As one, the twins assumed a defensive position. Ready for battle they hadn’t a hope of winning. Straining not to be claimed by the feral court, they stood between Giaus and his mate.
There was no deadlier place in all the wilds, tamed or not.
Head tossed back, Giaus issued a cruel bark of laughter. “You dare? This is my kingdom!” he snarled, and his voice bounced back at him. Distorted and powerful. “Your lives are already forfeit. Mine to do with as I please, for I have saved you from the legion!”
A steadying hand landed on Giaus’ shoulder, where a wound wept and nearly ruined a coveted ring of scars. “This is not the Trax of old, my brothers,” Sinadim said from behind. Standing on Giaus’ left—where the prince was most vulnerable. His blind spot exposed to the king’s whims, it was not to place Giaus on his right, but rather a subtle gesture of trust. To submit his greatest weakness to the other male, Sinadim’s blind spot exposed. “It’s…” Sinadim took a breath. Painted the roof of his mouth with the storied scents whirling around the clearing. “It’s a leap of faith. One I wouldn’t ask of you, if the reward wasn’t worth the risks.”
“You ask us to die,” one twin said.
“To willingly accept infection,” said the other.
“I’m asking you to join me,” Sinadim returned and took a step. “To submit to the feral court. To Giaus and this new variant of the virus. I’m asking for your trust, so we might rise as something new. Together.”
“I’ve been like you,” Giaus rumbled, tail lashing as he paced, pinning each of them with his alien glare. “Wandered the wilds like you. I was lost like you. But I alone have communed with the ghosts of the ancients. I was left to traverse the magma fields without the safety of pack or brothers. It wasn’t one lunar cycle before I was infected,” he said, mane bristling as his tail lashed. Leaving so very much unsaid. “In me, the virus became something new. A variant splintered away from the original. It is a gift the likes of which you cannot comprehend. This is your reward,” he said, voice laced with a primal snarl that left no room for petty argument. “This is what it is to join the feral court.”
“It’s true,” Sinadim said, his cultured drawl a perfect companion to Giaus’ ferocity. “I swear it. But it is a truth you can plainly see standing before you. We are not corrupt. We aremore.”
“Join me,” Giaus said. “Bow your heads and submit to my rule. Bend the neck and accept the gifts only I can give you.”
“Submit to infection?” one of the twins asked, aghast.
Stomping through the carnage, Giaus flashed a greedy smirk at his audience. His captive subjects. “Each of you will be given the chance to prove yourselves worthy. To survive the killing fever and emerge as something more.”
“And if we refuse?” the other twin asked, as if the answer wasn’t painfully obvious.
“Oblivion.” The king’s lips spread over a terrible grin. “There is no place for weakness in my Kingdom. Submit or die.”
But his moment was overshadowed. Eclipsed by two words spoken in a deep, rumbling voice echoing down from the mouth of the den.
“She’s awake.”
10
Deep in the dark, at the bottom of a tomb where pitiful little light filtered down from the gloom above, a bleary eyed blink was the only hint of something profound.
Change, hanging in air too dense to move. A moment with seemingly little significance, and yet… it marked the start of a new era. One that would echo through the ages, surviving change after change, through horrors and triumphs of the unfathomably distant future. A single split second that history would inevitably forget, if ever it was recorded at all.
Down in the dark, a nameless harem Omega took her last crackling breath.
In her place, a fledgling queen.
Stretching her lungs and her back, Renegade coughed and rid herself of all that remained of her fever.
War raged in her chest.
A tug that pulled too hard at a thing not meant to unravel. The edges of a blow that struck just a touch too deep.
She could feel them both—her head and chest a mess of tangled things that were and were not. Fears and triumphs, injuries and advantages, her limbs were flush with a strength only half as impressive as the incomparable confidence burning in her heart. A particular poise of spirit that wasn’t earned—at least not as a lowly Omega in a prince’s harem.
But it wasnothingto the risen tide pounding at the backside of her ribs. Lust for bloodshed. For sex. A deafening static that left her head spinning as it whirled and slashed, aching one second only to recede in the next. It was static she couldn’t ignore, the sort that threatened to consume everything she was or might one day become.
All of it stemming from a bristling cord wound tight about her throat and her heart, tugging in two directions with equal, yet utterly different forces.
A shadow fell across her knees, making her limbs lurch in an uncoordinated flail as she scrambled to flee.
“Renegade?”
Spoken in a voice she recognized. One that forced a memory of kindness. Of big brown eyes set in a shadowed face—a male who’d been kind when he could have been cruel.
