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Half past the . . . what?
Clara ripped up her sleeve and took in the time on her wristwatch. The bone-colored hand had just ticked past the twenty-eight-minute mark and was quickly closing in on the dreaded half hour.
“There’s no time! How can you not give me any time to consider this?”
“Because there’s nothing to consider. I will have my way regardless. I was merely giving you an opportunity to have a hand in your male’s future before I secure yours. Now, what will it be? Will you play your part, or will I end his?”
Her heart forced the answer from her closing throat before the avenue for speech was lost to her entirely, before her head had time to analyze any possible alternatives, any way out of the hell she’d been dragged into.
The truth, when she was finally able to see it clearly, was mirrored back at her through the ashen reflection of her circumstances as they had always been. A broodmare to be won. A bloodline to be purchased.
Love had never played a part, and she was foolish to believe it would do so now.
“Yes.” She sighed. “I’ll do as you ask of me. Just, please, spare him. As you have remarked, he is not one of us. He is innocent.”
The king assessed her with a smirk of satisfaction, yet no small measure of remorse. “That is yet to be decided. If he dies tomorrow, it will not be by my guards’ hands. That is, so long as you cooperate.”
She nodded, no longer trusting her voice to say anything that wouldn’t end in Bronze’s execution. As she walked out of the kitchen, trailing her father in stature and shadow, she never looked back at the food she’d intended to feed Bronze.
She couldn’t bear to witness the flies that had no doubt begun to descend.
Chapter 27
As Bronze stepped out of the stronghold and into the drizzle-rain-drizzle combo that had made everything just wet enough to be miserable, he had the oddest thought about the arena. He had no idea why the concept hadn’t come to him sooner, but now that it had, it made so much sense.
The place looked like the inside of a public toilet.
The circular pen had been thoroughly doused with far too much saturation for the ground to handle, which created a landscape of lovely brown smears. Small muddy ponds had cropped up throughout the practice ring, producing cylindrical shapes that seemed to bob among the matted-down earth beside it.
So, yeah, definitely a toilet. Only good news was that Bronze was about to step into the thing for the last time.
Except maybe he wasn’t?
The warm rain mingled with the morning mist, which had no intention of getting gone any time soon. The lingering clouds hovered low above the arena and grassy meadow surrounding it, seeping through the outskirts of the forest like a mortal plague of gray shadows.
It was in front of that copse of trees that the crowd gathered—and everyone was silent. Like, pin-drop silent.
Bronze checked to make sure his bandages were nice and taut and strode to the forest’s edge, wishing like hell he’d been able to see Clara at least once before the attendant had come to fetch him this morning. He’d not seen her since yesterday when a healer came to his patient room and informed him she’d been urgently called away. After she’d shared her apology with him and he’d shared half of his fucking soul with her.
The words they’d spoken had been buzzing around his mind ever since, until he finally allowed them to land.
When they did, they chose to nestle in tight and good to that spot behind his sternum that had been not only walled off but condemned to a duty that had become impossible to fulfill. He realized that now.
This feels right to me.
It does. It really does.
Shit, he needed to see Clara. To hold her again, tell her what the gooey center of him had known since she’d first whipped the thing up.
He loved her. Holy hell, did he love her. And he would tell her free and clear of any oath, of any relic, of any obligation to his family or his mages or a dead brother who, if he were still alive, wouldn’t keep holding Bronze to a panicked and dying compulsion.
And perhaps the biggest noodle scrambler of them all: Bronze would do it all over again. He’d give up every power, every flight, every bit of his angel fire, if it meant he’d wind up back here, fighting for this female.
Bronze reached the center of the crowd where Raff stood and slowed to a halt in front of the king, who was alone except for his advisor, Pascal, to his right and Broderick, his guard, to his left. Where was Clara?
“Today is the final trial of the Betrothal Games. Lord Raff!” The king extended his arm toward the lycan, but the crowd stayed silent. “And Bronze the demigod.” Another arm gesture. More silence.
A trickle of warning pricked at the base of his spine. What the hell is going on?
