“It’s the honorable thing, sure, but what if she loses?” Camille didn’t have to lift her head to know Benny had a deep, dark frown etched into his expression.
Kaz answered for Viktor. “If she can’t do it, then we’ll handle him. Quietly.”
“That’s against UTA law, my dude,” Benny dryly fired back.
“Only if you get caught,” Kaz answered, equally dry. Camille felt rather than heard Viktor’s quiet snort.
“We can talk about that later. If we’re lucky, it may not even be a conversation we have to have.” Viktor’s fingers stroked through the short strands of her hair, soothing the anxious beast that paced inside of her. It railed against the threat that stood so close, to so many strangers in his proximity. All it wanted to do was hide him away from the world and rub her skin against his until they were drunk on one another.
But that wasn’t possible. At that moment, she could only be thankful that she would not have to watch her consort step into that circle.
Camille pressed a lingering, reverent kiss to the base of his throat before she lifted her head and took half a step back. Viktor didn’t let her go, but loosened his arms around her enough to allow her to shift to his side. “Okay,” she said, looking around at all the hard, angry faces of her family and her new packmates. “What happens now?”
* * *
She had never witnessed a challenge, but she had lived under their shadows for all her life.
Elves had once been famed for their death matches. In the first few months after Delilah’s abdication, Theodore was challenged six times for the sovereignty — and won every match without killing his opponent. They couldn’t afford to lose even a single elf, so what had once been fights to the death rarely went quite so far in the modern day.
Shifters, though, were just as vicious as they had always been.
She never thought she would need to see a challenge herself and had certainly never desired to change that. Why would she, when her family had been so very scarred by one?
Though she was relieved that Viktor would not be the one fighting today, she still felt a deep unease as they gathered at the circle’s edge. They were flanked by their entourage, with Benny, Diana, Kaz, and Valen just behind them, watching their backs. Across the circle, the assembled alphas and the Alliance guards watched with somber faces. Between the two groups, Andreas’s second and his brother stood with arms loose at their sides, their eyes bright with aggression.
In the middle of the circle, with their backs to one another, Lana and her father stood. They were naked, their skin glowing gold in the relentless sunlight, with several feet of empty space stood between them. While Andreas faced his packmates, Lana stared out over the jagged expanse of the canyon and its dome of baby blue sky, her expression clear of everything except a serene determination.
Camille wondered what kind of person it took, what kind of pressure was necessary, to drive the young cougar shifter into the circle. It would have been easier to simply let Viktor take the risk. If he won, her understanding was that Lana would become alpha by default.
Was it courage that drove her? Revenge? Pride?
She tried to imagine herself standing there, facing off with her mother. Camille could picture herself turning around and seeing Marian there, her skin glowing with the deep amethyst that had been Theron’s Solbourne’s favorite feature. Could she have looked in her mother’s eyes and still decided to kill her?
Certainly, there were many moments in their relationship that Camille was certain shehatedher mother.
Marian’s rage and grief was directionless and more often than not found purchase with her children. When Camille guarded her brother from it, she opened herself up to take more. Marian would often berate her for hours at a time, relentlessly pulling at every little thread in her daughter’s self-esteem until she simply shut down, waiting quietly for the rage to flow back the way it came.
When the tide washed out, Marian was left more grief-stricken than before. She often felt deep regret for what she’d said and done, but never asked for forgiveness. Instead, she leaned on the daughter she had just railed against for comfort, to be cosseted and coddled until the pain went away.
Camille loved and hated and pitied and understood her mother in those moments.
But Marian was not simply volatile. She was proud, and she loved her children even when she couldn’t bear to look at them. She lived in fear of what elvish society would do to them. She nursed them and played with them and watched indulgently as the twins splashed in the river behind the estate.
Marian held Camille as she sobbed that night twenty years ago. She stroked her hair and did not ask questions, didn’t berate her for entertaining a secret relationship with a nobody shifter. She simply held her daughter as she cried. The next morning, she handled the situation with brusque efficiency, and Camille had never, ever been more grateful to have her as a mother than she was then.
So no, Camille thought, she could not have turned around and unsheathed her claws on her mother’s fine skin. She could not have looked in her violet eyes and still chosen to end her life.
Love existed between them even when old grief threatened to swallow her mother whole. She couldn’t see even a spark of that between Lana and her father.
When the shifters turned to face one another, they locked eyes. While Andreas nearly vibrated with unconcealed rage and contempt, Lana appeared coolly aloof, her hazel eyes clear of regret or fear or pain.
From his place by the edge of the circle, Lee cleared his throat. “Last chance, both of you. If you want to back out, say it.”
“Not a chance. It’s about damn time we did this.” Andreas shifted his stance and lifted his upper lip over rapidly elongating fangs. Magic was a deep, disconcerting shimmer over his skin as the cougar hovered just below the surface. “Come on, Lana-bean. If you think you’ve got the fucking stones to take on your father, thendo it.”
Two jagged, rumbling growls spilled from Andreas’s packmates. When Camille glanced at them, all she saw was furious agreement. Edging closer to Viktor, she breathed in his ear, “They hate her, don’t they? Look at their faces.”
He nodded once, but never took his eyes off of the two shifters in the circle. In a voice that was not at all subdued, he answered, “Yeah, they do hate her. They’re loyal to the alpha that lets them have power. You take that away and they’re nothing. No one wants to be nothing, butespeciallytwo pieces of shit like that.”
