Page 98 of Renegade Kingdom
I looked down to find Maddox standing at the base of the ledge, two bowls in his hands. Steam curled from whatever he’d made this time.
“I’m thinking,” I corrected. “There’s a difference.”
“Ryder says that too. He’s usually lying as well.” Maddox held up one of the bowls. “Come down and eat. Alyssa wants to talk next steps.”
I climbed down from the ledge and took the bowl. Some kind of stew, thick and rich, made from whatever stores this court had hidden in its depths that none of us really wanted to think about the logistics of. Maddox watched me eat the first spoonful with the quiet intensity of a man who needed to see other people nourished. It was his way of healing. I understood that now.
“How are you doing?” I asked him. A simple question, but the weight behind it wasn’t simple at all.
Maddox’s jaw tightened. Then loosened. “Better,” he said. “Not fixed. But better.”
He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t push. Some conversations didn’t need to be finished in a single sitting. Some pain didn’t need to be laid out and examined every time someone else mentioned it.
We joined the others at the table. Alyssa looked up when I sat down, and something flickered across her face. Not pity, and not the careful tenderness she reserved for her mates. Somethingmore honest than either of those things. Recognition, maybe. An acknowledgment that I was here and that my presence mattered even if it didn’t fit neatly into the shape of her life.
I appreciated that more than she probably knew.
“Right,” Alyssa said, and the room settled. Even Ryder stopped fidgeting. “We need to talk about what comes next.”
“Arik,” Dean said. The word landed on the table like a blade. His arms were crossed, his back against the wall, and the ice in his eyes hadn’t thawed since I’d watched him stare at the gap where his throne should have been. “We take the fight to him before he brings it to us.”
“It’s not that simple,” Tank said from the far end of the table. His voice was calm, measured. It was always calm and measured. I’d known men like Tank in the Summer Court’s guard. The ones who never raised their voices because they never needed to. “Arik will have felt Nymeria die. He’ll know the courts have shifted. If he’s smart, and he is, he’ll already be making his move. We’ve given him the chance to end it all. To get what he’s been fighting for.”
“Then we need to move faster,” Dean pressed.
“We need to move smarter,” Alyssa countered. She held Dean’s gaze until the ice cooled from a blaze to a simmer. “The Endless. The ones still under his control. If we kill Arik while they’re still bound to him, will they die with him?”
Silence fell over the table. It was the kind of silence that tasted like ash. Every person in this room had seen what Arik did to his Endless. The hollow eyes, the stolen will. Bodies moving under someone else’s command.
“So we free them first,” Ryder said. He leaned back in his chair, arms folded behind his head in a way that projected casual ease and fooled absolutely nobody. “Any idea how?”
“The same way I freed the others at Ice Falls,” Alyssa said. “Breaking his hold on them one at a time. But that was during battle, in the chaos. If he’s expecting it, if he’s fortified himself...”
“He’ll make it harder,” Damon finished. He’d been quiet until now, sitting at the corner of the table like a man still getting used to being allowed to sit at tables. The shadow magic curled around his fingers in idle patterns, dark smoke that caught the light in strange ways. “He’ll use them as shields. Put the Endless between us and him, and dare us to fight through them.”
“That sounds like something he’d do,” I said. Every head turned to me. I wasn’t part of this group, not really, and they all knew it. But I’d grown up in Nymeria’s courts. I understood how power worked here. How cruelty worked here. “Arik doesn’t value the Endless as people. They’re resources to him. He’ll burn through every last one of them if it buys him time. And he’ll make Alyssa kill them just because he knows it will hurt her.”
Alyssa’s expression hardened. “Then we need a way to break his hold on all of them at once. Not one by one. Before the fight even starts.”
“Can you do that?” Tank asked. The question was direct, but his hand found Alyssa’s shoulder as he asked it. The gesture was so natural, so unconscious, that I doubted either of them noticed.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe. With the Fifth Court’s magic added to all the other four courts...” She trailed off, and I could see her mind working. Weighing what she knew against what she didn’t. “I need time to figure it out.”
“Time is the one thing we don’t have much of,” Dean said.
“Then I’ll work fast.”
The discussion continued, circling around the hundred small decisions that had to be made before they could march on Arik’s stronghold. I listened more than I spoke. Not because I had nothing to offer, but because I was watching.
I was watching Damon.
Or more accurately, I was watching the space between Damon and Alyssa.
It was a living thing, that space. Charged with something I recognised because I’d spent years drowning in a lesser version of it. Every time Alyssa turned her head, her eyes found him. Not deliberately. Not consciously. The way a compass needle finds north. A small, involuntary pull that she probably didn’t even notice but that was obvious to anyone standing outside the magnetic field.
And Damon. He was worse. Every time Alyssa spoke, his body shifted toward her. Fractionally, almost imperceptibly, like a plant turning toward light. His hand would twitch on the table, fingers reaching for something before he caught himself and pulled them back. And his eyes. Those newly clear eyes that I’d watched the nightmare cloud for weeks. When they found Alyssa, they held on like she was the only solid thing in a world that kept shifting.
The bond between them was incomplete. I could see it in the way they circled each other. Orbiting, never quite touching. A sentence started and left hanging. A glance that lasted half a beat too long before one of them looked away. The others had the luxury of settled bonds, of knowing exactly where they stood with her. Damon had a thread. A beginning. A promise of something that hadn’t been fulfilled.
