Page 57 of The Wolf

He gnashed his teeth together so roughly he caught his bottom lip between them hard enough to draw blood. Brine cursed and then deftly jerked back, circled around Scarlet, thrust open the door, and left the room.

She stared at the entrance with wide eyes.

Brine had been so close to breaking.

So had you.

Surprise and shame mingled in her chest.

It would have been easy to let him wrap his arms around her.

Succumbing to him is too dangerous.

Scarlet touched her fingers to her lips.

Her interrogation didn’t go the way she’d planned. And for some reason, it felt as if he’d won this round.

TWENTY-SEVEN

BRINE

The silver moon was a sickle in the sky. There was barely enough light to see by within the confines of the forest in which Brine’s trial was taking place. The trees were full and dark and bushy, filling Brine’s nose with the scent of pine needles, decomposing leaves, and moss. All around him was the kind of quiet only found in a forest in the dead of night.

Despite all of this, Brine had keen senses, even by wolf standards, in his human form. And especially against his useless kin of the Betraz wolf pack.

A minute noise to his left informed Brine that another opponent was upon him. All he had to do was remain where he was, motionless and apparently none-the-wiser to the wolf stalking him, for the foolish shifter to come out of the shadows and launch himself at his back.

Brine nimbly avoided the gray wolf, knocking them unconscious with a quiet snap of his hand to the back of their head, letting them fall gracelessly to the ground. It was the seventh wolf he’d knocked unconscious over the last hour, and he was growing impatient.

He hadn’t been allowed to shift for his trial. Neither had he been given any weapons. The latter was usual for a trial in Betraz, but the former was not. Brine knew fine well it was his grandmother’s twisted punishment for him leaving the pack, but Brine took it on the chin.

After all, he’d learned much in his time with Pyre in the Dark Court. He knew how to dispatch wolves and lions and bears alike with nothing but his human hands and legs as weapons. The trial was easier than anyone could have imagined it would be, though this gave Brine no comfort.

By trial law he was supposed to kill everyone who came across his path—ten opponents in total. Even as Brine looked over his shoulder, another two attacked him in tandem.Eight and nine,he thought, twirling out of reach and grabbing a short sword from the seventh fallen wolf. Everyone who attacked was in wolf form of course, but some of them had weapons attached to belts around their necks in case they found themselves having to attack as humans.

This worked in Brine’s favor. Though he hadn’t begun the trial with any knives or blades or bows, after taking out the first three wolves with rocks thrown with a deft eye straight at their heads, Brine had acquired two daggers and now a sword.

But Brine still chose a rock to the face to battle wolf number eight as it charged toward him. It hit the creature directly in its left eye, causing them to whine and growl in protest and veer wildly off course. Brine used this distraction to turn around and grapple with the ninth wolf, bowling straight at it and launching his full weight around the wolf’s back legs, locking them in place.

The wolf snapped at him, bucking its hips to dislodge Brine, but he hadn’t spent many an afternoon sparring with Briggs for nothing. Brine held on fast, then lodged one of his daggers into the wolf’s front right leg.

It tumbled to the ground just as Brine rolled away. Throwing a handful of dirt at the eighth wolf when it came for him once more, blinding the poor fool for the second time in a row, Brine returned to the injured wolf and wrapped his arms around the creature’s thick ruff, squeezing tight.

The wolf tried its best to buck Brine off, but Brine’s entire body was honed to a fine point for this kind of work; the corded muscles in his arms flexed with the effort it took to choke the wolf out, and eventually its head sagged to the side, and Brine let go.

He barely avoided an attack from the eighth wolf this time, some quick thinking and the cold steel of his sword the only things protecting his right arm from being ripped off entirely. The wolf snarled at Brine—a clear show of intimidation—but Brine didn’t care. He rolled behind a tree, leaped for a branch, and then used the momentum from swinging off it to kick the wolf squarely in the face. Brine dropped on top of it, punching the creature in its stomach again and again and again until the wolf spat blood.

Brine punched it in the head for good measure, and it fell silent. Silent, but not dead. None of the three wolves were dead, and neither were the previous six Brine had knocked out. Instead, he had cut a fistful of hair from each and every wolf, then nicked them to draw enough blood to smear it upon his bare chest. From the ninth wolf, Brine didn’t evenhaveto nick its skin. It had coughed up more than enough blood for Brine to use.

He’d already sent word to Pyre and Damien about the trial, and they were on hand to remove the wolves Brine took out and transport them to the Dark Court. A group of ten wolf shifters of Betraz as prisoners was a boon for the Dark Court, and of course removing them from the trial grounds served to make it look as if Brine had really killed them. A punishment for failure, those deceased were left to the carrion in the woods.

He turned on the spot, breathing hard, on the lookout for the tenth and final wolf. Now that he had a moment to himself, Brine’s thoughts inevitably drifted back to Scarlet.

Of course they did.

He couldn’t believe he hadn’t recognized her until she was literally right in front of him, a pet of his grandmother. And then, when he confronted her, it had been Brine who had given away part of his intentions, not Scarlet. Just who was she now? Was she Red? Whose side was she on?

She held dangerous information. He shouldn’t have been on Old Mother’s ship. If anyone found out… he’d be dead within the hour.

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