Then I heard the scream. Not from the pit, not from the Council, but from directly behind me.
Declan barreled through the mass of bodies, shoving guards out of the way, his face a color I’d never seen—bloodless, veins showing blue under the skin. He fixed his eyes on me, and I realized with a sick certainty that nothing in the last twenty-four hours mattered. I would always be prey, and he would always be the wolf at the end of my story.
He hit me hard enough to knock the air from my lungs, driving me into the stone wall. I heard Bronc shout, and Juliet curse, and someone in the crowd start to laugh—a thin, brittle giggle that belonged in a hospital ward, not an arena.
Declan’s hand closed around my throat. He squeezed. The world went gray at the edges, then white. I clawed at his fingers but got nothing. He leaned in close, his breath sour with whiskey and hatred. “You think you’ve won?” he spat, voice a splinter. “You will never be free. You’ll never—”
Menace broke him off. He wrapped his arm around Declan’s neck and yanked him away, the movement so fast and savage I barelysaw it. They went down together, rolling across the ground, a tangle of blood and muscle and old, unspeakable fury.
They wrestled, less a fight than a slow-motion homicide. Declan clawed at Menace’s face, and Menace just kept squeezing, cutting off the blood to his brain. They rolled across the arena floor, into the legs of Council guards who only watched, too shocked or too delighted to intervene.
Finally, Declan went limp. Menace let go, shoved him aside, and staggered back to me. He knelt, cradling my face in his hands. “Red,” he whispered, “you okay?”
I tried to nod, but my neck wouldn’t hold me up. “You’re bleeding,” I said. “Everywhere. Please. You have to—”
He smiled, blood in his teeth. “Don’t worry. We’re wolves remember? My wounds are already starting to heal.”
In the lull, the Councilwoman’s voice rang out. “The challenge is decided. The mate bond stands. The Council recognizes the new—” She never finished.
Declan got up. His face was purple now, veins bulging, eyes wild. He didn’t run at me, though. This time, he aimed for Menace. There was a knife in his hand, pulled from somewhere in the folds of his ruined suit.
He screamed, “You’ve destroyed everything!” and drove the blade at Menace’s chest.
I moved, but not fast enough. Menace blocked the first blow, but the second caught him just under the ribs. A wet, sickening thunk that made me want to vomit. Declan twisted the blade.
The guards swarmed him then, pinning him to the ground. But it didn’t matter. The knife was in Menace’s chest, all the way to the hilt.
He fell, catching himself on his hands. The blood pooled around him, dark and spreading. He looked up at me, and his eyes were full of something I’d never seen before—fear, maybe, or the sudden, animal knowledge that everything he’d fought for could be taken away in an instant.
“Savannah,” he said, and then collapsed.
I caught him as he went down, blood turning the front of my clothing into a sticky second skin. I pressed my hands to the wound, trying to hold him together. His heart was still beating, but the tempo was wrong again, slowing and skipping and then stopping for whole seconds at a time.
He looked at me, and his mouth shaped my name, but no sound came out.
The world shrank to a tiny dot. Just the two of us, his dying, and my inability to do anything about it.
I screamed for help, but it wasn’t enough. It never was.
Menace’s blood was hot and too slick for me to grip the wound closed from where the knife had been, but I pressed my palm there anyway, bracing his body on the sandy floor of the arena. He blinked, once, and the eye that wasn’t swollen shut rolled up to find me. “Savannah,” he said, and the word was wet with red. “My mate.” His fingers tightened on my wrist, then twitched away.
I kept calling for help, not knowing who was around me or what they were doing. Maybe it was the Council, maybe Juliet, maybe just the dead wolf inside my head who refused to believe in endings. I heard Bronc cursing, heard boots shuffling in the sand, but the world had collapsed to a hole barely big enough for the two of us. I threw myself across his body as the bond between us shrank and shrank, thinning to a thread, a wire, a ghost of itself. I felt his heartbeat stutter and then skip. Once, twice. The third time, it didn’t come back.
“NO! Don’t you leave me! Bridger! Come back to me! You can’t leave me alone! You won! We won! Please!” I sobbed uncontrollably.
He went slack. The blue of his lips bled into gray. I pressed my mouth to his, desperate, as if I could give him my own air, but the world’s best CPR couldn’t raise the dead. The thread snapped. It was the sound of a violin string breaking in a dead-silent concerthall. The pain was so sharp and final that for a second I thought I’d been stabbed too. Maybe I had.
I wailed, my face in his throat, the world refusing to end but also refusing to keep going. His body stayed warm, but the soul inside it was gone. I rocked him, muttering his name over and over until the noise dried up in my mouth.
That was when the hush hit the arena. I didn’t notice at first. But then the silence was a weight, a tidal shift that crushed every living thing flat. I looked up, expecting the Council to have fled, or the guards to be dragging Declan away for execution.
Instead, the entire crowd had parted in a ripple, everyone staring at the far stairwell.
A figure was descending the steps. He was tall, seven feet, and he wore white, just white, not the blue of the Council or the silver of a king. His hair was long, white-gold, and it trailed behind him like a sheet in a hurricane. His face was beautiful the way icebergs are beautiful: too sharp, too old, too indifferent to care who it killed.
He moved with a slowness that was not hesitation but mercy, as if every step down the stairs was a gift to the crowd, giving them time to reckon with what they were about to see. He never took his eyes off me. Not once.
When he reached the pit, he walked through the guards as if they were smoke. I’d moved off to where I was seated next to Menace’s body, and he knelt at my side and set a hand on my shoulder. His skin was cool, but it didn’t sting. It just was. He looked down at Menace, then at me.
