Page 134 of Renegade Kingdom
Maddox made a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. “He’s right. We knew something was wrong.”
“We trusted you to tell us when you were ready,” Damon said quietly. His shadows curled around him, protective, and his eyes never left Arik. “Or when we needed to know.”
Arik’s triumph curdled. I watched it happen. The weapon he’d crafted from the truth, the revelation designed to shatter us the way a well-placed charge shatters a dam, fell flat against the reality of what we were.
We were not raw material. We were not soldiers shaped by a general’s hand. We were brothers who had chosen each other, again and again, through possession and death and resurrection and the slow, gruelling work of learning to trust. Holden had put us in a room. We’d built the family. A family who had fought against the so called fate he’d tried to manipulate with us.
I turned to face him.
“You might have made us into soldiers,” I said. “But you never made us into family. That’s the thing you never understood. You don’t get to take credit for what we became.”
Something broke behind his eyes. Not composure. Not control. Something deeper, something structural, a load-bearing belief that had held up the architecture of his superiority for centuries. The belief that he was the architect. That everything they were, everything they’d built, was his design. This broken, flawed being really did think he should have been a god. But, unlike Alyssa, he’d never be able to reach anything close to that level. Because he lacked the one thing that was so fundamentally hers. He lacked the light, her sheer capacity for good that shone from every cell of her being.
I saw the moment he realised it too. When his face turned into an ugly grimace and his rage took control as a cloak of denial wrapped around him.
Arik’s magic surged. Wild, uncontrolled for the first time since I’d known him. The vortex of stolen energy pulsed outward, and the ground cracked in radiating lines, as his face contorted into something that was neither Holden nor Arik but something older and more broken than both.
I moved.
The ice on my arms sharpened into blades. Not the clumsy, desperate weapons I’d formed earlier but something refined. Something that drew from the Winter Court magic that had been crawling under my skin for weeks, begging for release. The cold that had always lived in me recognised its purpose and finally, finally, I stopped fighting it.
Two strikes. Both found their mark.
The first opened a gash across Arik’s chest that froze at the edges, ice crystallising in the wound, preventing it from closing. The second caught his arm, the blade slicing through the sleeve of his coat and into the flesh beneath.
He staggered.
I pressed forward. A third strike, aimed at his throat. He caught my wrist but the ice burned him and his grip slipped and the blade scored a line across his collarbone that wept blood and frost in equal measure.
Arik looked down at himself. At the wounds that weren’t healing. At the blood freezing on his skin.The evidence written on his own body, that he was not invincible.
That hecouldlose.
His eyes found mine and for one moment I saw the child underneath. The boy Nymeria had made and found wanting. The first creation, cast out, broken from the start. Hungry for something he couldn’t name and hating himself for the hunger.
Then the moment passed and Arik retreated.
Not a tactical withdrawal. Not a strategic repositioning. A retreat. Desperate and graceless. He pulled the vortex of stolen magic around him like a cloak and the dark creatures surged to fill the gap, throwing themselves between us. By the time I’d cut through them he was gone. Pulled back to the northern edge of the battlefield where his remaining forces clustered like a wounded animal’s last line of defence.
Shaken. Both his psychological weapon and his physical invincibility, cracked.
I stood in the circle of frozen ground, bleeding from a dozen cuts, ribs screaming, the ice on my arms melting now that the adrenaline was fading. My brothers stood behind me. The battle still raged around us.
But something had shifted.
Ryder caught my eye. His storms crackled above us, electric and ready. “For the record,” he said, “that constipated look? Really unattractive.”
Maddox choked on a laugh.
The wolf settled in my chest. Not peaceful. Not calm. But certain. The way only a predator could be certain when it had drawn first blood from something it intended to kill.
I looked north, where Arik had retreated, where the bruised sky was darkening as he pulled more magic from the air.
This wasn’t over. Not close. He was desperate now, and desperate men did stupid things.
But the first crack had been made. And cracks, once started, only spread.
Chapter Forty
