“Maybe they intend to give Tristan a proper trial,” I said as a dash of hope sprang to life inside me. “If they do, he could actually defend himself. Maybe he’d have a chance. They can’t all be as nasty as Elodie…”
“Maybe you’re right,” Trick said, though he sounded skeptical.
A minute later, a growl emerged from his chest as a second set of figures emerged from the far side of the woods. The one who walked at the front of their small procession was all too familiar, his face set in a permanent sneer, his knotted black hair a disaster on top of his head.
In his hands he carried a length of braided rope.
I gasped when I saw it, bile rising up in my throat. Trick reached out for my hand and grabbed it hard. I wasn’t sure if he was comforting me or trying to keep me from running into the clearing to throw myself at his feet and beg for mercy.
“Try to stay calm and quiet,” he said, answering my internal question. “The last thing Tristan wants is for you to get hurt.”
I nodded, but the truth was that my heart was threatening to beat its way out of my chest. Anger raged inside me, growing to a fever pitch, and I felt as though my insides might come to a rolling boil if I didn’t let out a primal, viciously defiant scream.
At the tail end of the procession came Tristan, his hands tied together with a second, finer length of rope. Another shifter was escorting him, holding tight to his upper arm though Tristan wasn’t making any effort to escape.
I told myself again that this couldn’t be happening. It all had to be a bad dream. There was no way I was about to watch the Marquis, of all people, hang my lover. There was no way I could remain frozen in my hiding spot, watching helplessly as my lover was stolen from me. My husband.
My life.
My everything.
“There’s got to be something I can do…” I whimpered.
Trick held onto my hand like he was now convinced I was on the verge of bolting into the clearing. I got the sense that this wasn’t the first time he’d witnessed a hanging like this—or the first time he’d had to hold someone back. “The only thing you can do is stay strong,” he said. “For Tristan.”
“But I…”
He turned my way, his light blue eyes fixing me with a laser focus that almost frightened me. “Ariana,” he said, “if I have to, I’ll knock you unconscious and carry you out of here. You need to understand how serious this is. If the Seven catch you here, they’ll kill you too, and what Tristan is doing—what he’s sacrificing—it will all be for nothing. Do you hear me?”
“But I can’t let them kill him,” I sobbed in a rasping whisper. “I love him, Trick. So much…”
“I know that,” he said, grabbing me and wrapping his huge arms around me. For a minute he let me weep into his chest, and I knew he understood. He felt the same way about Sierra. They’d been in a life-or-death situation themselves, and he of all people understood the fear of an end, of eternal loss.
He understood what it was to form an immediate bond with one’s true mate only to have it nearly severed.
What he didn’t understand, though, was how it felt to watch the love of his life die in front of his eyes.
When I managed to pull away and wipe the tears from my cheeks, I looked into the clearing again only to see that someone had hung a noose from the thick limb of a nearby oak tree. But Tristan wasn’t standing under it, not yet. Instead, he was being escorted to the center of the circle of torches embedded in the ground.
“Tristan Wolfe…” said one of the Seven, a man with dark brown hair, swarthy skin, broad shoulders, and a thick accent that told me he was likely from some faraway place.
“I think that’s Jove,” Trick whispered. “He rules the Pacific rim.”
“…you stand accused of breaking a vow to the Seven…”
“A vow?” I said. “They’re saying he actually vowed never to marry? I thought it was just a rule they threw his way.”
“It’s their way of making it sound like he betrayed them by breaking his word,” Trick said. “But yeah, Tristan probably told one of them two hundred years ago that he wouldn’t marry. It probably didn’t mean much to him then; he would have been in the throes of torment after his change. He would have agreed to anything to keep them from torturing him any more.”
“How do you plead?” the dragon shifter asked, his deep voice booming through the air.
“Guilty,” Tristan growled loudly enough for us to hear. “I married the woman I love, and I don’t regret it for a second. If you think that’s worth killing me over, so be it.”
“No,” I moaned in a whisper. “No, no, no. Fight for this, lover. Fight for us. Lie if you have to.”
The man who’d asked the question stepped back and Elodie stepped forward, her wild red hair framing her face. She reached down and loosened the rope that held Tristan’s hands together. Apparently she wasn’t particularly worried that he’d wrap his fingers around her throat.
I leaned forward to hear what she had to say, hoping against hope that she’d find it in her heart to free him. Maybe she still loved him enough to let him go. She was the leader of the Seven, after all. No one had more power than she did.
“When I was sent away,” she said, her fingers taking Tristan’s bearded chin in hand, “so long ago, with your child in my belly…”
I swallowed back a sob. I’d all but forgotten that she’d been pregnant at the time, and the thought of it was like an extra knife in my side, twisting cruelly. It was yet another experience I would never have with Tristan…to carry his child. To start a family.
“…I was crushed,” she said in a strange, pathetic voice. “I thought my life was over, that I’d never see your beautiful face again.” With that she pressed close to him and drew her tongue over his cheek. Once again, Trick had to restrain me to keep me from charging into the clearing and kicking the shit out of her.
