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A rounded shadow formed in front of Bronze’s vision as Raff leaned over him, blocking out the sun and bits of Bronze’s sanity. “There is only ever one end. Remember that.”
Two scraps of brown leather were tossed in the dirt at the side of Bronze’s head, all while his brain had begun to clamor in time to the crowd’s chants.
He had lost, and now he and Raff were even.
Which meant he was only one game away from breaking his promise again and losing Clara forever.
Chapter 26
The young female healer stood before Bronze, wringing her hands and begging him to hand off the job of wrapping his wounds to her care. “Are you sure I can’t help you in this regard? I’ve already cleaned the gouges thoroughly. I recognize your preference to forgo any stitching of the flesh, and that is certainly your prerogative as the princess’s chosen champion, but at least let me secure the binding. You are to give it the best chance at healing before the third game tomorrow, and I should not like the dressing to come loose while you sleep.”
“Thank you, but there is no need. I can take care of my own wounds.”
“Yes, sir.” The head bow of disappointment was so heavy, it was almost—almost—enough to make Bronze feel guilty over turning away the kind healer. It was clear she cared deeply about her profession. After all, it wasn’t her fault she got stuck with an ornery angel who’d just had his ass handed to him in the most public of settings.
The lycan closed the door behind her, leaving Bronze to admire the scene of his stupidity. The infirmary room they’d brought him to was much, much smaller than the one he’d spent time in with Clara when they’d first arrived. This one, with its butcher-paper-clad utilitarian cot and very little else, was likely for those who couldn’t afford a side of office furniture with their injuries.
It was a perfect place to lick his wounds. Quite fucking literally.
The gouges Raff had scored into his flesh weren’t the only parting gifts the male had left him with. There were just some things that stuck with a being, no matter how much time had passed. For Bronze, the sound of those two scraps of brown leather thwacking the dirt next to his ear would be the eternal metronome in his mind ticking back and forth between two of his most solid truths: loss and mate.
He sure as shit had enough in the first column to fill a black hole. The second column, however? That pain was about as fresh and murky as his newly appointed gashes before the healer had cleaned out all the gunk that clung to him from the arena. Over the eons, from time to time, he’d summon the idea of a mate to his mind and more so ever since Titan had been the first of his brothers to find his soul bond in his lovely female, Rose.
It had always been Bronze’s duty, however, that would engage first, calling to mind images of Polina, but the thing was . . . the representation was always invariably a bit off. Long blonde tresses haloed over the slight stature of the woman he thought he recalled, but when he tried to narrow his focus, the best his brain could come up with was Malik’s ugly mug stretched to fill out the face holding up all that hair. And Bronze had to believe there was more to Polina than the sum of her brother’s features, but for the life of him, whenever his mind conjured up the word mate, it was his oath regarding Polina, not the female herself, that always floated to the surface.
Until recently, when a frost-haired lycan princess began slipping into his dreams. With Clara, they’d tossed the mate moniker around freely, as if it was a frisbee to be played with. Whoever caught the thing in that moment was the proverbial keeper of the secret and actor extraordinaire, until they flung it back and could breathe a sigh of relief that the ruse was no longer theirs to uphold for a time.
Except, somewhere along the line, the ruse had stopped feeling so . . . ruse-y. It was in the feel of her hair, the taste of her skin, the strength in her back when she stood up against her father’s oppression. In those moments, his heart had begun to clench more tightly, anxious and terrified for the time when he’d have to catch that frisbee again and pretend he didn’t want to try the truth of the part on for size.
Maybe Raff had knocked loose more than just Bronze’s back teeth.
“Bronze!”
For anyone else, a frantic lycan flinging a patient room door wide would have been enough to call not only security but the nearest Comic-Con convention to see whether they were missing some of their talent. For him, however, it was just enough to scatter the rest of the staff and afford him a measure of privacy with the female he needed to apologize to in a big fucking way.
“Hey, princess.” Then he cleared his throat, trying to chase away some of the gravel. “Clara, look, I’m so sorry for how I?—”
“I’m so sorry for the words I?—”
The verbal collision caught them both off guard, casting an expectant pause around the small room.
Clara quirked her head to the side, and Bronze had to bite his lip to keep from smiling. It was easy to forget sometimes that his female was descended from canines and occasionally exhibited very canine-like mannerisms. Now was not the time to point it out to her, however. The prime mages had gifted him with a nominal amount of intelligence most days, but even he was smart enough to know to gird his loins if he let that observation about her fly.
“Why on earth would you be apologizing to me?” Clara rushed forward and started inspecting his bandaged arms. “I’m the one who said the most awful things to you. And you must know they were outright lies.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but her raised palm silenced him.
“I know what you’re going to say. That they were born from my emotions, and emotions don’t lie, and yes, that may be true, but my sentiments were built on misconceptions and inaccuracies. They were words I believed at the time because I didn’t know I could believe in anything else. Every male who’s been in a position of power in my life has always proven that point ruthlessly. And it’s all garbage. Believing something for the sake of believing doesn’t make it true.” She dropped her hands and clasped them in front of her. “True power does not pick and choose its recipients. It is not defined by role or lineage or?—”
“Gender.”
The look on her face would have been so beautiful if it didn’t also crush him. She still doesn’t believe what she’s capable of.
Bronze cradled her face in his palms. “Listen to me, princess. It is indeed a rare thing to go up against one’s father, let alone one’s king, and publicly castrate him so effectively, all without a single lycan knowing. You want to talk about ruthlessness? About power? Oh, Clara, I wasn’t angry at you, not truly. I was angry at myself for thinking I had made it this long in this realm on my powers alone. There was no way I was ever going to win that match, regardless of how you ensured a fair outcome. From the moment I stepped foot onto that dirt, my brain was already starting from a place of affirmed lack.”
“It was?”
He nodded. “It’s the first rule of any competition. If you start out thinking you’re going to lose, then what’s stopping you? All I was focused on was the power I didn’t have, the strength I couldn’t summon. No shit I didn’t win. All my attention was going toward what I was missing, so of course that’s where my energy went, too. The whole thing was over before it started, and for that, I could never apologize enough. I cost you a match and may have jeopardized what you’ve worked so hard for.”
