Page 7 of Rising Reign

Marcelle hauled open the door and shoved me inside, then turned the lock and pocketed the key. “I’ll be seeing you, Little Flower.”

The music got impossibly louder, making my ears ache. The other wolves here likely didn’t care because of their drunken states. Bastian seemed unaffected by it; he simply sat and watched the debauchery play out in front of him like his favorite show. Bastian loved two things: pleasure and pain.

At times, I wasn’t sure which he enjoyed more. But looking at him now, I knew it was pain. He looked on as his wolves drank, danced, and rutted, but he didn’t enjoy any of it as much as he did the brutal fights.

Movement caught my eye, and I managed to duck at the last possible moment as a bottle flew at my head.

“Might be a traitorous bitch, but she’s fast,” a man I vaguely recognized slurred.

Bastian cackled. I knew the sound so well that I could pick it out through the music and voices. Pleasure in others’ pain. That made him the happiest.

“Cunt,” a woman accused, throwing whatever was in her cup at me.

Some sort of red punch splashed over me, sticky and smelling sweet with a hint of alcohol. I gnashed my back molars, and my knife burned a hole in my side. My fingers itched to pull it free.

“Traitor!” a man yelled, hurling something at my cage. I managed to duck again, realizing it was a fucking rock.

Bastian howled with laughter. “Tell me, healer. Could you cure someone with a hole in their head?”

Hera’s lips thinned. “That steps too far.”

“Pity,” Bastian muttered. “I’d so enjoy seeing it.”

A familiar whizzing sound pricked my ears—something so faint I almost missed it. And then they fell. The man who’d thrown the beer bottle. The woman with the fruit punch. The man with the rock.

They all collapsed to the ground, arrows sticking from their chests.

My gaze flew to the trees, the only place the projectiles could’ve come from, and I thought only one word: Ender.

Chaos erupted. Enforcers raced for my father, moving to get him into the house, and he ran like the coward he was. But only after barking orders at everyone else.

Other Red River pack members began to fall, but only the ones taking up fighting positions. Many of the wolves simply fled because they had no true loyalty to Bastian.

The mountain man who’d offered to fight me shifted into an equally massive brown-and-gray wolf and ran for the trees. My stomach sank at the thought of him going up against one of the guys. They’d be okay. They had to be.

Sounds of fighting past where I could see erupted, and the panic dug in. A familiar wolf with piercing green eyes ran at a Red River man, pointing a gun at the tree line. Puck leapt into the air, grabbed the man by the neck, and shook him like a rag doll. A second later, the man fell, his eyes vacant as blood dripped from Puck’s mouth.

Movement flashed in my peripheral vision. Another familiar figure emerged, but this one had dread pooling low in my gut. Marcelle prowled toward my cage.

“You think you’re going to get free, little bitch?” He slid a key into the lock and jerked open the door. He was fast—so fast I had no chance to block him. The blow to my cheek had me staggering back, and then he grabbed me by the throat. “I’ll kill you before I see you free.”

“No,” I wheezed. “I’ll kill you.”

I grabbed the knife from my waistband, flipped it open, and shoved the blade deep into Marcelle’s chest. His eyes went wide with shock, and his grip on me loosened. And then he fell. I kept a hold of the knife as he crumpled to the ground. Blood seeped through the material of his shirt and spilled onto the dirt beneath him.

Dead. I’d killed him.

5

BRIX

I ran through the forest, my wolf’s vision taking over as my four paws hit the ground at record speed. The only thing I could think of was Wren. It didn’t matter how much care we’d put into our planning; this could go wrong in many ways—especially because the sheer size of the Red River territory meant we each had to enter alone.

We had our pack link to keep us in contact, but no one was watching our backs. Ender had said it was the only way. We needed to take out the enforcers on patrol first.

It was lucky the Red River pack had a watchtower system. Their guards stayed high in those towers except for during their hourly patrols. Locke had watched the feeds to figure out the timing, and we’d struck just as they were all climbing down.

But the moment Ender started taking the bastards out with arrows, all hell broke loose. My brothers needed backup, and they needed it now.