Gullen strode across the room and kicked the cloak, revealing a pile of pillows and cloth. “It was a good trick. The hair was a nice touch, I thought.” His gaze roamed the room, searching for me, but I stayed hidden.
“I’ll kill you!” Altair raised his sword, but ten of Gullen’s guards stepped between him and his uncle. “Traitors.” Altair’s voice was low and pulsing with Alpha power. “You betray your rightful king. Which of you threw your queen into the sea? I will grant you a merciful, quick death if you confess.” None of them spoke, and the glint in Altair’s eyes spoke of madness.
“Stop,” I murmured, just loud enough. “Gullen lies. She is still alive.” She had to be, if they had gone to the trouble of creating a dummy of her form. If she had been dead, it would have been her body lying before us.
“Kill him,” Gullen shouted, his face in a rictus of rage. “Kill them all!”
A resounding thud of hardwood hitting a wall drew every eye to a door on the far side of the hall. The bright light shining from the outside lit a halo around the forms of four people. I averted my eyes, protecting my ability to see what lay in the shadows.
“No, no. No killing,” a voice boomed. “This is a day for celebration! My son is here, and so is the Omega. I can smell her glorious bloom even now. Where is she, young Kavin?”
The whole room stopped as an enormous Alpha entered the room, followed by three others, all wearing fur cloaks. The largest man, Wulfram, wore what looked to be a massive gray wolf pelt, the head of which towered over his own silver mane.
One of the others was a woman, and I recognized her immediately, though she moved as if she were in considerable pain. Valerie. Her face was bruised, with dried blood at her temple and trailing down her neck.
I didn’t let myself take a breath, or react in any way. The other two men were Betas, and I knew them without seeing their faces. The first was Nordin, an assassin I had studied alongside.
And the other was the Guildmaster. His eyes burned into me from across the room. I nodded slightly, tapping my neck, acknowledging the hit. His hands fell from what I knew was another dart ready in a gun. No need to waste expensive poison. He and I both knew I was dead. I didn’t even have my cloak, and unless I could entice him closer, there was no way to avenge myself.
“My son!” Wulfram’s voice boomed out again in the throne room as a smaller door opened on the far side. “I have traveled far to find you. Where is your mate?”
Kavin straightened, his shoulders tight. “I have no mate, Father. You made sure of that.”
“What is this?” Wulfram asked, moving across the marble floor. He was even taller than his son, over seven feet, and thick with muscle. A true warrior, with sharp, bright eyes, though his hair and beard were silvered.
Gullen cursed. “This idiot is your son? The Omega is his?” Gullen was past fear, mired in his insanity. A sane man would have recoiled at the cold fury on Wulfram’s face.
“He is my child.” He glanced at the Guildmaster. “And she is the Omega that I bought… for him.”
Gullen cackled. “Omegas really are the whores the legends portray. Altair tried to claim she was his mate as well. I think she’s been stringing them all along.”
“Where is she?” Altair stalked toward him, but Kavin was there with a hand to stop him, and a nod at the gathered guards to remind him how outnumbered they were. “And what do you mean, you bought her?”
At that, the second most dangerous man in the room—if only because he still had a life to lose, unlike me—spoke softly into the quiet. His voice was smooth, unassuming. “The Guild placed her with the warlord Wulfram in Starlak.” Placed her? I almost laughed. “Her mission was to be an ongoing one, to liaise with the warlord’s son.”
I did laugh at that. “Liaise? Is that what we’re calling it now, Guildmaster?” With that word, everyone in the room froze, as if they had lit a torch to find a viper coiled at their feet. A few of Gullen’s guards, who lined the walls and surrounded him, inched toward the door until Gullen spat out an order to hold.
Valerie, I noticed, was moving quietly past the guards, so unassuming in her brown dress and cloak and with her head down, that she appeared to be a servant. By the time she’d passed the third guard, she probably had six of their weapons in her possession, before Nordin stopped her with a hard hand on her arm. I moved unnecessarily to divert the Guildmaster’s attention from her.
He nodded. “Well, we wouldn’t want people saying we sold one of our own, would we? Wouldn’t want anyone running around the world with that knowledge if we did.”
Wulfram’s nostrils flared and his mouth thinned. He knew as well as I did that the Guildmaster had just tipped his hand; Wulfram’s name was on the same list as mine, of people who knew too much about the transaction he’d engineered.
Wulfram nodded slightly, and I saw the movement for what it was: a shift in alliance. I wouldn’t even have to use my token—theliefhaldthat I owned for saving Roya and her sisters—to sway him.
Good. I let out a breath. If Wulfram wasn’t the monster I had assumed, or at least not as bad as I had feared, Roya might yet be protected even after my death.
That was all I cared about—making the world I left to her as safe as possible. Ensuring her happiness.
My inner Alpha roared at the scent of her that was even now dissipating. She was in heat somewhere in the palace. Icarus must be with her. I tried to convince myself that was good, that we had somehow misunderstood what had occurred on the small island. If she was his sky bond, he couldn’t truly hurt her. He would protect her while she was vulnerable and see her through her first heat.
A terrifyingly dark wave of possession and fury rose in me, but I battered it down. This was not the time to mourn what was lost.
“Father,” Kavin called, drawing his sword. “I will not mate Roya if she doesn’t want me. I told you that in Verdan, and I’ll repeat it now. She is a warrior herself, a woman to be reckoned with. It would be a sin against the Goddess and my conscience to force her into a mating.”
“You’ll do what I tell you, boy,” Wulfram said, drawing his own sword. “And what Starlak requires. Or do I need to teach you another lesson in who is the real Alpha here?”
The two of them were almost equal in height, but Wulfram had the breadth of maturity and the stance of a battle-hardened warlord.
