Page 11

She looks back at me over her shoulder. “Welcome home, Darian.”

They shove me through the opening. My body hits stone steps and tumbles, each impact sending fresh waves of agony through my paralyzed limbs. I can’t brace myself. Can’t protect my head. My skull cracks against the edge of a step and white light explodes behind my eyes, then darkness, then the sickening thud of my body hitting level ground.

The smell hits me first. Damp earth. Mold. And beneath it, something sharper, silver. So much silver the air tastes like a coin on my tongue.

Torches flare to life. The underground chamber is larger than I expected, carved from the bedrock, supported by thick wooden beams blackened with age. Runes cover the walls. I recognize them even through the blur of my vision. Ancient symbols, older than most packs, etched into the stone with methodical precision. Suppression runes. The kind used in the oldest prison cells, designed to mute pack bonds, mindlinks, and...

My stomach drops.

Mate bonds.

The runes glow faintly, pulsing with a sickly green light that casts everything in the color of rot. I’ve studied these symbols. My father made me memorize them when I was twelve, sitting in his study with a leather bound tome open across my knees. These are the runes that break what cannot be broken, he’d said. Never let yourself be taken to a place that bears them.

I let myself be taken to a place that bears them.

They drag me deeper. The passage narrows, then opens into a corridor lined with iron barred cells. Some are empty. Some hold shapes I don’t want to look at. The torches here burn lower, the shadows thicker, and the runes on the walls pulse stronger the further we descend.

And then I feel it.

Not my wolf, he’s still gone, that black void where half my soul should be, and the silence of it is so complete it’s louder than any sound. But something else. Something humming beneath my sternum, warm and faint and desperately familiar.

Arlene.

The mate bond. It’s still there. The runes haven’t killed it completely, they’ve muffled it, turned the roaring river into a thin, trembling thread, but it’s there. She’s close. Somewhere in this labyrinth of stone and silver, my mate is alive.

The warmth of the bond swells against the suppression runes like a heartbeat fighting against a hand pressed to a chest. She’s feeling me too. I know she is. I can almost hear her voice in the back of my skull, so distant it might be imagination: Darian. Darian. Darian.

Zeke and the other warrior haul me around a corner, and Candice stops at a heavy iron door. She produces a key, where did she get a key?... and the lock turns with a sound like a bone breaking.

The door swings open.

The cell is small. Dark. Water drips from somewhere above, each drop hitting stone with the patience of centuries. Torchlight spills through the doorway and illuminates the figure chained to the far wall.

Arlene.

Silver manacles bite into her wrists, the metal glowing faintly where it meets her skin. Her clothes are torn, bloodied at the shoulders where they’ve dragged her. Her dark hair hangs in matted strands across her face, and there’s a bruise flowering along her jaw, purple and angry.

But her eyes.

Her eyes find mine the instant the light touches her, and everything in the world narrows to that single point of contact.

Relief crashes through me so hard my vision blurs. She’s alive. She’s hurt, she’s chained, but she’s alive, and the mate bond surges between us like a cable pulled taut, humming with everything we can’t say.

I’m sorry. The words burn behind my teeth, but I can’t speak them. My lips won’t move. But I pour it into the bond, every ounce of guilt, every shred of self loathing, every moment I dismissed her instincts, every time I told her she was paranoid. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I should have listened to you.

Her eyes soften. The anger I expect isn’t there, or if it is, it’s buried beneath something deeper. Something that looks like forgiveness, and that somehow hurts worse than any anger could.

You came for me, her eyes say. You brought the pups.

And then her gaze drops to my body, to the way Zeke and the warrior are holding me upright because my legs won’t work, to the silver collar burning around my neck, and something fierce and terrible rises in her expression. The look of a mother whose cubs have been threatened.

Zeke shoves me forward. I hit the stone floor face first, and the impact sends a bolt of white hot pain through my jaw. My body slides across wet rock and comes to rest against the far wall, inches from Arlene’s bare feet.

“Mom…my?” Damian’s voice, slurred, unconscious as a tear rolls down his cheek, and then a small thud as Candice drops him beside me. Darlene follows, her small body rolling against my side. Their breathing is shallow but steady. Alive. Both of them, alive.

Arlene makes a sound, not quite a word, not quite a sob, and her chains rattle as she strains toward the pups. The silver bites deeper, and she gasps, but she doesn’t stop reaching.

“Don’t,” Candice says mildly. “The manacles are calibrated. The more you pull, the tighter they get. You’ll sever your own hands.”