Chapter 58

Arik

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

That was apparently the sum total of my thoughts the entire time I spent with the bloody crown princess of Stormare, and that didn't improve now. The three of us were tired, bloodied, and bruised, but rather than sit at a table and drink down a big tankard of beer, we were all running towards the forest.

Where I hoped like hell Creed's beast wasn't raping the girl or murdering her.

I swore black and blue under my breath, damning Jessalyn's stupidity, her recklessness… her bravery. It felt like a claw went around my throat when she approached a feral Creed, her hand looking like a tiny little star as she reached out for my brother. It squeezed all the breath out of me, forcing its talons into my windpipe as she calmed Creed's beast.

Gods, Jessalyn didn't have the sense the gods gave a cat, but each time she seemed to survive her thoughtless gestures. I had to hope that divine luck was with her now. My body ached, my muscles protesting at being required to do more, but we ran past fields and cottages, then followed the trail of broken branches into the forest.

"Do you think he—?" Roan asked.

"Shut up," I replied.

"But what if he's hurt her. I don't have my fucking sword—"

"I've got a few knives on me."

We both turned to look at Silas, who just shrugged. "I know they said no weapons, but I wasn't going to use them, not unless I really had to."

"You could've gotten us disqualified if you were caught," I snapped.

"If I got caught." Silas' smile was smug. "You know that was never going to happen. I've got blades in places that only someone very intimate with me would discover and…"

It was Creed's voice, hers, that stopped Silas' little boast midstream. Our feet slowed, then stopped as we bled into the undergrowth, ready to identify any threats and act on them. I just didn't expect them to come from the princess, not Creed.

"Why me and not the others?" The question was for me, not my brother. "Why bring me here and not all the other princesses?" Jessalyn damned me then, asking the same question everyone asked. Shit, I even asked it myself when it became apparent Creed was her mate. "If the packlands are a safe haven for all women, why not them?"

Yes, why not them, I asked myself as Silas and Roan turned to stare at me. They'd suggested the same damn thing each time we escorted a woman to her death. We'd argued long and hard about it initially, and then… We stopped talking about it at all.

But they didn't know what I did.

I swallowed hard, forcing my attention back to the clearing.

"A hero that stood by as women died." I'd felt the sting of the lash, having been whipped more times than I could remember, but it never stung as much as Jessalyn's words. "A hero that refused to step up and protect the weak from the brutal."

I was everything she said and more. Worse, far worse, and she didn't understand that. None of them did.

"Or Arik had to stop him."

Don't say it, I hissed inside my head. Don't fucking say it, brother.

"Kill his brother, take the throne, become the next king of Khean."

They knew what I thought of this. I'd made myself clear when I turned upon anyone who suggested such a thing with so much ire, they dared not speak of it again. This was confirmed by Roan and Silas shooting me uneasy looks.

"It's why I couldn't say anything to you, even though every fibre of my being needed to because I knew I couldn't rely on the commander to back my play."

That stung like a bitch. When my own blood family was slaughtered like sheep by Magnus, I'd built another with my brothers. I wanted to stand up tall and shout at Creed that he could bring anything to me. But he couldn't, and that was a bitter pill to swallow. He couldn't bring this to me.

"He will do anything to avoid sitting on the Emerald Throne, including seeing a bunch of women die."

That wasn't the price I deemed acceptable to pay. My breath was coming in fast and hard, forced to squeeze past a compressed windpipe. Not because I'd been injured, but because the collective weight of their gaze was directed at me. Not just Silas and Roan's accusing looks, but all the women I'd betrayed. I forced myself to forget their names, to drive every detail of the princesses we'd brought to Magnus out of my mind because it was the only way I could survive. They were just pretty pawns in a game my king was playing with the continent at large, to cow the lot of them, rub their submission to Khean in their faces, but most of all, he played with me.

No matter what I did, no matter what I achieved, he would always have the upper hand. I forced myself to take one shuddering breath, then another, readying myself to burst in here and stop this treasonous talk, when Jessalyn delivered her coup de grace.

