Page 91 of Renegade Kingdom
But certainty wasn’t required. Just will. Just the decision to try.
My brother needed a wolf. And I was going to give him one.
So we headed for the throne room, and I brought with me all the crushing doubts, the fear, and most of all a desperate hope that this was the answer we needed.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Damon
The throne room felt different now.
I could feel Nymeria’s absence the way you feel a missing limb. The air was thinner. The golden veins in the floor were dark, just stone now, just ordinary rock. The throne still stood in the centre of the chamber, roots and crystal and ancient stone, but the presence that had filled this space was gone. What remained was a hollowed out shell. It felt more like a room with just a chair rather than a throne room now. Or maybe a room waiting to become something else.
I knew the feeling.
The others filed in behind me, and I was aware of each of them in ways I hadn’t been before. Not through any bond. Not yet. Through something older, more basic. The awareness of a man who had spent years watching the world through a window he couldn’t open, cataloguing every detail because details were all he had.
The worm was quiet. It had been quiet since the chamber, since Nymeria had touched my face and light had bloomed where her fingers met my skin. Not gone. I could still feel it,curled in the dark corners of my mind like a snake in a hole. Watching. Waiting. But quieter than it had been before, as if even the nightmare had been shaken by what it had witnessed.
Good. Let it be afraid. For once, let it know what that felt like.
“Centre of the room,” Alyssa said. She’d taken charge the moment we’d started walking, and the shift in her was something I noticed even through the fog that perpetually clouded my thoughts. She stood straighter. Spoke with more certainty. The magic of this place responded to her in ways I could see. The air moved when she moved. The stone seemed warmer where she walked. She wasn’t the woman who’d arrived at the Fifth Court yesterday. She was becoming something else. Something this realm needed. And she looked glorious in every single second of it.
I walked to the centre and stood where a god had unravelled herself to bring a dead man back to life. For me. Because I’d asked.
The weight of that settled onto my shoulders, and I let it. I’d carried worse.
“How does this work?” Alyssa asked. The question was directed at Tank, but she was looking at me.
Tank rubbed the back of his neck. His nervousness wasn’t exactly filling me with confidence.
“Teeth,” he said. “You have to shift enough to bring forth your fangs. The bite has to break skin. The wolf will know what to do. It’s mostly instinct.”
“If it makes you feel better, my wolf is more than confident that he can do this,” Dean told me. “It’s the man who’s worried.”
“Don’t be.” The words came out of me before I’d planned them. Dean’s eyes snapped to mine. “You won’t hurt me. Nothing you could do to me comes close to what’s already been done.”
Something flickered in his face. Pain. Guilt. The particular kind of anguish that came from being the protector who’d failed to protect. I knew that look. I’d worn it myself, every time the nightmare had used my hands to hurt someone.
“Besides,” I added. “If you mess this up, I’ll haunt you. And I’ll be much more annoying than the current thing living in my head.”
A startled laugh escaped Ryder. Dean’s mouth twitched.
“Shoulder or forearm,” Dean said, all business now. The wolf was close. I could see it in his eyes, that amber flicker at the edges of the blue. “Shoulder seems to be… traditional.”
“Shoulder then.”
I pulled my shirt over my head. The air in the chamber was cool against my skin, and I was aware of how different I looked from the man they remembered. Thinner. Harder. The nightmare didn’t care about things like eating regularly or sleeping well. My body bore the marks of months of possession like a landscape after a war. Scars I didn’t remember getting. Bruises in varying shades of healing. The physical evidence of a battle fought entirely inside my own skull.
Nobody commented. I was grateful for that.
Tank had positioned himself by the door. The only exit. His arms were loose at his sides, but I recognised the stance. He was ready to move. Ready to contain whatever needed containing. The bear was close to the surface, held in check by the steady discipline that defined everything Tank seemed to do. I didn’t know him well, but the parts that I did know I was grateful for. Grateful to have at mine and my brothers side, grateful to have protecting Alyssa… our mate. And that was the thought driving me through this. It couldn’t go wrong. This had to work. It had to work because at the end of it I had her waiting for me and there was nothing in this world that was going to keep me from her.
Ryder had drifted to my left, his body language deliberately casual in a way that meant he was anything but. His eyes were sharp, tracking, calculating. People underestimated Ryder. That was their mistake.
Maddox was to my right. Close enough to touch. His presence was a quiet, steady warmth, and the grief he’d been carrying for weeks had shifted into something else. Something that looked almost like hope.
And then there was Alyssa. The woman who had been nothing but a stranger to me before this terrible place, the woman who was the one shining light in this whole place. She stood directly in front of me. Her hands were at her sides but her magic was awake. I could feel it in the air, a hum of power that hadn’t been there an hour ago. She’d said she was stronger in this room, more connected to the magic of this place, and I believed her. The woman standing before me was a live wire. If the nightmare surged, she would be ready. And even if she wasn’t strong enough to kill it yet, I had faith that she could keep it in its place, but if she couldn’t...
