Kill the Traitor
"Bring the prisoner forward."
Chains scraped against stone, and ten thousand voices rose up around me, cheering for my death.
The man standing at the center of the execution platform, the one who would give the order to end my life, was my mate.
I knew it the way a person knows their own heartbeat. The bond had settled in my chest the first time I stood near him four months ago, and it had been pulling me toward him ever since, even while I knelt in front of all those people with silver chains eating through my wrists and my own blood dripping off my fingers onto the wood.
That was the part I knew I would never forgive myself for. It was not about the chains or the screaming crowd but the hope. Because I still believed he was going to save me.
The silver was the worst pain I had ever felt in my life. For a wolf, silver does not simply burn, it poisons, crawling up your veins and shutting your body down piece by piece until you cannot shift, heal, or do anything except kneel and feel yourself dying by slow inches. My mother used to tell me silver was a fairy-tale danger, the kind of thing that only happened to wicked wolves in faraway kingdoms. She never once warned me that my own people would be the ones to wrap it around my throat.
"She doesn't even look sorry," a man in the front row shouted, jabbing a finger toward me. "Cold as a snake, that one."
I wasn't cold. I was shaking so hard the chains rattled against the boards, but I would not cry in front of these people, because crying was the one thing I had left and I held onto it like it still mattered.
The iron doors at the back of the platform opened with a loud sound, and there he was.
Alpha King Kael Blackthorne walked into the torchlight, and the whole crowd went silent at once. He was tall, with black hair and a face that seemed cut from stone and gave nothing away, and the heavy black war coat with the silver clasps made him look like a man nothing in this world could touch.
My stupid heart leapt at the sight of him.
He came, I thought, while the bond strained toward him so hard it hurt. He came for me. It's going to be all right now.
I should tell you how foolish I really was. I had loved Kael Blackthorne in secret for four whole months, and nobody knew, not even Kael himself. I had felt the mate bond click into place behind my ribs and I had told no living soul, because a bond between a silver-eyed noble girl and the Alpha King was the most dangerous secret in five kingdoms, and I had been a coward about it.
Four months of stolen glances across crowded rooms. Four months of standing always one body too far away from him at every gathering, memorizing the hard line of his jaw and the way he held his shoulders, telling myself the same soft lie every single time. Next time. Next time I'll find the courage to say something.
Now here he was, walking toward me while I bled out on a stage, and the bond in my chest reached for him like a child reaching for a parent, like it could not understand what was happening to us.
"Kael," I whispered. My voice cracked down in the middle. "Kael, please. Tell them it isn't true."
He stopped directly in front of me. He looked down at the blood and the dirt and my hair plastered to my wet face, and there was absolutely nothing in his eyes. No love. No pity. Not even hatred, which I think I could have lived with. Just flat gray nothing, as if he were looking at an empty chair.
"Kael," I said again, and I hated how badly I needed him to hear me. "It's me. You know me. You know I would never—"
"Silence."
One word, spoken quietly, and somehow it cut deeper than the silver had.
I shut my mouth.
He turned his back on me and faced the crowd instead, lifting one hand, and the roar of the crowd died away so completely that you could have heard a single leaf drift to the ground.
"People of the five kingdoms," he said, and his voice carried across the square without any effort at all. "You have all heard the prophecy. The silver-eyed daughter of the old blood will bring the darkness down upon us. She will open the door to the Crimson Fall, and the world will burn."
"No," I said. "That isn't what it—"
"For years we wondered who she was," he went on, talking straight over me as though I hadn't made a sound. "Now, at last, we know."
He turned and pointed at me, at my face, at my eyes, those stupid silver-gray eyes that my mother had once held my chin and called beautiful.
"This is the monster the prophecy promised us," he said. "This is the rot growing inside our own house, and I will not let her live long enough to end us all."
The crowd roared back to life, ten thousand voices screaming for my blood, and in that wall of sound I picked out people I knew. People I had grown up beside. People who had sat and eaten at my father's table and smiled at me over the bread.
And then something happened that I had not expected at all.
I stopped being afraid.
