Page 106 of Renegade Kingdom
“I watched you once,” the Endless said, conversational. Almost friendly. “In a bar. Dirty little place. Cheap tequila. A woman with long blonde hair who threatened to kill the man sitting next to her.”
The cold spread.
“You were so angry that night. So desperate. Your brother had been gone for nine days and you’d been told he was probably dead, yet you walked into that bar ready to do whatever it took to get him back.” The Endless took another lurching step. “You had your rifle trained on her. Steady hands. Good discipline. Always sodisciplined. But then she did something you didn’t expect, didn’t she?”
No.
“She threw a knife into your commanding officer’s shoulder and sent three rifles flying across the room with a wave of her hand, and you tackled her to the ground.” The voice was almost tender now. Reminiscing. “You pinned her hands above her head. Straddled her waist. Got so close your lips nearly touched. Then she looked up at you with those eyes and said something about it being a position she could get used to.”
My blood had turned to ice. Actual ice. I could feel it crystallising in my veins, the magic responding to somethingdeeper than anger, deeper than fear. The wolf was howling but I couldn’t hear him past the roaring in my ears.
“But that wasn’t the interesting part,” the Endless continued, and Arik’s voice dropped lower. Intimate. Like a secret between friends. “The interesting part was what happened after. When she touched your face. When she told you she was sorry about your friends. And you leaned into her hand, Dean. Just for a moment. Just long enough for anyone watching to see exactly how easy you were going to be. Oh how I enjoyed it. Even I didn’t realise who she would become to you, who she would become for all of you. And there I was with one of you writhing on the floor in agony. It made torturing him so much more delicious. Breaking his mind was the greatest fun of my life.”
The clearing was silent. The forest was silent. Even the strange ambient hum of the Fifth Court had gone quiet, as if the land itself was holding its breath.
“How do you know all that?” My voice didn’t sound like mine. Too controlled. Too empty.
The Endless spread its arms in a gesture that was almost a shrug. “Things fell into place that night exactly as they were supposed to. So many little puppets already attached to my strings.”
The ice cracked inside me. Not outward, not yet, but I felt the fracture lines spreading through my chest like a frozen lake giving way. Because there was only one person who could know those details. Only one person who had been in that bar, who had watched the whole thing unfold, who had seen me lean into a stranger’s hand with nine days of grief carved into my face.
The briefing. The off-the-books mission. The three rangers he’dhandpicked. The brother he’d sent through a portal to a realm he knew would consume him.
General Philip Holden had sat on the stool next to Alyssa and watched us meet her for the first time. He’d engineered thewhole encounter. Damon wasn’t missing. Damon had been sentdeliberately, knowing the nightmare would take him, knowing we would do anything to get him back, knowing that desperation would be the weapon that put all of us in her path.
Holden was Arik.
Arik was Holden.
There was no other explanation.
The man I’d followed. The man I’d trusted. The man whose training I carried in my muscles and my instincts and the way I positioned myself between threats and the people I loved. He was the threat. He had always been the threat.
I stood in the clearing and felt my entire foundation crack. Every mission. Every briefing. Every time I’d thoughtHolden would know what to do. He’d known. He’d always known. Because he’d been playing a game so long and so intricate that we’d never even realised we were pieces on his board.
The Endless was watching me with Arik’s smile. Drinking in the devastation the way a man savours wine.
“There it is,” he said softly. “I do love watching the moment it lands. She had to come home, Dean. I need her here. I needher. You make her powerful, but I will make legends with her.”
The woman’s body jerked. A spasm ran through her, violent and sudden, and she made a sound that wasn’t Arik’s voice anymore. It was hers. Thin, broken, a whimper of pain that cut through my paralysis like a knife.
Arik was hurting her. Twisting whatever hold he had on her body just to make her scream. Just because I was standing there and couldn’t do anything to stop it.
“She’s been very useful,” Arik said through the woman’s contorting mouth. Her eyes were rolling, muscles spasming, feet dragging against the dead grass as her body fought against itself. “But I find that things are always more instructive when there’sa demonstration attached. You understand, don’t you, Dean? A good soldier knows the value of object lessons.”
Holden’s words. Holden’s exact phrasing. I’d heard that sentence in a dozen briefing rooms on a dozen different bases, delivered with the same measured authority, the same implication that pain was just another teaching tool.
The woman screamed. Not the sound Arik made through her, not performance. A real scream, ripped from whatever was left of the person trapped inside the puppet. Her back arched, her fingers clawing at her own arms, and I could see the moment Arik let her surface just enough to feel what he was doing to her body. Just enough to suffer.
And I couldn’t stop it. I was five feet away and there was nothing I could do because the man hurting her was somewhere else entirely, pulling strings from a distance, and any blow I struck would land on her body, not his.
That was the point. That was the lesson. Look how helpless you are. Look how easy it is for me to break the things you want to protect.
I watched her convulse for three more seconds. Counted each one. Filed them somewhere cold and deep where I kept the things that would fuel me later.
Then I closed the distance and drove my blade through her heart.
Quick. Clean. She went still instantly. The scream cut off. The puppet strings severed. Whatever Arik had been channelling through her snapped like a cut wire, and the body that had been a woman and then a weapon and then a demonstration slumped against my chest.
