Page 2 of Griffin Undone
“How can you pretend to mourn them?” he asked, the words filled with disgust. “How can you kneel there and contemplate their desecrated bodies, and not appear as anything but a loving son?”
I shook my head, frowning up at him. “I am their son.”
“But you do not mourn them. You could not. Not when it was you who killed them.”
“What?”
“You were seen, Arik.” The barest hint of anguish glinted in Sun’s brilliant eyes. “Maddox connected with me; he showed me. How could you do this? How could you conspire with the enemy to destroy your own people—your own parents?”
“I—”
“Silence!”
Solomon, the Archai king, stepped to his son’s side, his hardened features like granite in the bright light of the funeral pyre. His contempt glared down at me from eyes that matched Sun’s exactly, much like my eyes matched my father’s, though he was no longer here to compare, was he?
Because of Maddox; not because of me. And yet the accusation in Sun’s eyes declared otherwise.
I sucked in a breath. The tip of Sun’s sword touched my shoulder.
“Maddox himself told us he saw you with the Anigma leader, Bricriuu, in the woods outside the village just yesterday.” The king’s furious gaze swept across the memorial fire. “He came to us immediately, but that was not soon enough, was it? Not soon enough to stop this, stop you from killing them—and him.”
“Maddox is not dead!”
Sun’s single step forward embedded the tip of his sword in the thick muscle alongside my neck, though I felt no sting. “He is. I felt him. I was connected to him when you took his head.”
“That is impossible. He—”
Sun leaned in. His sword sank deeper, pinning me in place. Pain roared through me, nearly overshadowing my confusion. All it would take was a swift strike across, severing my spine, and Sun would take my head. I began to shake, the need to defend myself rising. The need to stop this nightmare. I could not acknowledge the rise of grief, though it was there. Grief at the betrayal of not one friend, but two.
Out of the darkness, shadows solidified into the forms of men, circling the pyre, surrounding me. I scoured each face glaring down at me. It was not only my friends or my king who had betrayed me. It was my clan. My people.
Your people are on that pyre. No one else matters.
I glared back at the ring of faces, at Sun, but refused to speak.
King Solomon’s cold eyes added to the bitterness welling inside me. “We may not have stopped you, but we will make you pay,” he warned.
“Get on all fours,” Sun commanded, his eyes a frigid match to the king’s. They meant to take my head here, now, I realized, the shock of it spearing my gut. Bending forward, I planted my fists into the grass before me, feeling the earth give at the pressure, the soil cupping my fingers—the only comfort I had received since the second of my father’s death. Rigid, stunned, I listened to the rustle of grass and stone as shifters formed a loose circle behind me, but I did not try to look at them, not even when swords slid from sheaths.
No, I stared straight ahead, at the pyre I had built with the hands now digging into the dirt.
Sun dragged his sword from my flesh, ignoring my grunt of pain, and moved to stand before me. His gaze drilled into mine as he repeated Solomon’s judgment. “You will pay, Arik. Right now.”
No one else matters.
I slid my gaze away from his. The male was no longer a friend but an enemy. I gathered myself instead.
And then, through the flames of the pyre, I saw the slightest movement. A familiar face. A triumphant smile.
Maddox.
Instinct threw me toward my parents’ murderer. I did not feel the cut of Sun’s sword as it sliced across my body, nor the sizzle of the fire along my skin. I did not register pain or hatred or despair. All I felt, all I knew at that moment was the need to kill Maddox, the male who had taken everything from me.
I would return for Sun. And for my clan. If it took destroying the world, I would do it. But Maddox came first.
In the end, they would all die. Rivalen and Anna deserved nothing less.
ChapterOne
