Page 131 of Renegade Kingdom
“Dean.” The bond carried his name like a thrown blade. “He’s pulling magic. Everything he can reach. You need to get to him. You need to stop him.”
I felt Dean’s response before I heard it. The wolf’s snarl, cold and absolute. The coiling of ice beneath skin. The single-minded focus of a predator locking onto its prey.
Then Dean was gone, a streak of white and silver cutting through the battle toward the bruised sky and the monster hiding inside it.
But as he moved Arik locked his eyes on the advancing wolf and then… laughed. And as he laughed his face distorted, rearranging itself with subtle changes. He turned to look at me. That same self assured smile on his lips that I’d seen so many times before and I found myself looking at a face I’d never thought I’d see in Nymeria, but one that made so much sense because of the betrayal he knew they’d feel. This was right out of Arik’s playbook. He didn’t just kill people. He played with your mind and enjoyed breaking you first. Except Dean didn’t break. He didn’t falter. He just kept surging forward.
Toward Holden.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Dean
The wolf and I agreed on very few things.
It wanted to run when I wanted to think. It wanted to fight when I wanted to plan. It operated on instinct where I operated on training, and most of the time our partnership felt less like cooperation and more like two men steering the same boat in different directions.
But when Alyssa said our name through the bond, the wolf and I became one thing. A single creature with a single purpose, cutting through the battlefield with an efficiency that left no room for hesitation or doubt.
Arik was ahead of us. I could feel him before I could see him, a cold pull in the centre of my chest where the ice magic lived. The Winter Court power that had been crawling under my skin for weeks recognised its source and strained toward it like iron toward a lodestone. Every step closer made the pull stronger, the ice harder to contain, until frost was crackling across the ground beneath my paws and the grass died in my wake.
The battle parted around me. Not because the creatures feared me, though some did. Because the wolf was moving at a speedthat made everything else seem slow, and the ice that trailed behind us created a corridor of frozen earth that nothing wanted to cross.
I shifted as I ran. Ice coating my body like armour. The change was fluid now, faster than it had been even days ago, the wolf releasing its hold on my body with a reluctance that bordered on protest. But this fight needed hands. Needed a voice. The wolf could tear through flesh but it couldn’t look the man who’d trained us in the eye and make him answer for what he’d done.
I came out of the shift at a dead sprint, and slammed into the ring of dark creatures that surrounded Arik like a living wall.
They went down hard. Ice speared through the first, freezing it from the inside out until it shattered. The second caught a fist wrapped in frost that caved in whatever passed for its skull. The third I simply ran through, the cold radiating from my body enough to kill anything that got within arm’s reach.
And then I was through, and there he was.
Arik stood at the centre of a circle of dead grass, the magic he was pulling from the ground visible as currents of light streaming toward his outstretched hands. He looked exactly as he had back when I’d believed he was a man of honour and integrity. Tall, broad, composed. The face of General Holden, the man who had found four broken men and turned them into soldiers, worn like a mask that had been glued on so long it might as well have been skin.
He turned when I broke through his perimeter, and his expression was the thing that nearly undid me.
He smiled.
Not Arik’s smile, cold and cruel and ancient. Holden’s smile. The one I remembered from the training yard, from the briefings, from the night he’d put his hand on my shoulder after a mission gone bad and told me that what made a good soldier wasn’t never failing. It was getting back up.
“Dean.” His voice was Holden’s too. Warm with something that sounded like pride. “I was wondering which of you would reach me first.”
The ice on my arms flared, the armour sharpening at the edges from my fury, and I had to clamp down on the magic to keep it from detonating. The wolf was howling inside my skull, not with rage but with something worse. Confusion. Because the wolf didn’t understand betrayal. The wolf understood pack and enemy and nothing in between, and the man standing in front of us still smelled like pack.
“Shut up,” I muttered, and I wasn’t sure if I was talking to the wolf or to him.
Arik’s smile widened. “You’ve grown since the Ice Falls. The ice is stronger. More controlled. Almost ready for what it’s meant to be.” He tilted his head, studying me the way he used to study tactical maps. “You know what I’m going to offer, don’t you? A seat at the table. A crown that was always meant to be yours. The Winter Court needs a king, Dean. A real one. Join me and rule this world like it deserves.With ice.”
“You’re not Holden.” I clung to the lie I so desperately wanted to believe because it was so much better than the truth.
“Of course I am.” He said it so simply. So reasonably. “I’m everything Holden ever was. Every mission, every training session, every late night going over strategy. That was all me. I didn’t pretend to care about your development, Dean. I genuinely did. You were magnificent raw material.”
Raw material.
The words hit like a blade between the ribs. Not because they were cruel but because they were honest. I could hear the truth in them, the genuine admiration threaded through the calculated manipulation, and that was worse than a lie. A lie I could have hated cleanly. This required me to hold two incompatible truths at the same time and keep fighting anyway.
“It was always you,” I said. My voice came out flat. Good. Flat was all I could manage without the ice taking over.
Something shifted in his expression. The smile didn’t disappear but it changed shape, becoming less Holden and more Arik. The mask slipping.
