Page 135 of The Lure of Wolves and Whispers

Once, she might’ve caught me. But Finn spentyearsdrilling me in back alleys, teaching me how to fight dirty. I dodge her attack and throw my weight onto her back. Shove her down to the soaking earth, and push her face into a puddle of mud and filth.

She rears backward, slamming her head into mine, and stars explode inside my head.

Shock slows me down, and she’s on top of me in an instant.

The blade flashes in her hand, and she stabs for my heart.

A scream rips in my throat. I shove one hand up, fist colliding with the empty socket of her dislocated shoulder, and shehowls. Her face goes as gray as ash, and I twist my whole body, flipping her off me and pinning her in the mud.

“Yield!” I scream at her, not caring who hears me now.

Nothing but hate burns back at me in her eyes.

End it.

Wolf’s voice curls around my mind as if he’s speaking right over my shoulder.

Finn’s voice drowns his out.

One day, your life might depend on whether you’re willing to get your hands bloody.

My knees pin Oona to the soaking earth.

Every muscle in me trembles. My hands shriek, the palms burning raw from the rope and the climb down the turret.

Fury cranks up every one of my senses. Not just at her but at all of this. At what this world is forcing us to be to survive. I hear the ragged rage of her roar, see the terror flashing sudden and bright in her eyes. She bucks, fighting ferociously—desperately—to throw me off her. I grip my thighs, refusing to let her shift my weight, and reach to rip the blade from her hand. She slashes for me, but I throw my weight and pin her arm down.

Dig my nails into her wrist again until her fist releases, and snatch the blade hilt.

Mine are too far to reach for, lying in the soaking mud.

Every human instinct in me fights back. I shove them down. Turn that part of me off, and heave it into the drowning dark well at the back of my mind.

This is what I need to do to survive.

To walk away from this and kill a king.

To make it back to my sister and the fight to save magic.

Oona shrieks, and I heave the blade into her chest. A scream tears my throat apart. Her whole body seizes. I strike like she’s the epitome of everything that’s been done to us.

This feeling—it’s vengeance, and it controls me.

My blood is ice, thenfire.

There’s no control. No thinking. Nothing except the deafening thrum of my pulse until I taste the sharp bite of iron. Until Ican’t even feel the hilt clutched in my white-knuckled grip.

Oona’s frozen, unseeing eyes stare back at me, and I can see myself reflected in them.

Wild—possessed.

Horror floods in, crashing over me, and I retch. My stomach heaves up bile.

Shadows shift at the edge of my vision in the slashing rain, and I stumble off the corpse beneath me and lift her blade with shaking hands.

Topaz cat eyes stare back at me.

Blood soaks the tangles of golden hair knotted in lank, wet braids.