Kneeling there with the silver poisoning my blood, the fear simply drained out of me, and something colder and steadier slid in to take its place. I lifted my head and looked up at the man I had loved in secret for four months, and I laughed. It came out broken and ugly, scraping its way out of my chest, but it was a laugh.
"You son of a b***h," I said.
His jaw moved, just barely.
"You actually believe it." I let my voice rise and climb, because what did I have left to lose. "You stand up there and tell all these people that I'm going to burn the world down, and you believe it. You never once spoke to me. Not a single time. Four months I stood in your court and you couldn't be bothered to learn my name, and now you'll kill me over a story scribbled down by old men who hate everything they don't understand."
"Selena Ashwood—"
"There it is." I laughed again, and it hurt. "So you do know my name. Good. I want you to remember it. I want you to lie awake some night years from now and remember exactly whose life you took."
For half of one heartbeat, something flickered behind his eyes. I swear on the moon that it did. Something cracked open inside all that gray nothing, the way a man surfaces from a deep dream and cannot remember where he is.
Then it closed over again, and his voice came out as hard as a sheet of iron.
"Tie her tighter," he said. "Silver chains. All of them."
Hands grabbed at me from every side. They looped new chains over my shoulders and around my throat, thicker and heavier, and the silver bit so deep into my neck that white spots burst across my vision.
"Kael." I couldn't laugh anymore. The cold thing inside me cracked clean through, and underneath it there was only a girl who loved someone and was about to die. "Kael, please. I love you. Do you hear me? I have loved you since the very first day I saw you, and I never told a single soul, and I'm telling you now, at the end of everything. I love you. Please."
He looked at me for a long moment. And then, slowly, he looked away.
"Kill the traitor," he said.
The crowd screamed in triumph. The executioner stepped up with the long silver blade, the kind that drinks a wolf's whole life in one clean stroke. My last clear thought was not a prayer, and it was not a curse either. It was the bond. That damned, faithful bond in my chest, still pulling toward him even then, still reaching desperately for the man who had just ordered my death.
The blade came down.
There was a flash of pain so enormous that it stopped being pain at all, and then there was nothing.
I died with my eyes wide open and my foolish heart still reaching for him, and the last thing I ever saw in that life was his broad back, turned away from me.
Then I woke up screaming.
My hands flew straight to my throat. There were no chains there, blood, or silver, only warm skin, whole and unbroken, and a heartbeat slamming under my fingers as if it had something to prove.
I was lying in a soft bed. My bed.
I knew this bed. I knew the carved oak posts and the moon-and-stars quilt my grandmother had sewn by hand, and the long crack in the ceiling shaped like a running wolf that I used to stare at for hours as a small child. I knew the smell of the lavender that Bria always packed into the linen chest.
I knew this room, because it was my old bedroom in Ashmoor, in the house that had burned all the way to the ground three full years before I died.
"That's not possible," I said out loud, to the empty room, and my own voice came back wrong, younger and higher than it should have been. "No. No, no, no."
I threw the covers off and stumbled across the floor to the tall mirror on the wall, my legs barely holding me up, and when I reached it and finally looked, I forgot how to breathe.
A girl looked back at me out of the glass. Silver-gray eyes, wide and terrified. Soft, unlined cheeks. Skin without a single scar on it, no silver burns, no marks of any kind.
Nineteen years old.
I was nineteen years old again, and I had died at twenty-two.
My hands were shaking so badly I could hardly lift them. I touched my own cheek, then pressed my fingers to my throat, right where the blade had gone through. I was whole and alive.
Behind me the bedroom door swung open, and a bright, ordinary voice chirped, "My lady, you're awake at last! The whole house is upside down this morning, the Alpha King's caravan was spotted on the north road and they're saying it'll reach our gates by nightfall—"
I spun around so fast I nearly fell over my own feet.
Bria stood framed in the doorway with a breakfast tray balanced in her hands. Beaming at me as though it were the most ordinary morning in the entire world.
And the second she said his name, I understood exactly what kind of nightmare I had just woken into.
Kael Blackthorne was coming. And this time, I already knew precisely how the story ended.
