Page 69 of Renegade Kingdom
I spun, reaching for the bonds, reaching for my mates. But the fog seemed to muffle even that connection, turning the bright threads that tied me to them into distant whispers. I could feel them, barely, but I couldn’t tell which direction they were in. Couldn’t tell how far away they’d been scattered.
“Tank?” I called out, my voice sounding strange in the muffled silence. “Dean? Ryder? Maddox?”
No answer. Not even an echo. The fog ate my words before they could travel more than a few feet.
I sent a pulse of magic outward, trying to feel through the unnatural mist, trying to find the familiar presences of my mates. But what came back to me wasn’t the warmth of pack bonds or the steady heartbeats of the men I loved.
It was fae hounds.
Dozens of them. Maybe more. They had us completely surrounded, their presence pressing in from all sides like a noose slowly tightening. I could feel their hunger, their anticipation, their absolute certainty that their prey was trapped and helpless.
And I felt the desperation start to rise inside of me, just as I heard breathing behind me.
I whirled, magic gathering at my fingertips, ready to strike. And found myself face to face with Damon.
Relief flooded through me, so intense it nearly buckled my knees. I wasn’t alone. At least I wasn’t alone. But the relief was quickly tempered by confusion, because the man standing in front of me wasn’t the Damon I’d grown accustomed to seeing.
He looked... alive.
His eyes were bright, almost feverish, burning with an intensity I’d never seen from him before. His shoulders were squared, his stance wide and ready. There was nothing of the broken prisoner in the way he held himself, nothing of the man who’d spent weeks fighting a losing battle against the nightmare in his head. He looked like a soldier about to charge into battle. Like a predator who’d finally been let off his chain.
“Get behind me,” he said, his voice low and commanding in a way that sent shivers down my spine. Before I could respond, he was pulling me to his side, pushing me behind his back, putting his body between me and whatever was out there in the fog. “When they attack, I’ll draw them to me. You run for the others. Don’t stop until you’re back with them.”
He dropped into a fighting stance, his hands curled into fists in front of him despite the chains, his weight balanced on the balls of his feet. He had no weapons. No magic that he could reliably call upon. He was chained and exhausted and had spent weeks being used as a puppet by a creature that lived inside his skull.
And he was planning to fight a pack of fae hounds with his bare hands while I ran away.
Part of me wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. Part of me wanted to cry at the bravery of it. But mostly, I just stared at him, seeing something I’d only glimpsed in fragments before.
This was the real Damon.
This was the man who had led soldiers into battle, who had protected his brothers through impossible odds, who had survived things that would have broken anyone else. The darkness in his eyes wasn’t the nightmare. It was something that belonged to him alone. Something fierce and dangerous and absolutely unwilling to let anything hurt the people he cared about.
I watched as he seemed to reach inside himself as if it was second nature, grasping for that whisper of magic I’d felt brewing inside him since the ship. That power that had been waiting, dormant, for the right moment to emerge. He was trying to force it to the surface through sheer will and desperation, trying to become something more than human through nothing but the raw determination to protect me.
And in that moment, I believed he might actually succeed. I believed he might tear apart a pack of fae hounds with nothing but his hands and his fury and his absolute refusal to let them touch me.
But he didn’t have to.
My hand came to his shoulder, and I let a wave of calm wash through the contact. Not control, not manipulation, just... peace.The kind of peace that came from absolute certainty. From knowing exactly who you were and what you were capable of.
Damon looked at me in surprise, his tense muscles relaxing despite himself. He straightened slowly, confusion flickering across his face.
“You forget who I am,” I said quietly. “Whoweare supposed to be.”
I held out my hand to him.
For a long moment, he just looked at it. Looked at me. His eyes searching my face for something I couldn’t name. Then, slowly, he reached out and took it.
The moment our palms touched, something shifted.
His magic, that bare beginning of power that had been stirring inside him for days, rushed toward me like water finding its way downhill. It twisted through a line of my own magic, braiding together, intertwining. The bond that had been forming between us, tentative and fragile, suddenly solidified into something real. Something permanent.
I felt him. Really felt him, the way I felt Tank and Dean and Maddox and Ryder. His strength and his fear and his desperate, overwhelming desire to protect the people he loved. His guilt over what the nightmare had made him do. His hope, fragile but fierce, that maybe he could still be saved.
And underneath all of that, a shadow. Dark and cool and surprisingly gentle, like the shade of a great tree on a hot summer day. His magic. His true self.
He felt it too. I saw it in the way his eyes widened, the way his breath caught in his throat. The way he looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time.
