Page 88 of Renegade Kingdom
The wolf surged forward. Not in aggression. In something I didn’t have a good word for. Need, maybe. The need to go to my brother, to give him what he’d asked for, to put a wolf inside him that could fight the thing that had been eating him alive.
I’d wanted to give him the bite since the moment Ryder had first proposed it. The wolf had been howling for it. Every time I’d visited Damon in his chains, every time I’d watched the nightmare surface and twist my brother’s face into something cruel and wrong, the wolf had pushed.Give him the pack. Make him ours. Let us protect him.
I’d held back. Because it had to be Damon’s choice. Not mine. Not the wolf’s. His.
And now he’d made it.
The relief should have been simple. It wasn’t. Because I’d also never done this before.
We’d all been bitten by alphas back in the human realm as a way to get into Nymeria in the first place. Men who’d done it dozens of times, who knew the process, and understood the risks. I had the instinct. The wolf knew what to do. But I’d never sunk my teeth into someone’s flesh and pushed my venom into their blood, hoping that it would take instead of kill.
Because that was the other side of the bite. The side none of us seemed to want to talk about. It didn’t always work. Sometimes the body rejected the wolf. Sometimes the person just didn’t wake up.
We’d all passed out. Days of nothing, of lying still while the wolf and the body negotiated their new arrangement. Maddox had stayed on his feet for a few minutes before going down, and everyone had been genuinely impressed. Nobody managed that. The body needed to shut down so the wolf could settle in. Or lion as was the case with Maddox.
What if Damon’s body, already fighting the nightmare on every front, couldn’t handle the wolf on top of it? What if instead of giving him a weapon, I gave him another enemy? What if the bite was the thing that finally broke him?
The wolf growled. Low, certain.He’s strong. He’s ours. It will work.
I wished I had his confidence.
“You’re staring.”
Tank’s voice, low and steady, from beside me. I hadn’t heard him approach, which told me exactly how deep in my own head I’d been. Tank was a big man. You heard him coming. It was the side effect of being the human embodiment of the bear that occupied the other half of his soul.
“I’m thinking.”
“You’re staring and thinking. And grinding your teeth.” He settled against the wall next to me, arms folded, his gaze following mine to Damon. “Talk to him.”
“I will.”
“You’ve been saying that for days.”
I cut him a look. Tank met it without flinching. He never flinched. It was one of the most annoying things about him.
“What happened in that chamber changes things,” Tank said. Not pushing. Just stating. The way he did. “You know that.”
I did know that. Watching Damon refuse a cure, watching him choose Rhidian, watching him look at Maddox and saylittle brotherwith more love than the nightmare could ever touch. It had cracked something open in my chest that I’d been keepingsealed shut since the day we’d had no choice but to put Damon in chains.
I’d been avoiding him because I couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand seeing my brother, trapped behind those eyes while something else wore his face. Every visit to his cell had been a knife in my ribs.
But the truth was simpler and uglier than what I wanted to admit. I was afraid. Afraid that Damon was already gone and I’d been too late to save him. Afraid that the brother who’d gone out into the night and fixed the biggest mistake of my life, showed me how to lead and how to survive. But what if he was buried so deep under that nightmare that nothing could bring him back? What if all I had to offer him was an end to it all?
But there was hope. Because when he’d stepped forward in front of a dying god he’d proved to me that the man he’d always been was still there inside.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
Tank clapped me on the shoulder once and walked away. He went to Alyssa, who was standing by one of those strange windows that looked out on colours instead of what actually lay outside. She leaned into him when he reached her, a small unconscious gesture that said more than words. He murmured something I couldn’t hear, and she nodded.
I pushed off the doorframe and crossed the room.
Damon’s eyes opened when I was three steps away. Clear. Present. The nightmare was in there somewhere, I could sense it, but it was deep. Buried under the iron will that had held it at bay in the chamber.
“Hey,” I said.
Eloquent. Really profound.
The corner of Damon’s mouth twitched. “Hey.”
