Chapter 43
Gustav
Iknow the exact moment the forest turns against us.
The light changes first. Gray pulls out of the sky like someone is bleeding the color away drop by drop.
The temperature drops with it. Each breath comes out in a thick cloud and hangs in the air before breaking apart.
Snow dusts down through the pines, soft and quiet, as if the world is trying to pretend it is peaceful.
It’s not.
And Peighton violently shivers.
That harsh movement does more damage to me than any bullet.
Her shoulders hunch, her teeth chatter, and my coat I wrapped around her is nowhere near enough for night in the Chernobyl woodlands.
We have no proper clothing, no fire, no shelter, no food, no spare ammo.
Just four bodies in an irradiated graveyard pretending to be a forest.
I promised to protect her from everything. This place feels like it exists for the sole purpose of proving me a liar.
I take what is left of my jacket and shove it tighter around her shoulders, fingers lingering on the curve of her neck. Her skin is so cold. I want to lift her, stuff her inside my chest, close her away from the wind, the snow, the wolves, the ghosts.
Instead, I step back and scan the trees, pulse ticking in my throat.
My right eye starts to twitch. Then my lip.
I clench my jaw to stop it. It twitches harder.
A wolf howls in the distance. Long and low. It rides the wind and echoes between the trunks until you cannot tell where it started.
Petyr goes still behind me. Keira’s breath hitches. Peighton hugs me tight, her fingers digging into my back.
The men out here call themselves wolves.
But they’re a Pripyat bratva. They are so new, they don’t know it, yet. Criminals dressed in fur instead of suits.
The exiled. The feral. Men who slipped off the map and decided they preferred it that way. Men who hunt humans like animals and keep the pretty ones as toys. Men even the Council pretends do not exist because they do not know how to control them. They hide in plain sight on lands people fear.
Another sound threads through the pines. A birdlike trill. Short, sharp bursts of sound, repeating, getting closer.
“That wasn’t a bird,” Peighton whispers.
“No,” I say.
The twitching gets worse. My eye jerks in tiny spasms that make the edges of my vision jump. I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth and breathe slow through my nose, trying to push the chaos back down.
An arrow whistles past my ear.
I feel the force of it. It hits the tree behind me with a solid thud.
I spin and draw my gun in one smooth motion.
Shapes detach from the trees like they were carved out of the bark.
Men wrapped in furs and pelts stitched to modern jackets.
Faces streaked with ash and mud. They emerge from every direction.
When I look up, I see more of them on the crude wooden bridges lashed between branches far overhead, silhouettes moving above us like predators on a canopy.
We are surrounded.
Petyr steps close enough that I can feel the heat from his body at my back. Keira does the same on the other side. Peighton presses into me from behind, small and breakable, using me as a shield, as she should.
We form a tight knot of four in the middle of the clearing.
I count. There are too many of them for one magazine. Too many even if Petyr and I land every shot. I keep my gun raised, but I do not fire. Not yet.
The circle parts.
He steps out then. The blond one. Taller than the others. Broad across the shoulders. The one with the metal helmet. Handmade, hammered in some hellish workshop. Frost clings to the edges where his breath escapes in clouds.
He points at our women. “Leave them and you can go.”
A younger man near him laughs. “Leave the men too. I’ll fuck them first.”
The twitch in my eye leaps into a full spasm.
Voices I don’t know slam down into my skull like hammers.
Look at you. Trapped like a dog. You brought her here to die. You cannot protect her. You ruined everything. Just like with your parents.
I grit my teeth so hard my jaw aches. The world narrows to a tunnel. My fingers grip tighter around the gun.
For a second, I cannot hear the forest or the wind. I can only hear my father’s contempt and my mother’s sobbing. Not even the crackle of fire that never leaves what is left of their memory.
The man in the helmet tilts his head, studying me. “I am Nikolai, a Forest Viking.”
A what?
“You must be... the Mad King?”
The name scrapes against my nerves.
I do not answer. The darkness is loud enough that forming words feels like trying to speak underwater.
Peighton does not reach for me this time. I feel her behind me, trembling, but she stays still. Maybe she is too afraid to touch me when I am like this. Maybe she knows even her hands cannot cut through this storm. Not this time.
One of the wild wolfmen lunges and grabs Keira by the hair.
I fire on instinct, but another man slams my wrist at the same moment I pull the trigger. The bullet goes into the branches above. In the same breath, men swarm us. Arrows press to our throats. Rough hands rip Keira free of our circle and drag her out into the open.
They tear off her clothes. Wild grunts and pig noises fill the night. For a moment, Nikolai studies her, dragging his knuckle between her breasts and grunts.
“I like this one,” he murmurs, his smile wicked. “Now her.”
And then—
Other hands reach for Peighton.
Everything inside me stops.
The voices. The panic. The static.
Silence drops into my skull like a stone off a cliff.
I hear my own laugh float out of my mouth, and a calm settles in my chest.
Then I clap.
Slow. Loud. Mocking.
They freeze, interested.
I pinch the arrow pressed to my neck like it is filthy and flick it away. The man’s brow twists, but it clear he’s curious.
“I’ve heard stories about the Chernobyl wildlings,” I say. My voice sounds too calm to my own ears in such danger, which is how I know I am far from sane.
It’s... better this way.
The Mad King.
I’m here.