MADDOX~
I was dumbstruck by everything unfolding before me, my head aching from the sheer exertion of maintaining composure. The mate bond newly formed, unwanted, undeniable pulsed in my chest like a second heartbeat. Uncomfortable. Distracting.
Focus.
Kade stalked out of the arena like a wounded predator, and I followed, keeping my distance. My wolf stirred uneasily in my chest.
He's hurt, my wolf whispered.
So? I shot back internally. *Why should his pain matter when he's putting the entire pack at risk?
But I knew the answer. We'd been brothers for twenty-eight years. I'd watched our father's murder break something fundamental in Kade, watched him transform from a fair leader into this a man ruled by rage and grief instead of logic.
The walk to his chambers felt longer than usual. Pack members scattered as we passed, their eyes downcast, necks bared in submission. They could feel their Alpha's fury radiating off him in waves. Smart of them to get out of the way.
I entered his room without knocking. That was our way we'd never stood on ceremony with each other. The space was exactly as I remembered: Spartan, functional, with maps of pack territories covering one wall and weapons mounted on another. Our father's ceremonial sword hung above the fireplace, a constant reminder of what we'd lost.
Kade stood on the balcony adjoining the room, his hands gripping the stone railing so tightly I could see his knuckles white even from across the room. He was gazing out at something or perhaps at nothing, lost in whatever dark thoughts consumed him.
I knew he could hear my footsteps even though he didn't turn to acknowledge me. His shoulders remained rigid, his spine straight. Alpha posture. Defensive posture.
"If you came here to talk about the traitor's daughter," he said, his voice deadly quiet, "kindly escort yourself back out. I will not entertain any matters pertaining to her. Let her rot in that dungeon where she belongs instead of ruining my evening."
I sighed, running a hand through my hair. This was going to be harder than I'd anticipated. How did you reason with someone who'd wrapped his pain around himself like armor?
"Kade, you're my Alpha and I respect you for that—" I began, choosing my words carefully.
"But?" His voice cut through mine like a blade.
"But you need to consider what you're doing. This could destroy everything Father worked for. The pack's stability, the alliances, the—"
"SHE!" He bellowed, spinning to face me so fast I almost stepped back. His gaze hard, his wolf rising to the surface. "SHE is the one who will destroy everything our father worked for! Just like how her father destroyed him! Destroyed us!"
His hands gesticulated wildly in the air, all that careful Alpha control shredding before my eyes. His voice was so loud I knew the servants could hear every word through the thick oak door. Tomorrow, the entire pack would know we'd fought.
Good. Let them know.
"Are you done?" I asked coolly when his shouting finally stopped echoing off the stone walls.
He glared at me, chest heaving. "Get out."
"No." I moved further into the room, closing the door behind me with deliberate calm. "We're going to have this conversation whether you like it or not. And you're going to listen to me, brother, because I'm the only one in this pack who'll tell you the truth instead of whatever you want to hear."
"The truth?" He laughed, bitter and broken. "You want to talk about truth? The truth is her father murdered ours. Stabbed him in the heart while he slept. The truth is she carries traitor's blood. The truth is—"
"The truth is you never questioned the trial." My voice remained level, but I let steel creep into it. "Not once. Not the convenient timing. Not the rushed judgment. Not the witnesses who disappeared. Not the evidence that was too perfect, too clean. You wanted someone to blame, someone to hate, and Theron Thorne was handed to you on a silver platter. So you took him."
Kade's jaw clenched. "There were witnesses. Evidence. The murder weapon—"
"Was found by Garrett in Theron's quarters. Garrett, who'd been passed over for a promotion the week before. Garrett, who suddenly became very wealthy after the execution. Garrett, who's been systematically torturing Theron's daughter for three years." I paused, letting that sink in. "Doesn't that strike you as convenient?"
"You're grasping at shadows—"
"I'm stating facts." I pulled a folded paper from my jacket evidence I'd been gathering for months. "Four witnesses to the 'murder' disappeared within six weeks of the trial. One died in a 'hunting accident.' Two left pack territory with sudden, unexplained wealth. The fourth was found dead in the river, officially ruled a suicide." I tossed the paper onto his desk. "Does that sound like justice to you? Or does it sound like someone cleaning up loose ends?"
Kade stared at the document but didn't pick it up. "Why are you telling me this now?"
"Because I thought I had more time!" Frustration bled into my voice despite my best efforts. "I thought I could gather irrefutable proof before confronting you. But then the Moon Goddess decided to bind that girl to us, and now we're on a countdown to catastrophe. The affliction from your rejection has already started. You felt it during the ceremony that wrongness in the pack bonds."
