“I have told you to join me or face oblivion,” Giaus said. “That there is no room for weakness in my kingdom. And it’s true—guarding my mate will be no easy task. Fortifying this queen’s landing will be grueling work. But this is the price of your exile from the Silver City.
Giaus paused then, touching them all with the light of his feral gaze. “Choose. To fall, as Balkazar fell. Infected by a variant that favors oblivion, fall to the command of the legion, enslaved to the many, where you will be made to turn against your brothers. Or chose this tiny, glorious Hathorian queen who offers hope. Hope that in her, the virus has become something divine for Anhur, Hathorian, and hybrid alike.”
That might have been the end of it. Might have been enough to win the loyalty of the hybrids who’d once been Sinadim’s loyal men. But with a cruel smirk, Sinadim watched the hybrids wander away to consider their options, then said, “It’s not enough.”
Head tipped back, menace rumbled through Giaus’ chest. A promise of retribution that went ignored.
“It’s not enough to make them choose and swear loyalty to a defective queen.”
At this Giaus went very still, his eyes little more than gleaming slits.
“It’s not enough to name a general, and it’s not enough to abstain from tasting her slick,” Sinadim said, and allowed his mismatched gaze to slip to Renegade’s nudity once more. “This kingdom of yours will fail.”
“Is that so?”
“I have one last secret,” Sinadim drawled, claws circling as he watched the king and did not blink. “One last coveted scrap to divulge, and without it, everything you want is doomed to fail.”
For a moment, there was silence. The gentle murmur of lapping water and the distant whistle of wind through the trees.
And then, “Your price?”
Sinadim grinned, showing teeth, but said nothing…
… because of course, Giaus already knew.
13
Pressing his back to stone, ears flicking back and forth, Sickle scanned the landscape for any hint of lurking predators. Braced for attack. Counting the beats of his heart as he stared at the smoking corpse laid out before him. The brood mother, or…
… what was left of her.
What had once been a breathing nightmare was now a smoldering wreckage of horrors. Leathery, impenetrable skin left sagging from charred bones, every last scrap of meat the brood mother might have possessed had been consumed from the inside. Hollowed out by her own offspring in a final gesture of reptilian love, her massive vacant eye sockets had been left to stare into nothing for the rest of time. Void of everything but twin, fragile tendrils of rancid smoke curling around empty ocular bones.
But it was her jaws—wide enough that he could fit his head, neck, and shoulders inside and still have room to turn—that spoke of what had happened here. Left jarringly askew, they’d been unhinged by some awesome force, the joint shattered high at the connecting point where mandible met skull.
There had been a battle here.
A clash between titans of gruesome proportions, their passage marked by the loser of a contest Sickle was glad he hadn’t witnessed.
Still… he would do well to respect the victor. Absent or not, for it was a predator greater than even the most feared beast in all the great beyond—the only thing marking its passage was the carnage left smoking in its wake.
It was an instinct exclusive to Hathorian males, his compulsion to cling to shadows. Not something a prized harem Omega could possibly know, for although it was true that his female counterparts where kept safe and cherished in secret subterranean vaults… Sickle had been raised in the courts. Traded and marked at the whims of a predatory species, he knew too well what it meant to suffer consequences of rash decisions.
All the Omega male could do was guess at what had been capable of doing damage like that to a nesting brood mother.
But he did not charge forward, reckless and flush with the excitement of his foundling idea. He refused the urge to celebrate the boon of some greater monster’s table scraps, and instead clung to shadows and searched the barren landscape for any hint that that fearsome predator had yet to move on. Searching for a demon lurking in wait, one clever enough to use a corpse as bait to nab an easy meal.
Heavy with the scent of flesh cooked in sulfur, only the wind dared to offer a vague answer, useless though it might be.
Grimacing, ears tucked flat, Sickle inched from the darkness. Ready to bolt back into the tunnels at a moment’s notice, his heart hammered at the backs of his eyeballs. Echoing in his ears where it pounded a rhythm in the very tips of his fingers… all the way down to the twisted nub of his severed tail.
It was madness to stay, to make a stand and claim his place among the wild and brutal. He had no weapons, no legendary Anhur strength or speed. All he had was a lifetime of abuse and neglect fueling his thirst for vengeance. For validation that he was here! That he deserved a place to finally close both eyes and sleep well. In safety.
This was that.
A place to build a life, where he might grow into something formidable, free to live or die at his own whim. Where he might know the sort of happiness Renegade had known, the secret glimmer he’d caught when she’d turned glassy eyes back into the wood. A tiny, sad smile creasing the edges of her lips.
She’d found peace, living in solitude. He was sure of it.
