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He spared only half a second to test for injuries. Bruised, not broken. Then he pressed on. Faster, harder, until his breathing became the only sound he could hear and all he could smell was the salt from his sweat as it soaked into the blindfold. Goddammit, he was powerless like this! Every muscle strained to shift into his bronze armor. His wings begged to be set free, even though his fire and the celestial powers that fueled his transformation were little more than dying embers in his core. There but withered and starved. Useless.
Nothing responded. Fucking nothing. Not even a ripple of yeah, we hear you, bro, but we’re a bit tied up at the moment. His formerly powerful body was nothing but a shell for empty echoes.
And then he heard it. It wasn’t loud, not in the least, but it also wasn’t the leaves under his feet, nor the sounds of his ragged breaths. It was something, though. There! He heard it again. Bronze did the hardest thing he’d ever done and stopped moving. A faint wince, like that of a creature in pain, then a wheezy inhale. Muffled moans but higher pitched, not the kind an injured animal would make.
Clara.
Bronze fled toward the sounds, homing his mind’s eye to each cadence and pitch as if they were his heartbeat. With his arms still out in front of him, he moved as fast as he dared, until he broke through a thick cluster of trees and heard the noise as loud as a fucking bullhorn.
It was his name. Garbled, yes, with all the consonants blurred together, but he’d know his name on Clara’s lips anywhere, and that shit was coming through clear as a cathedral bell.
“Clara!”
Screams of panic behind what must have been a gag rose up to answer his cry. By the mages, he hoped it was just a gag and not something worse. But she was there, close by. No more than twenty paces or so, judging by how the sound carried. So close. He stepped toward the echo of her voice?—
The crack against his skull rang his bell so damn hard, he wondered whether it was just blood that slowly seeped out of his nose. He hit the ground with a roar of pain, but it was nothing compared to Clara’s muffled cry that his senses still prioritized. He had to hand it to the king, though. Whatever the blindfold was made of, it was fucking solid. That shit didn’t budge.
“Do you have any idea how positively fucking annoying you can be? She isn’t even of your race, demigod. None of these creatures are. You are not lycan. You are not one of us. Did you really think you could outmatch me in scent?” The rage in Raff’s declaration loomed larger, louder, until his fucking puss was inches in front of Bronze’s, judging by the hot dog breath that caused his nose to twitch.
“You know”—Bronze winced around a pain in his ribs—“that’s the highest number of words I think I’ve heard you string together at one time. Bravo. I’d clap, but I think I’ve got a couple dozen splinters in my hands. Aagh!”
Raff’s heels crunched against Bronze’s wrists, forcing them into the damp earth. Bones and tendons shifted beneath the rubber soles as Raff pressed down harder.
Bronze gritted his teeth and swallowed around a choking cry of pain. “Please tell me you’ve taken off your blindfold. Give me permission to rip this thing from my eyes so I can wrap it around your throat, you self-important prick.”
“I do not need my eyes to kill you, nor do I need anything beyond what the Moon Mother has bestowed upon me at birth.” A sharp claw pierced the skin at the center of Bronze’s chest and dragged lower, lower, until the curved edge glazed over his sex and curled beneath other far more tender parts of him. Bronze’s breath caught in his throat, but he choked it back down, forcing his mind to work out a solution as quickly as possible.
“You’ve been a thorn in my ass from the moment you fired off your mouth at the dinner banquet. I should have dispatched you then if I’d known you’d be so much trouble, but hindsight and all of that. Now, however, it’s done. You’re done. The princess is mine. Her womb, her lands, her father’s money, all of it is mine! I will not be a slave to the humans any longer! They may have their guns and their land, but I have centuries on my side and nothing but patience.” Then he dipped his head closer, his foul breath causing Bronze’s eyes to water beneath the blindfold. “I’m done playing games, and so are you.”
Bronze tried to buck against the weight above him, but a subtle warmth landed on top of his right arm. It surprised him at first, enough to make him grow lax beneath Raff’s hold as the lycan tensed above him to deliver the final blow.
Head. Radiance. Comfort. Then, surprisingly, the rain halted. If he’d had his vision, he would have imagined a subtle sun poking through the dense fog of clouds. A beam of gold striking the forest floor to chase away the drizzle. And then the strange warmth moved down his arm, over his strained bicep, and along his forearm, until each finger wiggled with a rebirth of energy and blood flow.
So many questions assaulted him at once, but none so expedient as to what his newly charged fingers had just brushed up against. Had that been there before? Rough wood. Thick wood.
A weapon.
There were times for questions and times for action. This was most certainly a time for the latter. With a soft grunt, Bronze gripped what his fingers sought—a heavy tree branch. Then a great primal roar erupted out of him, loud enough to shake the trees and stir the birds to fly. Loud enough to create a new oath and have it reach the Empyrean to proclaim for all who would listen that Clara was his, and he would not leave her helpless to her fate.
Bronze’s cries stunned Raff, who lost his balance and was unseated just enough for Bronze to break free and swing his arm wide.
The impact wasn’t loud or jarring. Rather, it was wet and dull and followed the body it had struck to the ground with due devotion.
With the weight lifted off Bronze’s chest, he scrambled back and, giving zero fucks about the king’s rules, ripped the blindfold from his eyes.
Well, shit. If Bronze had known he was capable of such good accuracy with a long wooden stick, then why the hell had he been losing at pool to Chrome on the regular?
Raff lay motionless on the forest floor, still blindfolded, with a long thinly angled branch protruding from his ear. Like, dead center. The twig—though the thing deserved a posthumous promotion after its bold act of service—was only six inches long, but it was a proud offshoot of the thick bough Bronze had grabbed and hurled at the male.
He didn’t bother to check for proof of life. There was only one life he was concerned about.
“Clara!” With his sight available to him once more, Bronze whirled in the direction where he last heard her voice . . . and stopped in his tracks. “Oh, Clara.”
His beautiful lycan princess was bound to a tree so tightly the rope dug beneath her ribs, leaving a concave depression on her torso. The moonstone relic of her proud heritage hung limply around her neck like some sick shrine of perceived activism. She had been gagged, as he’d suspected, but there was no discernable blood to speak of. Just a nick, then, most likely. A trick of the mind to get him so worked up, he’d fumble before he left the gate.
It had nearly worked.
But the thing that broke his heart the most wasn’t the torrent of tears that ran down her dirt-smudged cheeks and over the stained rag covering her mouth, nor the way she sank against her bindings as if she had no strength left in her.
