Page 148 of Renegade Kingdom
A strong pair of arms clutched me tight, as fingers threaded through my hair. The relief of it all finally being over was almost overwhelming. I could feel a dampness on my cheeks and wondered if I’d been crying through the agonising pain or if it was just the relief that had brought them on.
I didn’t know how they’d done it, but they must come for me. My mates had saved me.
“You scream so beautifully,” Arik whispered, My vision cleared and I watched in horror as he lifted a lock of my hair and twisted it around his fingers, watching the strands like it was something he’d never seen before. “You know, I think she made you for me. The other half of me. It was always supposed to be you and me, sister. Haven’t you realised that?”
I surged out of his arms, recoiling at the idea of him touching me, let alone what he was suggesting. But the smile he gave me as I dragged myself away was the kind you give a child acting out and it turned my stomach.
Arik really had lost his mind.
“Would you give yourself to me, Alyssa?” he asked, his smile turning deadly. “Would you give yourself to mewillinglyif it would save them? Can’t you feel it? You have those pesky bonds with those filthy shifters. Can’t you feel them dying?”
My body was bombarded with sensation then and I realised that the pain wasn’t mine alone. My mates were suffering. They were injured, exhausting. Holding on with the last of their reserves. And it was the last. I could already feel the bonds starting to strain
“No.”
It was such a small word, but I didn’t have enough left in me for anything bigger, and Arik wasn’t worth bigger anyway. He’d asked me to choose between saving five men and keeping my own self, and the answer was no. That was the end of any conversation we were ever going to have.
His head tilted. The smile didn’t move.
“Are you sure, sister? They’re so very tired. So very close to the end. One word, and you save them.”
“You don’t get to use them against me.”
“Don’t I?” The smile sharpened. “Sister. You’re already letting me. Every second you stand here is a second they don’t have.”
He was right. And I hated him even more for it. Every breath I let him take in this place was a heartbeat my mates didn’t have. Tank. Maddox. Dean. Ryder. Damon. The bonds were a chorus of pain at the back of my mind, five separate voices fraying at the edges, and Arik knew exactly what he was doing. Distract. Delay. Make me waste myself on words while his creatures finished what his power had started.
I’d walked into this thinking I could kill him, and I’d been wrong.
Even with everything I had thrown at the core of what he was, it hadn’t even made him flinch. The realm hadn’t let me.The realmcouldn’tlet me. Arik was woven from the same fabric as Nymeria, and the realm couldn’t be turned against its own foundations.
So either there was no way to end this, or there was some other way that I couldn’t see yet.
I closed my eyes and reached for the bonds. They felt frayed and fading, but there. Thankfully still there. Through them I could sense the battlefield outside. The blood. The exhaustion. The way the men I loved were holding the line with the last of themselves because they trusted me to come back.
And in that moment, with Arik’s voice crooning through the dark and my mates dying outside, I saw it.
The realm hadn’t let my magic kill him. But it hadn’t stopped me from trying. The magic had just refused to flow in one direction, with that specific intention. It had refused todestroy. It hadn’t refused to do anything else.
Arik was woven from the same fabric as the realm. Killing him was like trying to tear out a single thread without unravelling the whole thing. The realm wouldn’t allow it. Of course it wouldn’t. Because destroying Arik meant destroying a part of him. Trying to remove him by force was too violent and this realm had been bathing in so much violence, for so long.
It was time to make a different choice.
One less violent, but horrific all the same.
Because what we needed her was an unweaving. Unmaking.
Which was something entirely different.
Killing was violence from the outside. Force applied to a thing that resisted. It was what Arik expected. What he was built to withstand. His entire existence was a fortress designed to endure assault, because assault was all he had ever known.
But unmaking was something else. Unmaking required going deeper. Not attacking the fortress but dissolving it. Not breaking the walls but removing the foundation they stood on. And thenall the energy and strands that had made Arik needed to be woven into something else. It would be easy enough to do with the physical parts of him, but there was also his essence, the spark that made him Arik. It would need a place to go. Not still as the man he was, but the echo of life that had once been.
And there was only one way that I could see us achieving that. I would have to hold every piece of what he was. Every memory. Every century of pain. Every moment of rage and loneliness and the terrible, corrosive conviction that he was worthless.
I would have to carry it.
Arik would cease to exist, but the horror of what he was would live on in my own memories. In the darkest recesses of my mind.
