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Markov’s hand lifts, claws tipping each finger.
Ollie doesn’t so much as move when a shadow plunges into the slender space between them, along with a harrowing sigh.
“Nope,” Zylus comments, holding Markov’s wrist at bay.
“Release me at once,” Markov grits.
Zylus yawns. “I don’t take orders from you.”
Markov’s teeth grind as he slashes his attention toward Cael. “Control your beast lest you want to lose the good faith of my pack.”
“Does it trouble you to feel weak, Markov?” Cael murmurs, unfazed. “Does it bother you to know that the strength of someone you cast out isn’t yours to claim now that it’s risen into the bounds of your acceptance?”
Markov’s teeth bare. “You would not dare dissolve the peace between us.”
“Adorable that you do not realize exactly whose shoulders that peace rests upon.” Cael threads his fingers together beneath his chin, viciously calm. “Do you sincerely think to flatter your mere pack as important to my nation?”
A chill works its way down my spine, and my mouth falls open.
Cael continues, “Any of the men in this room could take the three of you without receiving a scratch for their troubles.”
Markov barks a laugh. “Foolish belief. What merit has my failure of a brother shown you to contest such an idea?”
“Ollie?” Cael says. “You swore an oath to me.”
Ollie’s fists clench at his sides. “I did.”
“I’ve a boorish favor to request.”
Ollie turns his face, catching my eye a moment before he finds Cael’s. Worry eats away at his expression. Unspoken words drift in the space between them. Doubts. Fears. Questions.
I don’t know what’s going on, but I touch Ollie’s shoulder and draw his pleading attention back to me.
His throat bobs, but he stabilizes himself.
“Do you propose a trial of combat between the three of us and our most pitiful brother?” A thread of twisted eagerness laces Wolfgang’s words as he rises from the table, scraping his hand back through his hair and casting lingering shards of glass to the floor.
Markov pulls his hand from Zylus’s grasp and silences Wolfgang. “What would you wager on such a spectacle, Cael?”
Cael’s smile broadens, somehow wicked. The plumes of his antennae fan as he rises, and color washes fully from Ollie’s cheeks.
He whispers a frail, “No.”
As Cael says, “The girl.”
Chapter 33
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Politics are stinky.
“No!”
Ollie’s roar echos in my head, a buzz in my earplugs, and the entire aftermath of Cael putting me up for wager blurs, pieces in time that I can barely line up or grasp.
Zylus stopped Ollie from attacking Cael the second the words were out of his mouth.
Wolfgang’s booming laughter met Markov’s sadistic acceptance of the trial.