“But in the end, I found someone to help me,” she said, pulling back and dropping her hand to her side, “someone who could give me new life.” She stared into my lover’s eyes, her own irises shining like bright golden flames in the darkness.
“So everything I was told was a lie,” Tristan said. “You lied about your death. You lied about our child…”
“I didn’t lie about the child,” she said coldly. “He—yes, it was a he—was stillborn.”
I braced myself and ground my jaw, holding back another sob to think of the child who could have grown up with Tristan’s face, with his heart.
“But,” Elodie continued, “I gained something far better than motherhood. I gained a long life, one that I thought I might one day share with you.”
“I always knew you could be cold as ice,” said Tristan, his gaze moving around the daunting crowd standing in front of him, “but not this cold. Why the fuck did you think I’d ever be with you, a woman who would dismiss the death of her child like it was nothing? Why would I ever want to be with a woman who’s worked so hard to ensure that I would never be happy?”
She shook her head. “You were told that if you married a mortal, you would be faced with punishment. Yet you went against the Seven’s demands. The defiance of the rule was your choice, not mine.”
“The Seven’s demands are ridiculous,” he said. “A group of dragon shifters should have no control over my life. The world of shifters isn’t a fucking dictatorship.”
“But they—we—do control your life,” Elodie laughed. “As do you, by the way. You can still walk away, you know. You still have a choice.”
He glared at her, his fierce wolf eyes glowing with internal rage. I wished so badly that he would shift then and there and shred her throat with his teeth. If he was going to die, he should go down fighting, damn it. “I know perfectly well that any bargain you try to make with me will be a selfish one, Elodie. You and this entire crew of bastards.”
With that, a heavy tension worked its way through the air. I could all but feel the heat rising off the dragon shifters as they supp
ressed their rage at hearing his words.
“You’re right. It is selfish,” Elodie countered. “I want to offer you another chance.”
“Another chance at what?” he asked.
“At a life with me.” She threw him a smile that I would have considered beautiful if I hadn’t despised her with such a fierce, raging passion. “Come back to Europe with me. I’ll show you where I’ve been spending my life in France, Italy, Spain, England, for the last two centuries. You and I can learn to love each other again…” With that, she stepped forward, slipped a hand over his cheek and kissed his lips. When she pulled back, a sneer had settled on his face. “Like we once did,” she added. “You remember? We used to sit up late and talk about our dreams of traveling together. Now we can do it. You’re wealthy, and so am I. We can live like a king and queen. With me by your side, you can be Alpha to the entire world of shifters.”
“Why would I want that?” Tristan asked.
“For love.”
Tristan shook his head. “I love only one woman, and she’s the farthest thing from you on earth.” I wasn’t sure if I imagined it, but in that moment he seemed to turn his head towards me for a split second, eyes zeroing in on my own. “I will only ever love Ariana, whatever you do to me now. So get it over with, for fuck’s sake. I don’t want to look at you for another second.”
“A shame,” said Elodie as she spun away with a sweep of her long robe. “I hate to remove such a handsome man from this earth.”
“Your father removed the man you knew from this earth two centuries ago,” said Tristan. “He and his henchman killed me then, the night they turned me into what I am now. You don’t get to claim the privilege all over again, even if you do have a cruel beast inside you now.”
Elodie twisted back to face him with fire in her bright eyes, raised her hand to the sky, and uttered two words that made my heart stop.
“Do it!”
The same words Tristan had heard when her cruel father had ordered the Marquis to sink his teeth into his tortured body so long ago. The same words that had seared into my lover’s memory even as his flesh had burned from the multitude of whip lashes Demarche had inflicted on his chest and back.
The two words that had haunted him all his life.
A large man who wasn’t one of the Seven—he must have been a Lesser, or perhaps one of the Marquis’ shifter subordinates—pulled Tristan towards the tree where the rope hung. Without a second’s hesitation he draped the noose around Tristan’s neck and backed away. A second man reached for the other end of the rope, wrapping it around his arm so that bit by bit, the slack disappeared, and began to move away, pulling the rope tighter with each step.
Tristan’s eyes were so bright now that they looked like they were blazing with blue-white fire, and I could only imagine the struggle he was fighting to hold back the massive wolf inside him. The beast had to be be trying with all his might to defend his human form. By now he would want to tear out the throats of everyone around him, to kill them all so that he could save himself. But my Tristan was too good, too noble for that. He would take his punishment without another word, knowing that doing so would save my life.
He was sacrificing himself for me, and I couldn’t do a damned thing about it.
As a whimper escaped my lips I felt Trick’s grip on my arm strengthen. No doubt he could sense what I wanted; to leap up, to sprint forward, to remove that hideous rope from my lover’s throat. But Trick was powerful.
Even more than that, he was right. I couldn’t run to Tristan. All I could do was mouth the words “I love you” over and over again into the night air in the hopes that they’d somehow penetrate his mind and heart. All I could hope was that in his dying moments, he knew I was nearby…and that I loved him more than life itself.
When two more shifters grabbed the rope to help drag the noose upwards and pull my husband with it, I buried my face in Trick’s shoulder.
I’d said what I needed to. But I couldn’t watch Tristan die.
