Page 151 of Renegade Kingdom
We knelt on the battlefield together, hands clasped, and breathed.
Arik was gone.
Not dead. Unmade. Returned to the realm he had been born from. The soil beneath our knees was warm where his existence had dissolved into it. Tiny shoots of green were already pushing through blood-soaked earth, the first signs of change in a realm that had been holding its breath for centuries.
The dark creatures were collapsing. Without Arik’s will to sustain them, they crumbled like puppets with cut strings, their bodies dissolving into shadow like a fading echo of something that had once been alive. The guardians chased those still based in reality into the forest. Fizzle’s enormous shadow passed overhead, wings wide. His cry of triumph split through the clearing sky even though no one else had the energy to echo it back.
And then the Winter Court released.
I felt it before I saw it. A flood of cold, clean magic poured outward from the space where Arik had stood, rushing across the battlefield like water freed from a dam. It was searching for a vessel. The Winter Court line, the magic of ice and the long patience of frozen things waiting for spring. It needed somewhere to go. Somewhere worthy. Someone who could become a leader the Court so desperately needed.
There was only one logical place and no doubt in my mind that it was the best choice in all the realm and any other that might exist.
Dean.
He stood at the edge of the frozen ground where he’d fought against Arik and his creatures, his body battered, his ice magic spent, his wolf exhausted. But when the Winter Court magic reached him, something changed. The ice that had always lived under his skin, the cold that had been crawling through his veins since before Nymeria, finally had somewhere to go. It wasn’t an invasion. It was a homecoming.
The mark branded his skin. I watched in fascination as it seared into his skin. The last Court claiming a vessel to host its power. Dean’s head snapped back. His wolf howled. The ice erupted from his body in a burst of frozen light that spread across the ground in intricate, beautiful patterns.
Five courts claimed. The circle complete.
A newly born goddess and her mates. There was no royalty standing here on this field. No kings or queens. The old lines were broken, and something new was taking their place.
My other mates converged on us. Maddox first, his fire dimmed to embers, tears streaming down his face. Then Ryder, the storms fading above him, his usual mask nowhere in sight. Damon, his shadows quiet, the wolf pressing close inside him, both of them exhausted and whole. And Dean, last, the Winter Court mark glowing faintly on his skin, his expression stripped of every wall he had ever built.
We were hurt. Bleeding, broken but alive. There was a hopefulness in that, even if all of us would be forever changed by what we’d gone through. Some of us more than most. There was no unseeing the horrors we’d seen. No unfeeling the loss. Even this victory felt strangely hollow, like after all this time, winningcould never be enough because there had been so much loss up to this point that it barely seemed to matter.
But when I looked down, tears dripping from my face, I saw that where our blood dripped onto the ground, new magic took root. Tiny flowers. Green shoots. The faintest shimmer of light in the soil. The realm receiving pieces of the power it had entrusted to us and gifting new life in return.
I held Tank’s hand and looked at the men I loved. I felt the weight of a brother’s pain settle into the place where it would live for the rest of my existence. Heavy. Permanent. The cost of what I had chosen.
But not unbearable. Not with them.
Never with them.
Together we’d won a war, and now it was time to rebuild and learn how to live again.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Alyssa
Two weeks later, the world was still learning how to be new.
I felt it in the mornings, mostly. That strange hour just before dawn when the realm settled into something quiet and I could feel the individual heartbeats of every living thing in Nymeria without being overwhelmed by the chorus. The forest breathing. The rivers running. The creatures stirring in their dens. Feeling the slow waking of a world was a sensation I doubted I’d ever grow used to. It was the beginning of the noise that I was still learning to push into the background.
We were all trying to remember what a world at peace felt like. What life was supposed to be like without constantly fearing that someone was about to take it away.
It wasn’t easy. But then peace never was. We just liked to tell ourselves it was because the lies made the war feel survivable.
The prophecy had been fulfilled in blood and sacrifice and the unmaking of a god-child whose pain I carried like a second heartbeat behind my ribs. It might be taking the Summer Court longer to accept it, but there truly were no more kings and queens in Nymeria anymore. I had never been part of the Springline. Rhidian had given his life on the battlefield and the Autumn heir had sacrificed themselves to stop Arik from stealing their magic. Every drop of royal blood had soaked into the depths of Nymeria. The old ways were coming to an end, and we were left with a realm of traumatised people and more to rebuild that felt possible.
My mates were not rulers of territories. They were my anchors. The five threads that kept me tethered to my own humanity when the vastness of what I had become threatened to wash it away. Without them, I would have lost myself in the first week. There were some days when I still thought it would happen, but then one of them was there to remind me why I kept fighting to live.
They kept me whole. In small ways and large ones. In the warmth of Maddox’s hand on my back when grief that was not mine washed through me without warning. In the cold clarity of Dean’s voice cutting through the noise when the realm pressed in from all sides and I could not find my own thoughts. In Ryder’s refusal to treat me like anything other than the woman they’d once followed home to a garage in an old warehouse. In Damon’s shadows, which curled around my ankles in the quiet hours, a wordless reminder that darkness was not the enemy.
And then there was Tank. Always Tank. The steady presence at my side, the hand that found mine in the night when the dreams came, when Arik’s centuries of loneliness pressed against the inside of my skull and I forgot for a moment which pain was his and which was mine. He never asked what I was feeling. He just held on. The way he had held on in the formless dark when we were both lost and the only thing that existed was the bond between us.
The Summer Court was the problem we had not solved.