"You want me to feel safe? You'll do anything to make me feel protected? Then tell me how to do that, Master Creed. Tell me how to make Arik king."

I felt like I had been struck by a lightning bolt in that second. What else could explain the feeling of galvanic shock as it tore through me? Muscles tensed, ready to jump on my bones, to tear me free of this, because it was all too similar. In my head, another set of lips whispered the same intent, her eyes dancing with a combination of mischief and excitement. We were co-conspirators then, children playing at being revolutionaries. Her father, the Duke of Fallspire, had encouraged this kind of nonsense, something that had heartened me at the time and disgusted me now. I saw the folly of everything we had tried, and I wondered how the hell he hadn't.

"No," I said, shaking my head to dislodge the memory. Roan and Silas rose to their feet, ready to say something, so many somethings. I pushed past them, no longer caring if I spooked the near-feral Creed, not when I had this to say. "No, Creed—" Remind him of his relationship to you. Play upon that, my father's voice said inside my head, sibilant as a snake's scales. "Brother, we talked—"

"No, Arik."

I hated when people looked at me the way Creed did now. The way Jessalyn did as well, with disappointment. That made sense. I more than deserved that, but the other… Hope, it was talked about as if it was this miraculous thing when it was nothing but a disease. One that seemed to infect everyone around the first bright spark who dared to feel it, which had me wanting to quarantine Silas and Roan away from these idiots. But of course, no one did what I needed them to, the four of them coming to stand together, all of them staring me down with the same intent.

"You know this was always on the cards, brother," Silas said, and it was only my hands clenching into fists, all my muscles locking down, that stopped me from surging forward and shutting his stupid mouth for him. That irrational feeling, that even out here someone would hear, was riding me hard.

"No, I don't—"

"Arik, I know you don't want this, but—" Roan said in the same tone he used with his damn horse when it was getting skittish, but I was no fucking steed.

"No!" I threw myself forward, getting in his face. "You don't know." I'd tried to keep this all back, stuffed down where they didn't have to deal with it, but they had to poke the bear. It came lumbering up inside me, dragging a messy tangle of pain, and anger, and hopelessness behind it. "None of you fucking do because you wouldn't be saying a thing right now if you did. What do you think happened the last time someone told me I should take the crown? What do you think happened?"

I saw shock in their eyes, coupled with a fierce protectiveness in Creed as he tried to put his body between mine and the princess'. Because I was the one who was feral now. That had to be what this was, and I felt a moment of empathy with Creed because I didn't know how he bore it. A vicious kind of anger that raged utterly out of control, ready to lay waste to everything around me and damn the fucking consequences. But that was never on the cards, not since that day.

"Every single time some malcontent comes slithering up to my door, proposing to make me king, they think the same thing." I stripped all emotion from my voice, needing to keep to just the facts if I was to get through this. "That they're the first ones to come up with this miraculous plan to save the country from Magnus."

Roan stiffened and Silas' eyes narrowed, but I forged on.

"It won't work." I bit that off.

"You don't know—" Fucking Jessalyn. Her aristocratic tones cut across everything I had to say, as if her belief in the divine right of royalty would be enough to get us through an act of treason safely.

"But I do."

When my arms crossed my chest, my feet placed squarely on the ground and my stance was strong. When I felt my lips twitch, forming a smile I wore like a mask most days, I felt centred again.

"I know exactly how fucking hopeless it is to try and usurp the true king of Khean, because…"

My father always said I had a flair for the theatrical. He assured me it was part of what would make me a good king one day. You couldn't just order people around because you had a crown on your head. You had to create an air about you that made exercising that authority seem plausible, even beneficial. Magnus did it through fear and loathing, but I… I was supposed to be a good king, a benevolent one.

"I tried to do just that when Magnus killed my father, and…" When my breath hissed out of me, all my anger seemed to go with it. "A woman I loved was beaten, raped, and killed when I failed."