Page 29 of Wild Wolf

“No more lesser Orders,” a man beside her added keenly.

The crowd were chattering louder and louder until Roland finally called out for them to hush. “Drav Enterprises will be sharing this technology with the highest bidder here today. And not only that, but you will get to work personally with me! The Fae behind the genius. A man you once knew as the greatest Seer in Solaria and I have been hiding in plain sight all this time.” He turned to the screen and the word Drav rearranged itself to spell out Vard instead. “Roland Vard!” He declared and the crowd fell quiet, confused looks passing between people. “The Vard,” Roland pressed, but people only shrugged. Someone started clapping in the back of the room, but the applause quickly petered off. “As in the Dragon King’s Royal Seer!” he bayed and it suddenly clicked who he was. Leon had told me about him during the war several years ago. He had been Lionel Acrux’s right-hand man, but it was thought that he had died in battle. He was responsible for heinous war crimes and seeing him here now made fury rise in me that he had escaped all along. He deserved worse than death for all he’d done, and I ached to be the one to deliver it to him.

“Vard?” the Minotaur beside me breathed, a tremor to his voice.

“You know him?” I grunted.

“Know him?” he hissed. “He was part of the Order segregation. Him and Lionel Acrux, they were responsible for declaring certain Orders as lesser. The Minotaurs were forced to go into hiding. We were accused of thievery, made out to be enemies of the kingdom, but it was all lies.” He stamped his foot in anger and I stepped closer to him as Vard kept crying out to the crowd to explain who he was, and it appeared people were starting to catch on now. They might not remember his name, but they remembered the rise of the Dragon King alright. Likely plenty of these motherfuckers supported Lionel Acrux.

“How much for access to this science?!” a man hollered and Vard gestured to an auctioneer at the side of the stage.

A bidding process started up and a clamour of noise filled the air as Fae desperately tried to secure the technology from Roland.

“He truly changed your Order?” the Minotaur whispered, horror dawning on his face.

I glanced up at him and nodded. “He’s a monster.”

“Everyone in this place is,” he said darkly. “But Roland Vard has already done the unspeakable, and now he seeks to do even worse.” He shuddered. “What if he targets my kind? My Order? My family?”

“Maybe you should do something about it before it’s too late,” I urged.

He fell silent for a beat then spoke to me in an even lower voice. “I think I know where they’re keeping your Order.” He leaned in closer, slipping a set of keys from his pocket and subtly sliding it into mine. “That’ll deal with the collar and cuffs.”

“Where’s my Lion?” I rasped, my heart thundering with need as he leaned in even closer and breathed the location in my ear.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

We stepped into a room where a man stood on a stage, talking loudly to a crowd of onlookers raised up on seats that formed a half circle looking down on him. From my vantage point it was hard to see precisely what they were all looking at but as I moved along the narrow walkway between the raised seats, my presence concealed within the shadows, the man’s face was revealed. More importantly, so was the man chained behind him, a collar leashed around his neck, a thick chain held in the fists of a Minotaur who loomed over him threateningly.

I lurched forward a step but Cain snatched my arm, hissing a low warning to me as a silencing bubble fell over us.

“That’s Roary,” I hissed, trying to tug my arm free, my eyes fixed on the wretched form of the man I loved where he stared at the ground by his feet, looking utterly broken and alone. “We have to get to him. We have to-”

“There are guards standing in every corner,” Cain snarled. “Our moment will come. We know he’s here now. We just have to keep our-”

“Nightroary is a marvel of scientific and magical ingenuity!” Vard boomed and I tore my gaze from the man I loved to look at the vile bastardo who had stolen him away from me. “He is the first in a new and vibrant generation of Fae who will get to choose their fate. Why allow the stars to condemn you to an Order you did not wish for? Why follow a path laid out by another when you can claim your own fate and grasp destiny for yourself? For a price of course…”

The crowd yelled out, jeers and scathing declarations meeting with enthusiastic questions and excited exclamations.

“What has he done to him?” I breathed, my eyes back on Roary who looked so shattered, so broken, so haunted. It was as though something was missing, some vital piece of who he was now absent, and my hands began to tremble as the fucked up shit I’d witnessed back in Psych flooded through my mind.

“I don’t know,” Cain muttered, his eyes darting around the crowd, towards the exit, the sides of the stage, his mind clearly racing to form a plan while I simply fell into an abyss of despair as I stared at my mate and felt the sky caving in around him.

Some stronzo hurled a beer bottle towards the stage and it shattered against an air shield which had been cast before Roary, making him look up and snarl in fury.

I sucked in a sharp breath, stumbling back a step and smacking into Cain as my eyes fell on the fangs which Roary now bared at the crowd, the impossibility of them making my gut churn with terror.

“That’s impossible,” Cain breathed while I simply stared, tears burning the backs of my eyes as I took in the horror of what fate had befallen upon my strong, beautiful Lion.

“We have to help him,” I gasped, trying to go to him, not caring if there were a hundred bastardos waiting to leap from the shadows to try and keep me from him. My mate needed me and I couldn’t fail him any longer than I already had.

Cain’s grip on my forearm was bruising as he held me back in the shadows while Vard strode from the stage, a group of simpering sycophants closing in around him, keenly asking questions about what he had achieved.

Bile thickened my throat, a strange ringing filling my ears. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. I’d felt Roary’s anguish while we’d been separated, I’d known in my soul that he was in desperate need of me, but this…

Cain yanked me away from the stage, tugging me into the shadows beneath the stacked seating, pushing me back against the wall there.

“There isn’t time for you to lose your head, Rosalie,” he growled, taking my face in his hand and forcing my gaze up to meet his. “You came here to get him out. You knew he might not be in the best state when we found him. This is worse than we’d expected but he needs you more than we even knew. You can’t fail him now.”

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