“Watch closely,” Doran advised, and drove the blade in another inch.
The world narrowed to the black knife swallowing Casteel’s blood, to the hitching catch of his breath and the pallor that stole over his mouth. Nero struck the ward with everything he was; light burst in his skull. His hands tore; his knees hit stone. The wolf clawed, howled, battered itself bloody against everything sent to keep him from Casteel.
Then Doran paused, his hand on the knife. “Surrender the wolf to me and I bind his wound. Make me take it and he dies, right now, right here.”
“No,” Casteel ground out but Nero simply lifted his hand in total surrender and slashed his own palm open. Silver flared in the wound, brighter than blood, and the smell of it—cold storm, struck iron—cut through incense and burning fat.
“I yield,” he said, throat raw. “Take the wolf’s soul—only for his life.”
Light peeled from him in shivering veils. Silver mist poured into the air and coiled, alive with the memory of forests and home. Doran’s face transformed—no longer vaguely humanly pleased, but rapturous, a penitent before the icon of his undoing. He began to speak in the temple tongue, a binding litany that braided greed and command into a single strangling rope.Nero's head fell back a scream strangled in his throat as it felt like his very insides were ripped apart.
“Now, little god,” Doran breathed to the light itself. “Come home.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Doran moved so fast.Casteel, merely bait, could be left. The wolf-soul had his full attention, and the moment Nero had spoken his surrender the priests had him laid out and bound.
Casteel struggled for strength but he could barely move a finger. He wasn't important. Discarded the moment he had fulfilled his purpose.
Nero lay strapped to a blackwood frame tilted just enough to keep him from what seemed the real risk of drowning in his own blood. Braided iron bit into his forearms, shoulders, and hips; hooks had been anchored with leather through his skin to stop a shift before it began. Priests had painted his chest with sigils in a paste that steamed where it touched him. Each stroke had raised welts that refused to close, as if the letters themselves gnawed at his skin Blood seemed to cover him nearly everywhere from small cuts, so much so that Casteel barely breathed for fear he would run out.
But what could a stable boy do? His only value had been when he possessed the wolf-soul. Nero was a force to be reckonedwith before he even got the wolf. Casteel was pathetic. A nobody. Doran and his acolytes clearly agreed because they had discarded him in the corner. Casteel glanced back at Nero—not that his attention wandered far.
Silver still trembled beneath Nero’s skin. Doran wanted that web. He intended to pluck every strand from Nero’s ribs. The room itself seemed alight with it.
“Begin,” the High Priest murmured.
Two acolytes laid copper plates along Nero’s sternum. At Doran’s count they pressed—slow, inexorable weight, not enough to crush, but precisely enough to grind. Nero’s breath shortened, but he refused to make a sound. Casteel felt his pain through their thready bond anyway—a hot lance that pierced his own chest and made his vision swim.
“Here,” Doran said gently, guiding a veiled priest’s hand. He slid a filament of that same black glass beneath Nero's first rib and tilted. Silver flared along the bone, bright as a struck star. “There it is. You hide so deep, little god.”
A third priest tightened the braids until iron creaked. Another passed a rod over Nero’s bare skin; wherever it traced, the light recoiled and hissed. Not enough to extinguish but sufficient to harrow. Casteel found strength enough to yank at the bonds holding his arms, and nails bit his own palms until his fingers shook.
Yank at his bonds.
Casteel stilled. He had been tied, but poorly. They hadn't cared and considered him expendable. No threat, certainly. He wasn't yet free, but he wasn't immobile certainly.
He took the measure of the chamber the way he’d once took measure of a fractious mare—where it leaned, where it was likely to kick. The guards stood in two ranks beyond the chanting priests, one line facing inward to the ritual, another angled outward toward the approaches. Their stances wereloose, the laziness of men assured of magic more powerful than strength. Oil lamps guttered in iron brackets at precise points that corresponded to the carved arcs in the floor. Casteel took a slow breath. No one was watching him. No one considered him a threat. He could even see a woman imprisoned. One that had arrived with Nero so she must be important. Above him, the woman remained trapped in her circle of light, but her fingers worked steadily at something—a vial, a blade, Casteel couldn't tell.
Casteel forced himself to stillness, to watch with the patience of prey that had learned when to be invisible.
No, notprey. The memory of the first time he'd seen Nero in that tower slammed into him. Still as one of stone Fenrirs, but poised to fire that arrow into Casteel's heart. An assassin sent to kill him.
Stillness, invisibility, hadn't made Neroprey. It had made him anassassin. And Casteel understood stillness. Some stillness wasn't an absence of movement. It was a stillness in your soul. Horses understood that. He'd calmed many a fractious animal with that sort of stillness.
He fastened his gaze on Nero and watched the ritual progress with horrible efficiency. Doran's voice never rose above a conversational murmur, but each word seemed to hook into Nero's flesh and pull. The silver light beneath his mate's skin grew thinner, more desperate in its clinging. Blood ran from the corners of Nero's mouth now—not from external wounds, but from something being torn loose inside him.
"Beautiful," Doran breathed, his pale eyes reflecting the dying light. "The wolf fights so hard to stay. It knows what waits beyond once I have it within me."
Within me?Thats what Doran wanted? Casteel stilled in shock and horror. He never wanted Casteel to control Nero. Well, he did, but not to control him forever.
He meant to take the wolf.
He meant to transfer the wolf-soul. He knew it had happened once and thought he could do it a second time. Or no, he'd barely found that out a day ago. Realization slammed into Casteel. This had always been his plan. He had always meant to take the wolf for his own, and whatever else Casteel did tonight, he couldn't let that happen.
A priest adjusted the copper plates. Nero's back arched against the restraints, tendons standing out like cords. Still, he made no sound, though Casteel felt his agony like acid in his own veins.
The guards grew more relaxed as the ritual deepened. Several leaned against pillars, crossbows lowered. The ones facing outward had turned to watch the spectacle, drawn by the hypnotic pull of the silver light being slowly strangled from Nero's body.
