Page 107 of Renegade Kingdom
I lowered her to the ground. Closed her eyes. The wolf keened in my mind, mourning a stranger, and I let him grieve because one of us should.
Arik’s presence was gone. I could feel the absence of it the same way you feel the absence of someone watching you through a window. The clearing was just a clearing again. The dead grass, the trees, the fading light of the Fifth Court behind me.
I cleaned my blade on the grass and sheathed it.
Then I stood there for a long time, breathing, while the ice settled back beneath my skin and the fracture lines in my chest hardened into something I could carry.
I thought about telling them. Walked through the conversation in my head. Sat the brothers down and saidHolden is Arikand watched their faces change. Watched Ryder realise that the man who’d made him feel likejust a beta, the man who’d looked past him and through him and treated him like the least important piece on the board, had been doing it on purpose. Engineering his insecurity the way you’d sharpen a tool.
Watched Maddox connect every dot back to the beginning and spiral into the kind of guilt that would eat him alive. Holden had shaped us. Trained us. Turned them into the men they were, and all of it had been in service to a plan so vast and so cold that their entire lives were just lines in someone else’s strategy.
And Damon. God, Damon. Who’d spent months trapped in his own head by a nightmare that his commanding officer had sent him to. Who’d been the prototype. The test subject. The first piece moved on the board.
No.
They were about to go to war. They needed to be whole, not shattered. Ryder’s storms, Maddox’s fire, Damon’s shadows, all of it would falter if I put this weight on them now. And Alyssa. The implication of what Arik had said was clear: he’d always known where she was. He’d been playing with her for years, watching, waiting, moving pieces around her like a cat herding a mouse into a corner.
I’d carry this alone. I’d carry it the way I carried everything, in that cold deep place where the ice lived, and when the time came, I’d face Holden myself. Not a puppet. Not a projection. The man. And he would answer for every single thing he’d done with my sword in his chest and his lies frozen in his throat. That was where this was all heading.Thiswas my purpose and the reason I needed to give myself over to the ice.
I gathered her into my arms and walked back to the Fifth Court. I wasn’t about to leave her in that clearing, discarded like her life meant nothing. The shifting silver light swallowed me as I crossed the border, and the hum of the ancient magic settled over my skin like armour I didn’t trust anymore.
Before I went inside the palace I laid her out on the soft grass, crossing her arms over her chest. I let myself feel the pain and the guilt for a life taken and then I redirected it back to the man who was the cause of this all.
The magic swelled around us almost like a gathering of pressure in the air that I felt in the back of my ears. Then she slowly sunk into the ground as the Court helped her finally find a peace she’d been missing at the end of her life.
I stood there for a moment unsure what to do next. But it was so obvious that I found myself turning and walking away before I even realised what I was doing. Because there was only was place I wanted to be right now. With the people I loved the most.
When I found them, they were gathered in one of the smaller chambers. Alyssa sitting cross-legged on the floor with shadows and light playing across her fingers. Damon beside her, closer than he’d been to anyone in months, the new bond between them visible in the way they leaned toward each other like plants finding sun. Maddox watching them with an expression that was soft in a way he wouldn’t allow himself around anyone else. Ryder perched on the arm of the stone bench, swinging hislegs, looking like a man without a care in the world because he’d perfected the art of looking like he didn’t care about anything.
Tank, standing in the doorway across from me, saw me first. His eyes moved over my face in that measured way of his, cataloguing, assessing. He saw something. I knew he did. But he didn’t push, because that wasn’t who Tank was.
Tank had to be the wildcard in Arik’s plan. There was no way he could have engineering bringing him and Alyssa together. But did that even matter? How had he even known about the rest of us? Regardless, there was no way I would ever let him lay a finger on her. Yes, we made her strong. But with that strength we were going to destroy him, not give him the power he needed to do whatever else he had planned.
“We have a problem,” I said.
Every head turned and the temptation to just tell them everything was strong. But I couldn’t.
“There was an Endless scout at the border. Arik was using it to observe. He knows where we are.”
The silence was immediate and heavy. Alyssa’s hands stilled. Damon’s shadows darkened.
“We need to move,” I continued. “Back to Spring. Back to our forces. If he knows our position, we can’t afford to linger here. We’ll get cut off.”
Tank nodded. Already calculating routes and timelines behind those steady eyes. Maddox looked at Alyssa. Ryder’s legs stopped swinging.
“How close was the scout?” Tank asked.
“Close enough. I dealt with it.” I kept my voice level. Professional. The soldier delivering a report. “But where there’s one, there’ll be more. We should leave at first light.”
Alyssa was watching me. Those eyes that saw everything, that had seen through the nightmare wearing Damon’s face, that hadlooked at me on a grimy bar floor and told me she was sorry for my loss. I held her gaze and gave her nothing.
Some lies were acts of love. This one would have to be.
“First light,” Tank agreed, and the room began to move.
I stayed in the doorway. Watched them prepare. My brothers, my mate, the family that a monster had built for his own purposes. The family that had become something he never intended.
That was the part Arik didn’t understand. He’d placed us in her path, but he hadn’t made us love her. He hadn’t made us love each other. The bonds were fate. The family was choice. And both of those things were beyond his control, no matter how long his game or how intricate his board.