Chapter 21
I winced into Trick’s shoulder, murmuring the four words over and over again.
I love you, Tristan.
I love you, Tristan.
I love you, Tristan.
I mouthed the mantra a hundred times as I waited for Trick to tell me it was all over. For Tristan to cry out. For the Seven to cheer when the deed was done.
Anything but the awful, never-ending silence that hung over us like a suffocating veil.
But instead, Trick grabbed my shoulders and whispered, “Ariana!”
Terrified, I pulled my face up to see that he was staring up into the night sky above the clearing.
“Look!” he said, pointing towards the clouds above us.
My eyes moved to the open air above the trees, only to see a large, dark shadow soaring under the cover of clouds illuminated by the bright moon that had risen prematurely into the sky.
But…it was impossible. How had another dragon shown up? Why?
“What’s happening?” I asked. “Who is that? The Seven are all here, aren’t they?”
But as the creature banked around in a swooping circle, I began to understand. He was black as night, his flaming eyes glowing with rage as he shot down towards the oak tree where Tristan was still being pulled up by the three shifters who seemed to be having trouble getting the rope to move enough to raise their victim’s feet off the ground.
“Oh my God, it’s Krane!” I gasped. “What’s he doing here?”
For a moment I wondered if he could possibly be so callous as to want to watch his brother die. But surely even the mighty Krane wasn’t capable of that kind of sadism. If he were, he would have come with the Seven. He would be standing by their side with a grim smile on his face.
Before anyone on the ground could react, Krane’s ebony dragon shot a long, sharp dart of flame out of his mouth towards the thick limb of the broad oak tree. The fiery bullet pierced the rope that had now begun to choke Tristan, who fell to his knees on the ground below.
Without missing a beat, the dragon spun around in the air and shot another streak of flame, which crashed to the ground at the feet of the Seven, sending their servants scurrying for cover and the dragon shifters leaping backwards in shock.
Krane’s massive beast hit the ground hard a few feet from the tree. Clambering to his feet, Tristan pulled the noose off and reached for the dragon’s neck, swinging himself upwards and climbing onto Krane’s back. The dragon took off again, flying into the night as the Seven looked on. I watched as the one called Jove shifted in preparation to push off into the sky in pursuit, but the man called Nero called out to stop him.
“Don’t,” he shouted, commanding the other shifter to freeze. “It’s better to let them think they’ve won. This way we get everything we’ve wanted.”
The dragon on the ground shifted back into human form, stepping towards Nero defiantly. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “I thought we came here to take Wolfe down, to send a signal to others that defying us will bring them swift punishments.”
Elodie moved towards him, shaking her head. “We came here to start a war,” she said, reaching for Jove’s face as she’d done to Tristan’s. I could see the man’s eyes flaring bright, as though her touch was stirring something inside him. She kissed his mouth, sending him reeling backwards in a fit of dizziness. “This way we get the war, and we get Wolfe. We’ll take down all of them—wolves, Valkyries—everyone. We’ve been living in the shadows, while Tristan and his ilk have gained far too much power. It’s time we reclaimed it. We need to take back what’s rightfully ours. Once shifters in other parts of the world see that we’ve brought Tristan Wolfe to his knees, they’ll submit to us. We’ll control every sect the world over, just as we used to.”
“Holy shit,” I muttered. “So that’s why they’re all here. Elodie promised them a bonafide war. This was never about Tristan or her love for him. It’s about power…”
Trick grabbed me, yanking me to m
y feet. “We need to get out of here,” he said, dragging me back the way we’d come before I could even gather my thoughts. “We’re not safe. All of us—my pack, the Valkyries, and all of Tristan’s allies, including you—are now fair game to them.”
“Fair game?” I asked. “Because of what Krane just did?”
Trick nodded as he jogged through the woods, one hand clutching mine. “Krane betrayed them, too. They can’t risk an alliance between him and Tristan. The Seven knows that a revolution has just started before their eyes. They won’t be able to contain it unless they start exterminating us right now.”
“Exterminating…” I gasped. But he was right. They wanted to take down anyone who didn’t bend to their will, to squash us like insects under their shoes. “We have to find Tristan and Krane. We have to figure out what to do,” I said.
“I think I have some idea where to find them,” said Trick. “I’ll bring you there now, but then I have to get Sierra someplace safe and let all the wolf packs in the region know what’s happened. We’re about to have a battle on our hands.”
Chapter 22
When we got to Trick’s pickup, he drove us twenty minutes or so until we reached a strange corrugated metal shack on the edge of Lake Borgne, east of New Orleans. The small building was run-down and looked like it might have once belonged to a fisherman.
Trick let out a long, low whistle as he stepped out of the driver’s side.
“Are you sure this is the place?” I asked as I joined him. The building didn’t exactly look welcoming.
He nodded. Sure enough, a second later a door in the side of the shack opened and Krane stepped out, wearing a pair of dark jeans and a gray sweater. I tightened as our eyes met, too wary to be happy to see him, even if it did mean that Tristan might be close by. The dragon shifter had always had far too strange and consuming an effect on me. He aroused me in a way that felt like a sensual violation, and more than once I’d cursed him for it.
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