Page 58 of Renegade Kingdom
Because this was the woman I loved. This was the woman who had faced down impossible odds and won, over and over again. This was the woman who had saved my brother once already and was going to save him again.
If anyone could do the impossible, it was her.
“I trust you,” I said. “Completely.”
Her smile widened, and she squeezed my hand.
I fell asleep that night with her warmth pressed against my side and her faith wrapped around my heart. And for the first time in weeks, the wolf was quiet.
Chapter Seventeen
Alyssa
It had been a tense night.
I’d slept in fits and starts, waking at every rustle of leaves, every crack of a branch, every shift in the wind. The forest loomed at the edge of our camp like a living thing, and I could feel its presence even with my eyes closed. Watching. Waiting. Deciding whether we were worthy of passage or merely prey.
But it wasn’t just the forest that had kept me awake.
I could feel the tension through the bonds with my mates, thick and heavy like a blanket of storm clouds. They were worried. Anxious. Fighting their own internal battles while trying to appear calm for my sake. And I knew, without needing to ask, that it wasn’t the Wildling Forest that consumed them.
It was Damon.
Watching him sleep, chained and vulnerable, knowing that a monster lurked behind his eyes. Watching him wake, lucid and himself, knowing that it could change at any moment. The fear of losing him. The desperate hope that we could save him. The guilt of not having done it already.
They loved their brother so much. All of them did, in their different ways. Dean with his fierce protectiveness. Maddox with his tender heart. Ryder with his determined optimism. Even Tank, who wasn’t one of the original brothers, had accepted Damon into his pack without hesitation.
It was one of the reasons I loved them all so much. Their capacity for love. Their willingness to carry each other’s burdens. The way they would walk through fire for the people they cared about.
I just wished I could take some of that weight from their shoulders.
Morning came slowly, grey light filtering through the canopy. It was more oppressive than the hopeful sign it should have been. Everyone was packing up the camp in silence, the only sounds the rustle of canvas and the clink of supplies being secured. No one seemed to want to break the quiet. As if speaking would make this real in a way that silence couldn’t.
I watched Damon from across the camp. He was standing near the edge of the clearing, his shackled hands hanging at his sides, his eyes fixed on the darkness between the trees. There was a frown on his face, a tension in his shoulders that had nothing to do with the chains.
Memories flooded my mind at the same time. The visage of the aftermath we’d discovered when we came looking for Damon. His entire squad had been killed in one of these forests, picked off one by one by creatures they couldn’t see and couldn’t fight. He’d been the only survivor, and only because Arik had wanted him alive. Had seen something in him worth exploiting. But how had he known? How did he know Damon would be the one he needed or was it all just a coincidence?
And now we were standing on the edge of a forest that even the fae didn’t dare enter. This couldn’t be a situation he felt comfortable with. Walking into another forest, knowing whatlurked in the darkness, knowing that he was compromised in ways that made him a liability rather than an asset. The nightmare might be quiet now, but quiet wasn’t the same as gone. And Damon knew better than anyone what could happen when the thing inside him decided to wake up.
I was about to go to him, to offer some kind of reassurance even though I wasn’t sure what I could say that would help, when I felt the flutter of wings above me.
Fizzle descended from the trees, circling once before aiming for my shoulder. But at the last moment, he hesitated. Pulled up short. Hovered in the air beside me with an uncertainty I’d never seen from him before.
I sighed. “It’s fine, Fizzle. You can land.”
He settled onto my shoulder with exaggerated care, as if he expected me to shake him off at any moment. His talons gripped gently, none of the casual confidence that had characterised his movements for as long as I could remember. The distance between us was a physical ache in my chest.
The truth was, I hated it too.
Fizzle had always been the one I confided in. The one who was there when I woke from nightmares, when I struggled with my magic, when the world felt too big and too frightening and I needed someone to tell me it would be okay. He’d been my teacher and my friend and the one who had found a way to save me when Arik came for our Court. And now there was this chasm between us, carved by secrets and oaths and the terrible weight of things left unsaid.
“We need to talk,” I said quietly.
Fizzle’s feathers ruffled, but he didn’t argue. I caught Tank’s eye across the camp, and he nodded, understanding without words what I needed. Space. Privacy. A moment alone with the owl griffin who had shaped so much of who I’d become.
I turned and walked away from the group, toward a small clearing just far enough from the camp to be out of earshot. Fizzle rode on my shoulder in silence, his weight familiar and strange at the same time.
When I stopped, he spoke first.
