I went to him, rested my hands on his shoulders, felt the tension in the knots of his neck. “Don’t let them break you,” I whispered, and he smiled, but it was all teeth.
Juliet and Bronc stayed near the door, whispering in a language I didn’t know—something secret and ancient, the way wolves used to talk before men forced them into suits and jobs. Lucia sat alone, feet tucked under her, reading a battered paperback. But her eyes were sharp, flicking up every time someone moved.
At five o’clock, the crowd upstairs went insane. The sound was less a cheer than a wail, a million voices layered over each other. The stands were full—Council dignitaries, supernatural media, even the royalty from other houses. The big screens ateach end of the arena showed looping video of Menace and Dominic, their faces staring out like wanted posters.
A Councilwoman in a gray suit appeared at the door, her clipboard tucked to her chest like a shield. “You have fifteen minutes,” she said. “Then the challenge is called. Please make your way to the staging area.”
She left without waiting for a reply.
Menace pulled on a pair of black drawstring pants. He didn’t bother with shoes or a shirt. “You look good,” I said, and he laughed—a single bark.
He pulled me close and pressed his forehead to mine. “I want you to promise me something,” he said. “If I lose—”
“You’re not going to lose.”
“If I lose,” he repeated, “don’t wait. Don’t grieve. Just burn it down and walk away.”
I didn’t reply. There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t be a lie.
He kissed me, slow and hard, and when he let go, he touched the mate mark at my neck with the pad of his thumb. “I love you,” he said.
I gripped his wrist, squeezed. “I love you more.”
Bronc called, “Menace, it’s time.”
The staging area was another concrete bunker, this one lined with ancient runes that glowed faintly blue. There was a viewing slit, like in a prison, and through it I saw the pit—just dirt, packed hard, ringed by ten-foot walls. The air was thick with anticipation and fear. Juliet took my hand and didn’t let go.
Chapter 27
King Declan Calloway
The chamber beneath the arena was colder than the grave, wet stone bleeding chill through the soles of my shoes. It was almost dusk, so the moon was barely visible in the winter sky. Down here, light filtered in only as sickness, a thread of mercury seeping in through the grates and falling in trembling streaks over the table, the altar, the floor where Dominic would either die or become unkillable. The place reeked of centuries-old sweat and the yellow of fresh fear. I breathed it deep. The copper in the air would be worse soon enough. I made sure no one could make entry.
Dominic was already in the circle, stripped to his skin as Moira commanded. His flesh was marbled with pale, bloodless streaks, his veins webbing blue beneath the surface like worms pressed between glass slides. He shivered. Not from the cold—no, I recognized the shudder of a man preparing himself for a pain he could not conceptualize. His tongue darted across his lips, flicked at the dust of words he couldn’t say.
Moira circled him, barefoot and silent as a shadow, drawing lines in the salt with a sprig of something brown and leafless. Her eyes were voids; even when the candlelight splashed across her face, it was as if the light gave up and drowned there. Her hands moved with predatory grace. The sigils she drew on the stonesseemed to shimmer, then fix, as if the world itself was reluctant to let them stick.
“Do not move,” she whispered to Dominic, not looking at him. “If you move, you’ll tear the boundary and invite everything in at once.”
He looked at me, desperate for assurance. I gave him nothing.
Moira muttered in her death-dry tongue. I heard only fragments—words about teeth, and debt, and the part of the moon that does not turn to face us. Then she leaned in, pressing her palm to Dominic’s chest. Her fingers left behind a smear of gray powder that began to sink into his skin, as if his body was thirsty for it.
Dominic gasped. Not a scream. Not yet. But close.
Moira’s hands blurred. She produced a knife from her belt—its blade old, blackened, the hilt a tangle of wire and bone. She made the first cut below his right collarbone, and the sound it made was not the sound of a knife going into flesh, but the wet rasp of something burrowing out. Dominic’s back arched, muscles clawing up from beneath his ribs. Moira slashed again, down the length of his sternum, then along the curve of his hip. She was drawing runes—not simple lines, but entire alphabets—onto his body, inking them with his own blood.
He screamed now. The sound wasn’t human. It was the scream of a wolf gutted and hung upside-down, of a kingdom’s last heir dying for nothing. I felt the hair rise on my neck.
Moira chanted. The wounds did not clot. Instead, they blossomed, the edges writhing, knitting and unknitting as if the flesh was thinking about what it wanted to be. Dominic bucked, heels pounding the stone, but the salt ring held. Moira’s eyes rolled back, the white showing and then going gray as ash.
She bent low and whispered into his ear. Dominic’s jaw clamped so tight the bone creaked. Blood streamed down his chest, pooling in the hollow above his belly. Moira dipped herfingers in it, then painted the last sigil on his forehead. She stepped back, out of the circle.
The power hit like a car crash. Dominic’s spine bent backward, and for a second I saw every rib through the skin, straining to break free. The runes on his body caught fire, blue and orange, burning without heat, and the air filled with the stink of ozone and black pepper. His eyes rolled, turned black, then gold, then something else.
Moira watched, arms crossed. “It will end soon,” she said, but she looked at me when she said it, not at him.
Dominic thrashed, then stilled. His body jerked, every muscle spasming at once. I thought he would snap in half. But then, with a final convulsion, he collapsed into a heap, panting, half-conscious. The runes on his chest had stopped bleeding. Instead, they seemed to have sunk under the skin, glowing faintly, like the filaments of a light bulb behind thick glass.
