5. Chapter 5 #3
“Don’t.” Merritt’s hand came up. “Think. You’re about to throw away everything you are for a half-blood who’ll be mad or dead inside three years. I didn’t do this to hurt you. I did it so you would never have to choose. So it would be done, and you could go home.”
“You did it behind my back,” Roman said. “To a boy you ran out of his own home, and then lied to me about for fifteen years.” He took a step in. “Don’t you dare call that mercy.”
The lead Venator had gone still, watching the two brothers and staying well clear of it.
“Merritt, end this.” Amanda came forward out of the wolves, her voice hard. “Look at them. There’s nothing to win here. Not his life, not his loyalty, not over this. End it, Alpha.” She dipped her head in the old submission, but her eyes never left his, and they were hard as flint.
“If these people would do their job,” Merritt snarled, rounding on the Venator, “and take the half-blood, there’d be nothing to end.”
“My job.” The Venator was out of patience.
“I’ve put down half-bloods who were three days from killing a town.
I know the look. This one doesn’t have it.
He may have found his anchor, he may not, but I am not executing a man on the word of some local lordling with a family problem.
” She looked at Merritt like something on her boot.
“I answer to the Council. Not to packs. Not to tribes. Not to royalty.”
“Then I’ll take it out of all your hands,” Roman said.
He crossed the last of the floor before any of them could stop him and went down on one knee in front of Lance, in front of all of them, in the hard yellow light.
“Don’t,” Lance whispered. His eyes were huge. “Roman, don’t you dare. Get up. Walk out. I’ll be in Bedlam by morning and you’ll still have a life. We agreed.”
“We did agree,” Roman said. “I’m renegotiating.” And then, louder, for the whole shed, in a voice that didn’t shake at all. “Lance Dominic. Will you take me as your alpha? Will you walk the same path as me, from tonight on, pack or no pack, crown or no crown?”
“What are you doing?” Merritt’s composure cracked straight down the middle.
He started forward, his hand clamping on Roman’s shoulder, and Roman came up off his knee and turned, and the growl that came out of him stopped his brother cold, stopped all of them, the four wolves freezing mid-step.
He stood there bloody and half-dressed and badly outnumbered and there was no retreat left anywhere in him, because somewhere on that run he’d stopped being willing to leave this place without Lance, and every wolf in it could feel the difference.
He turned back to Lance like the interruption had never happened.
“Will you be my mate?” he said, quieter now, just for Lance, bloody and defiant and beautiful on the floor. “Will you take my protection, and my pack’s, knowing they may throw us both out for it? Say yes, Lance. For once in your life, let somebody come after you.”
“You’ll lose everything,” Lance said, and his voice broke on it. “Your pack. Your brother. Your name. Everything you were born to.”
“I’d still trade all of it for you, and not feel the loss.” His eyes didn’t move off Lance’s. “Yes or no.”
“You’re insane.”
“Insane for you. Yes or no, Lance.”
“Yes.” It came out of him like it tore something on the way up. “Yes, you idiot prince, yes. I take you. I’m yours. My heart, my whole sorry life, yours, pack or no pack.”
The bond snapped into place.
Roman felt it go through him like current finding its wire, a circuit he hadn’t known was open closing all at once, and he watched it hit Lance the same instant, watched his spine go straight and his breath catch.
The air in the shed changed. Every wolf in it flinched, because they felt it too, old magic snapping taut across the room, the kind nobody standing there could argue with.
The lead Venator exhaled through her nose like a woman whose long night had just gotten simpler.
“Well,” she said. “That’s that.” She nodded once, and one of her people muttered a word under his breath, and the silver cuffs and the leg irons sprang open and clattered to the concrete.
“The half-blood is anchored. By Council Law the pack lets them leave this place unharmed. Lance Dominic, you’re struck from the rolls.
” Her mouth did something that was almost a smile.
“Congratulations on not being my problem anymore.”
Lance came up off the floor and into Roman’s chest so hard it rocked him, and Roman folded both arms around him and put his face in his hair and breathed wolfsbane, just wolfsbane, no fear left in it.
“You’re mine,” he said into it. “You hear me. Mine.”
“You’re going to be insufferable about this,” Lance said, shaking, hanging on. “Worse than the window dressing.”
“Infinitely worse.” He looked up over Lance’s head at his brother, who stood in the wreck of his own plan with nothing left to say. “We’re going home, Merritt. You’ve got a choice to make about what kind of welcome that is. But this,” he tightened his arms, “this is done.”
He got an arm under Lance’s knees and lifted him, the cuffs left where they’d fallen, and carried him out of the yellow light into the dark, and not one wolf in that shed moved to stop them.