“Guards approach,” she mouthed.
Nero counted heartbeats. Three shadows flowed around the bend—the first never saw his knife. Nero seized the second by the throat and spine, twisting until cartilage popped. Veda took the third.
“Move,” Veda breathed.
The right-hand corridor broadened into a gallery of low pillars etched with wolves whose ribs were stark beneath their skins. Between them ran copper wire and tiny bells. Veda swore softly.
“Trip-alarms,” she murmured Nero breathed shallowly, each inhalation a knife against the part of him that wanted to run blindly toward the chanting, even as he had to carefully step over the wires.
The gallery spilled them onto a landing that overlooked a cavern. Firelight washed the chamber below in a sick, honeyed glow. Nero’s fingers bit into the stone rail as he took it in.
A circle had somehow been carved into the floor, not ancient work but newly dug, its grooves packed with something that gleamed wetly. Around it stood four priests in ash-gray robes, faces veiled to the eyes, knives curved like smiles in their hands. Behind them waited a dozen Silver Guard, helms gleaming dully in the firelight, crossbows cranked and loaded.
At the circle’s heart, bound to a stone bier with braided iron, lay Casteel.
Nero’s lungs seized. He registered details with brutal clarity: the split in Casteel’s lip, the bruise darkening along his jaw, the way his chest rose and fell too quickly as he fought for breath. Blood smeared one shoulder where hooks had anchored the bindings to his flesh. Through their bond came a pulse so faint it barely stirred: pain contained, fear leashed.
And beyond the bier, calm as a saint at an altar, stood Doran. He wore no armor, only simple white that threw his pallor into something luminous and unclean. He held not a ritual sickle he'd seen with the priests, but a straight blade of black glass, its edge oiled and somehow smoking.
Veda’s breath hitched once. “If we—” she whispered.
She didn’t finish. The shadows at their backs breathed and became men.
A wall of heat slammed into Nero as braziers along the landing flared to life. Wards written in ash flashed across the stone beneath their boots, blooming like frost. Pain went down Nero’s spine like liquid fire, locking the wolf hard against his bones. Runes flared around his boots in a ring of blistering white. A second circle flamed into being around Veda, capturing and imprisoning her with priest-magic. It was a reaction to the Fenrir blood, corrupted by Doran.
“Welcome,” Doran called, his voice floating sounded gleeful.
Nero moved, fur charring along his shoulders, the scent of his own burnt skin dizzying. He fell to one knee, jaw clenched so hard his teeth creaked as he tried to pass through the ward.
On the floor below, Doran lifted the black glass blade, admiring the ugly glow it caught from the braziers. He looked up and met Nero’s eyes with the slow delight of a torturer presented with a fresh canvas.
“Your alpha arrives, little vessel,” he murmured to Casteel, his voice paternal, indulgent. “Shall we begin the lesson?”
Through the ragged thread of their bond, pain pulsed like a heartbeat. Casteel turned his head on the stone, searching for Nero. When he found him, his gaze steadied. His lips shaped a single word.
No.
“Do you know,” the High Priest mused, “what happens to hearts when they break? They bleed so beautifully.” He lowered the blade until its edge kissed the thin flesh just below Casteel’s sternum. “But you’ve always been brave, haven’t you, Casteel of Abergenny? But too weak to make your bravery into anything someone stronger couldn't manipulate.”
Nero rose, forcing the wolf through another inch of ward-burn. Muscles tore, healed, tore again.
Below, Doran’s smile widened, tender as a lover’s and twice as obscene. He did not look at wards or priests or arrows. He watched Nero struggle and reveled in it.
“You forced me to this,” he said mildly, and pressed the point of the black glass blade into Casteel’s flesh.
The sound Casteel made was small and dragged with breath—the constrained agony of a man determined not to gift his enemy with a scream. Nero felt it ripple through the bond, and it lashed him harder than any flame.
“Stop!” The word ripped raw from his throat before he knew he’d spoken. It was not a plea. It was a command that snarled with the wolf’s authority.
Doran cocked his head, delighted. “There it is,” he said softly, as if coaxing a child to speak again. The black glass sank another cruel finger’s width. Skin split, bright blood welled and ran. Casteel’s breath hitched. His eyes never left Nero.
His wolf raged, trapped, battering the confines of his bones. The bond hammered at him—Casteel’s pain, yes, but threaded with something else: apology. A vow.Love.
“Doran,” Nero said, each syllable a nail in his body's coffin. “Take me. Release him and take me.”
The High Priest’s smile barely altered. He turned the knife, an infinitesimal pivot that made Casteel’s muscles lock. “Do you think we came this far to negotiate?” His eyes lifted, serene and hateful. “I have you both.”
He clung to Casteel’s gaze, that single fixed point in a world tilted viciously wrong. “I love you,” he whispered, and knew Casteel heard him because his mate’s gaze glittered with an unspoken reply.
