“Do your pendants…” Sadie started to ask.
“…work on the wolves’ secret kingdom gate as well?” Tadhg finished. His face had become a grim mask. “Yes, they do.”
Sadie’s hand flew to her mouth. “We have to warn Naomi and her kings.”
But by the time they were able to get through to them on their kingdom-to-kingdom communication system, it was already too late.
The Scottish Wolves were practically at their kingdom’s doors. And before Tadhg could re-raise their community army to go to the wolves’ aid, Bloody February was over and done.
Sea and Wild, two of the three Irish kings, had died, and they found Alban Scotswolf with his throat slit in the foyer of the dead Sea King’s castle.
The weeks had blurred after that. Sadie had stayed with her best friend as long as she could, considering she was also pregnant with triplets and the bear gestation period was months shorter than the wolves’.
Naomi had been mostly unresponsive the entire time.
“After Naomi gives birth, she’ll come back to you,” Sadie assured her best friend’s remaining husband, the city king they called Dublin, before she left to return to her own kingdom. “Motherhood will help her heal.”
But even as she said it, Sadie was pretty sure she was lying. To Dublin and herself.
There was a hollowness to Naomi that had not been there before. Her pretty features had sharpened overnight, casting her in the role of someone who would never stop being angry.
The Scottish males who returned empty-handed from the Bloody February campaign assumed Dublin had killed their leader. But it had been Naomi.
And it took years before Sadie was able to blur the image of Naomi’s blood-spattered face standing over Alban’s dead body.
Sadie returned to her kingdom, her kings, her children… and the quiet guilt of knowing Declan’s pendant had opened the door to everything that followed. The years passed with less and less contact. They both raised their children, though Naomi never went into heat again, while Sadie did so three more times.
Then, one day shortly after the fourteenth birthday of Sadie’s oldest triplets, she received a message from Naomi, rushed and urgent.
Naomi: Meet me at the Sanctuary Kingdom Temple. Get here as fast as you can. Come alone.
Sadie did as she asked. Mostly out of loyalty. It had been over two years since Naomi’s last message.
The Naomi she found in the temple’s waiting room was much changed. Her hair was a mess of tangles, and she was skinnier than Sadie had ever seen her.
Her eyes were no longer hollow. They were crazed.
“Naomi, what’s happening? Why did you?—”
“Come with me!” Naomi grabbed Sadie by the hand without so much as a hello and led her through a door bearing a sign that said, “Temple Clerics ONLY. No Visitors Allowed. NO EXCEPTIONS.”
“Are we supposed to be in here?” Sadie asked, casting the warning a worried look as Naomi blasted through the door, dragging Sadie behind her.
“All these years, I was trying to figure it out….” Naomi answered like she was picking up from an entirely different conversation. “I’ve been studying the god tech and its language for over a decade. Yet, I’m no closer to decoding their language or breaking down how the gods made all of these amazing things that have lasted for thousands of years. Not hundreds of years, Sadie.Thousands.”
Naomi’s mad eyes glittered under the hallway’s green light. “Do you know how few human-made materials on Earth cansurvive a thousand years intact? Even in a sealed environment, you get molecular degradation by the time a millennium rolls around.”
Naomi shook her head. “I just didn’t understand how this could work. And then Amanda stopped by the castle.”
Amanda.That was what Tadhg would call “a deep cut.” Sadie hadn’t heard Amanda’s name in years.
“Wölfennite Amanda?” Sadie asked. Like all the other kidnapped brides, the mean girl had taken Irish Wolf husbands and decided to stay in the secret kingdom.
“Yes, though now she makes everyone address her as the Wild Queen,” Naomi answered. “I let her have the title. I didn’t want it without Wild.”
“Seriously?” Sadie frowned, hating the idea of Naomi giving the insufferable Wölfennite who’d made Sadie’s life miserable anything. “But what does she have to do with?—”
“She was trying to campaign for her twins to read the prophecy instead of my kids. Apparently, that’s a thing all the princes and princesses are supposed to do on their sixteenth birthday. So I guess she was getting the campaign going early, but that’s beside the point….”
