Page 3 of Blood of Ancients

His dark orbs flashed with heat. A wave of fire pulsed from his body, his physique growing hard in an instant.

I never wavered from speaking my mind to my mates. It was always a pleasant surprise when my words caught them off-guard.

I was a woman who knew what she wanted. There was a reason I’d come to this faraway corner of the tunnels, to welcome the return of my wolfish mate from his field duty scouting aboveground.

That reason was not to simply spar snarky words with the leader of the Torfen pack.

“Two seconds returned and you already want to jump my bones? You really are a menace, woman.”

I didn’t enjoy when other people called me “girl” or “woman,” rather than my name. It was othering. But Sven? He could call me whatever he wanted. I had learned to live with it, love it, and now his words made me shudder, his eyes never leaving my face.

Playing coy, I pouted and started to step away. “Sorry. I could go. I’m sure Magnus or Grim aren’t too—”

He yanked me back, hard, slamming my chest against his. A smile crept up his lips. “Get your sexy ass back here. Don’t you know you have to finish what you started, girl?”

Chapter 2

Ravinica

WE PASSED A FEW MEANDERINGstudents en route to my little cavern lodging. As small as my dorm room aboveground at Nottdeen Quarter was, surrounded by other loud initiate women, I longed for what I now considered a mansion-sized bedroom.You never know what you have until it’s gone, I suppose.

There were no buildings under Vikingrune Academy, in the serpentine corridors and vast open caves that made up the network of the subterranean city. Students were given their own little hidey-holes carved into alcoves and nooks of the tunnels. The rooms were little larger than jail cells, because each person needed their own space, and there were hundreds of students here.

A hard cot, a tiny nightstand with a sconce and hooded candle above it. That was all we had. Not even a chair. Certainly no restroom—which were relegated to the disgusting spaces at the corners of the underground city, endearingly called shit-pits. A river that ran underground was our sorry excuse for a public bathhouse.

To say the individual dwellings for students were cramped was a massive understatement. I’d made it work though, in the three weeks I’d been smothered down here. Trying to find thesilver lining in every situation, I felt that, in some ways, our tiny homes brought me even closer to my men. Because I was forced to.

The walls along the rough-hewn corridor were dark and damp, a constant trickle of rainwater and melted snow permeating through the porous rock and making us all a little insane.

I held Sven’s hand as we trudged through the hall, keeping him firmly close behind me. We had to squeeze off to the side to let other students pass during narrow parts of the passage. Every ten feet sat a flickering torch on the wall, creating small globes of murky orange light.

Luckily, I was not claustrophobic. My bestie Randi had complained to me about the stuffiness here in recent days. She couldn’t wait to be back on the surface, and the feeling was mutual.

I found it fascinating these tunnels existed—right under our noses—my entire time at Vikingrune. They’d been here for generations, and I wondered what kind of scandalous, sneaky operations people carried out using the tunnels as clandestine highways.

I had partaken in a few sneaky missions through the underground tunnels, back when I hadn’t known the scope of their size and had needed to get from point A to point B without being seen.

Sven and I made it to my dwelling in the southeastern wing, beneath Nottdeen Quarter. As we came to the small door of my dwelling, I tossed a coy look over my shoulder at Sven, smiling.

He grinned, his dark eyes smoldering beneath the ridge of his brow. I stepped into the room, hurrying, ready to rip his clothes off—

And felt resistance at my feet, for a split second. Asnapechoed off the walls. Bewildered in the doorway, my pulse spiked—

As a shower of sticky warmth drenched me from above, stinking of copper and sickness.

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