His face flickered with something recognition? Fear? But he shuttered it quickly. "One rejection shouldn't cause—"
"She's not just any mate!" I moved closer, invading his space the way only a brother could. "She bears the mark, Kade. The prophecy mark. The crescent moon wrapped in chains. Do you know when that mark last appeared?"
Silence.
"Three hundred years ago. On the she-wolf who either saved or destroyed the wolf kingdoms the histories aren't clear which. What they are clear about is this: those who opposed her didn't live long enough to regret it."
"Are you threatening me with ancient superstition?" His voice dripped with contempt, but I heard the uncertainty underneath.
"I'm warning you with documented fact. Every pack that has defied a marked mate has fallen within a generation. Every. Single. One." I held his gaze. "Is your pride worth our pack's extinction?"
"This isn't about pride!" His control shattered completely. He swept his arm across his desk, sending papers, maps, and an ornate dagger clattering to the floor. "This is about justice! This is about honoring our father's memory! This is about—" His voice broke. "This is about the fact that I held him while he died. While his blood soaked through my hands. While he whispered my name and tried to tell me something but couldn't because there was a blade through his heart."
And there it was. The wound beneath the rage. The grief that had never been allowed to heal.
My voice softened but only slightly. "I know. I was there too, remember? I helped carry his body. I heard your vows of vengeance. But Kade what if we got vengeance on the wrong person?"
"Don't." His hands were shaking now. "Don't do this."
"What if the real killer is still out there? Still in our pack? Still in a position of power?" I pressed forward because this might be my only chance to crack through his defenses. "What if everything you've done for three years the girl you've tortured, the mate you've rejected, the pack you're driving toward affliction what if it's all been based on a lie?"
"Stop." His voice was barely a whisper.
"What if Father's real killer is laughing at you right now? Watching you destroy yourself over a scapegoat while they walk free?"
"I SAID STOP!" His Alpha command crashed over me like a physical wave, driving me back three steps. The power in it was absolute, undeniable. My wolf cowered
I fought it. Gritted my teeth and pushed back against that suffocating weight of dominance. "No."
His eyes widened. I'd never defied a direct Alpha command before. None of us had.
"I won't stop," I continued, my voice strained from the effort of resistance. "Because someone has to save you from yourself. Someone has to save this pack. And if that means I have to challenge my own brother, defy my own Alpha, then so be it."
The room fell into dangerous silence. We stared at each other across the space two brothers, two wolves, on opposite sides of an impossible divide.
Finally, Kade spoke, his voice dead. "Get out."
"Kade—"
"GET OUT!" The command hit me again, harder this time. "Before I do something we'll both regret. Leave Now."
I turned and walked toward the door.
But as I descended the stairs, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd just made things infinitely worse.
---
~NESSA
The dungeon was even worse than I'd imagined.
I'd expected darkness I got that. I'd expected cold stone and damp walls—got those too. What I hadn't expected was that I wouldn't be alone.
Three other prisoners occupied cells along the dark corridor. Or rather, what was *left* of them occupied those cells.
The first cell held a body. Just a body. Slumped against the wall in a position no living person could maintain, head lolled at an unnatural angle. Male, I thought, though it was hard to tell in the dim light. Dead for days, maybe weeks. The smell that drifted from that direction made my stomach heave.
No one had bothered to remove him.
The second cell held a woman—or what used to be a woman. She rocked back and forth, back and forth, humming a tune that might have been a lullaby if it wasn't so off-key and broken. Her hair was matted, her clothes little more than rags. She didn't acknowledge my presence. Maybe she couldn't see me anymore. Maybe she'd gone somewhere far away inside her own head where the dungeon couldn't reach her.
Lucky her.
The third cell held a man who watched me with eyes that reflected what little light reached this deep. His gaze was sharp, aware, but there was something wrong behind those eyes. Something that had fractured and reformed into something not quite sane.
When the guards threw me into my cell—fourth in the row, farthest from the stairs—he started laughing. Low and raspy, like gravel in a jar.
"Fresh meat," he rasped, his voice thick with an accent I didn't recognize. "They always bring fresh meat before a cleansing."
I pulled the rough blanket tighter around myself and moved to the back corner of my cell, as far from the bars as possible. Don't engage. Don't show fear. Don't give him anything to work with.
But he continued anyway, leaning against his bars with casual familiarity. Like he'd been here so long the cell had become home.
