Page 90 of Wild Wolf

He snatched his hand away, a blade appearing in it as he used his earth power and with a swipe of his arm he stabbed it right in my neck.

The betrayal stung me like a wasp, the truth a monster that had been there all along, living in his eyes, always staring out at me. I’d been used. Used like an old rag to scrub a filthy window. And Jerome knew how I felt about being used. He knew I hated being the Incubus everyone needed, everyone except myself. And all along, he’d been the worst of all.

I ripped the knife from my neck and he backed away, preparing to cast again, but I was upon him like a wraith, latching his limbs to his sides with air while driving his own knife into his chest.

We hit the ground and his pleas and cries for help punctuated every stab of the blade into his body, his death a cruel thing layered in pain. I dragged it on for as long as I could before silencing him with a final swipe across his throat. A ragged noise of pain left me as I leaned down and kissed his forehead, hating him, loving him, my brain just a casket full of lamenting souls, all wailing their grief and bidding Jerome goodbye.

I was confused as I sat beside him, his body twitching and blood bubbling at his lips, his death coming slow but with a certainty there was no avoiding.

I tossed the blade beside him, a traitor’s weapon ensuring a traitor’s grave. “That’s how the cookie crumbles, I suppose. You betray and lie, then you get what’s coming in the end. Either that or the bad guy wins, and I don’t let them do that, Jerome. You became bad to the bone, and I put Fae like you in deserving graves. It’s what I’m best at, what the stars made me for, I think. It’s why I’m cracked, because only someone shattered inside could do the things I have to do. But so long as I’m still here walking this earth, I’ll keep putting them in the ground, planting them like daisies. It keeps worse from happening. Kiddies shaking in their beds at night, worrying when the mean man will come home to hurt them. I make sure they don’t come home, and if the world fears me for delivering justice to monsters, so be it.”

A hand pressed to my shoulder and healing magic flowed through me, stealing away the sharp pain in my neck. Looking up, I found Maximus there, taking in the tears on my cheeks and the hurt in my eyes.

“He got what he deserved,” Max said darkly. “True brothers don’t use each other. They don’t sell each other out.”

“Even if their brother is death in Fae form?” I rasped.

Max took my hand, drawing me to my feet and cupping my cheek in his hand. “Even then. I think I’m starting to understand why you do the things you do, Sin. I see why they want you locked up, and I see exactly why you shouldn’t be.”

I leaned into him and his arms came around me, his embrace firm and bracing. Trust was a little bird placed in the hands of a goliath, and when that trust was broken, I need only remember I had the wings to fly away.

A clash of fighting rang out further down the corridor and we took off towards it, a whoop leaving me as I found Ethan there. Of course he’d come. And that meant Rosalie and the rest of her pack were here too.

Ethan was fighting with a group of guards, their numbers forcing him backwards. We raced in to join the fight at his side, his eyes brightening at the sight of us. The guards were fierce, driving us back and back until we were forced to blast a wall apart and retreat outside into the snow.

A bellow made my heart skip and leap, and from the depths of the shadows from whence we’d come, a beastie or five came racing into the battle, some of Vard’s twisted creations with all their teeth and claws and ugly glory. The true fight was just beginning, it seemed, and I was alive with the promise of death upon the air.

CHAPTER FORTY SIX

“Mason,” I gasped, scrambling across the ice and dirt which separated me from him, the blood of the Dragon he’d killed in his final moments staining the ground all around us.

Benjamin hadn’t shifted back into his Fae form upon his death the way most Fae did and the hulking mass of his dead body shadowed the fallen form of Cain before him.

I dropped to my knees at his side, taking his hand and gripping it fiercely, tears burning the backs of my eyes as his fingers failed to curl around mine.

“You can’t leave me,” I told him, a snarl riding up my throat with the words, my skin tingling with power as I called on everything I was, trying to force healing magic into his flesh.

But I couldn’t find the thread of his magic to bind mine to. Couldn’t find that intrinsic piece of him which defined the place his soul and his power mixed, creating an alleyway for my own magic to tether to his.

My view of his features shimmered and blurred, tears marring the bloodstained skin, making it harder for me to look at him.

His shirt had been burned from his flesh in several large patches, the curse which I had given him standing out starkly even through the blood and gore that stained him. It had spread. Further and further it had spread until it coated him like he was a canvas constructed for its art.

I shook my head, my insides twisting into a sharp-edged knife as I looked at the stain on his flesh and felt the weight of their burden. The moon had cursed him for my sake and now I felt the heavy shackles of responsibility weighing down on me too. I’d done this. I was the one who had spoken the words. His fate might have been different without this tarnishing his destiny.

“I won’t accept this fate,” I growled, my gaze lifting from Cain’s too-still features and finding the sky above where clouds shrouded the celestial being who was bound to me as surely as I was bound to it. “I won’t.”

My skin tingled as power grew within me, the cool light of the moon shimmering to the surface of my flesh and lighting me up from the inside out.

The clouds themselves seemed to pay attention as more light spilled from me, coating me in armour and calling out to the moon to face me and they parted to make way for her to see me.

Moonlight puddled over us, dripping from the sky, soaking us in its light as surely as if we had been doused in water.

I clung to Cain harder, my eyes burning with the brightness of the moonlight as I glared up at the sky and bared my teeth.

“He paid with his life for mine,” I spat. “He gave everything so that I might survive. But what is my survival worth if I can find no joy in it? Every moment of my life has been tarnished by the pain I have suffered in one form or another. At the hands of my papa, in the brutality of war, from the loss of the man I loved to that underground hell and now this? How much more will you watch me suffer?”

The moonlight continued to spill from the sky, falling over us in sparkling lumps which appeared like snowflakes. They tumbled past me, all of them moving with purpose, directing themselves onto Cain, touching down on his skin and melting into his flesh in every place where the curse had stained it.

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