“I’m notthatdesperate to serve a new queen,” he murmured, and secured the roof of Sultana’s prison with a heavier boulder.
He wasn’t entirely sure what it was he intended to do with the wryms. Didn’t know if he meant that prison to be a larder or a stable, but he stepped back all the same. Hands hanging loose at his sides, ready for whichever path the males might take, he watched the remaining siblings swarm forward. Their cries growing ever more frantic as they tried in vain to free her, to push a rock that to them was a bolder.
Delirious, bleeding and raw, Sickle stumbled for that exit. Haunted by the cries of juvenile lizards only half as real as the ghosts whispering insults that occupied his every waking thought.
It was madness to let them live. To take the risk for something as pathetic as sentiment, for creatures who felt only spite that he’d managed to escape with only a few ounces of flesh paid.
Renegade was dead.
His loyalty to the prince absolved.
Lust for vengeance satisfied by Balkazar, who’d deserved it most.
Only Giaus had escaped the bulk of the consequences, but what did it matter, really? Who was Giaus to him, but the catalyst of the end that was already written the moment they’d been exiled.
If not Giaus, a horde.
Or the Trax.
Or a rampaging predator stronger and faster and ultimately more deadly than even the most brutal Anhur—anything hardy enough to survive the wilds might be the thing to end them.
There was poetry in knowing some part of it had been Renegade. An Omega female, one ofhispeople. Glorious to the end.
But ended she was.
To mourn her by giving up was pitiful.
An insult to an Omega who’d have been equal to any Anhur queen Sickle had ever served.
Clinging to stone walls, he pressed on. Not quite sure where he was going, he knew only what he left behind.
A life lived for others. One he’d meant to reclaim before it was over.
But the fragile thing he’d been… that pathetic creature who’d known only to cower in the shadow of Anhur masters?
He’d perished in the dark alongside the prince who’d tried to save him… expired with the queen he’d loved at the hands of a king he’d loathed.
Sickle was gone.
Covered in dust and blood, he stepped into the light of early dawn. A shadow that hardly bothered to move, he inched forward on silent feet—and found himself before a smoking carcass. All that remained of a giant, the brood mother had been all but picked clean. He could see it in the way her scales sagged around a void. Hollowed out from the inside, they’d gone in through her eyes. Slipped down her gullet and eaten her tongue.
With a grimace, he inched forward and peered into the face of death. Those gaping, unhinged jaws lined with row upon row of teeth blackened by her very nature.
He reached. Touched the pointed tip and bloodied his finger for his trouble. “Sharp as obsidian,” he whispered, and smeared a streak of crimson between forefinger and thumb.
An idea took root. One born of blood and bruises, in open wounds and stinking lizard shit. It was as unhinged as what remained of the brood mother’s jaw, and yet, it was a new start. Crazy enough to gain the attention and respect of the Nine, if ever they’d bother to look at a lowly Hathorian male.
All he had to do was take it. Fight or die by his own hand.
As Renegade would have done.
Sickle could never do such a thing…
… but who was he really, but a shade of his former self…
5
“Drink.”