"What cleansing?" The words escaped before I could stop them. I cursed myself immediately. *Idiot. Don't ask questions you don't want answered.*
His laugh intensified, echoing off the stone walls. "The lashes, girl. Fifty, they said for you? Oh, that's special. Usually it's ten, maybe twenty for the serious offenses. But fifty?" He shook his head, almost admiringly. "You must have pissed someone off good. What'd you do? Steal from the Alpha? Kill someone? Spread your legs for the wrong wolf?"
Bile rose in my throat. "None of your business."
"Everything down here is my business, sweetheart. I've been in this cell for—" He paused, counting on his fingers. "—four years? Five? Time's funny down here. Stops meaning much after a while. But I've seen them all come through. The thieves, the murderers, the traitors. Seen them drag 'em up those stairs for punishment. Heard the screaming." His eyes glittered. "Oh, the screaming. It echoes down here, did you know that? Bounces off the walls. Gets inside your head. After a while, you can't tell if you're hearing it or remembering it or imagining it."
"Shut up." My voice came out stronger than I felt.
"Fifty lashes will tear you open, girl. Skin splits around twenty. Muscle shows around thirty. By forty, you're begging for death. By fifty?" He whistled low. "I've seen three people take fifty lashes. One died on the post. The other two died within days from infection. So you tell me—what makes you special? Why do they think you'll survive?"
"I said shut *up*." I moved closer to the bars despite every instinct screaming at me to stay back. "I don't care about your horror stories. I don't care about your experience. Just leave me alone."
He studied me for a long moment, his head tilted like a bird examining a bug. Then he smiled, revealing gaps where teeth used to be. "You're different from the others. They came down here crying, begging, promising they were innocent. But you?" He laughed again. "You've got fire in you still. That's good. You'll need it. Though I wonder—" His voice dropped to barely above a whisper. "—how much fire will be left after they're done with you?"
I turned away from him, from all of them, and sank down against the back wall of my cell. The stone was freezing against my back even through the blanket. I pulled my knees to my chest, making myself as small as possible.
Don't think about the lashes. Don't think about dawn. Don't think about
But I couldn't stop. My mind conjured images against my will: the whipping post I'd seen in the pack's punishment square. The leather whip with its multiple tails. The blood stains that never quite washed away from the stone beneath it.
Fifty lashes.
The man was right. No one survived fifty lashes.
We can survive, my wolf whispered suddenly, making me jump. I'd almost forgotten she was there, so quiet she'd been since we'd entered the dungeon.
How? I asked desperately. You felt it, didn't you? Whatever they've done to this place—silver in the walls, wolfsbane in the air, something you can barely reach the surface. If I can't shift, can't heal properly.
We're stronger than they know, she insisted, but I heard the uncertainty in her voice. She was as scared as I was, just hiding it better. The mark on our shoulder it means something. We're not like other wolves.
Then why can't you break us out of here?
Silence. She had no answer to that.
I buried my face in my knees and tried to breathe through the panic threatening to overwhelm me. What if I died during the whipping, it wasn't unheard of for that to happen.
Would that be mercy?
The thought came unbidden, and I shoved it away violently. No. I wouldn't give up. Wouldn't give them the satisfaction of breaking me. I'd survived three years of slavery, of Garrett's fists and worse, of starvation and humiliation and—
A sound interrupted my spiraling thoughts.
Footsteps on the stairs. Fast and hurried probably the guards they always moved with that distinctive stomp-stomp-stomp of boots on stone.
Heavy footsteps approached my cell. A guard I recognized from the ceremony appeared, his expression twisted with contempt.
He lunged forward. I fought, clawing at his face, but hunger made me weak. He grabbed my wrist and twisted. I screamed.
"Looks like it's just you and me tonight, pretty wolf,"
I scrambled back, my wrists trembling against the shackles. "Stay away from me" I warned, though I could hear the fear in my voice.
He laughed, fumbling with the lock. "No one's coming for a traitor's daughter."
The iron door screeched open. My pulse thundered. Every muscle in my body screamed to fight even if it was useless.
Feisty bitch," he spat.
His boot connected with my side. Once. Twice. I heard something crack. White hot agony exploded through my ribs as I collapsed.
He bent over me, I could feel his clammy breath on my face, his hands clawing at my dress, groping me wildly, my head was fuzzy, my body weak and I couldn't fight him off.
The guard froze suddenly, his hands no longer moving.
"Alpha, I, she," I could hear him saying, but I couldn't see the person
The edges of my vision had began to darken and everything became black.