The Alpha who was Meant to Kill Me

Chapter 5

Everything went red at the edges.

The false villager was strong, and his Alpha-trained guard knew its work, but he was not as fast as I was and he was not as angry. I knocked his blade up, slid along his guard, and drove my boot into the inside of his knee. He staggered. Leo was there in the same breath with a length of cord, and the man's hands were behind his back before his head hit the dirt.

Leo was already moving. Two more bandits rounded the corner and Leo met them both. Sword work like his is not common. I had sparred men my whole life and I had never seen a Beta move the way he moved. His blade did not cut. His blade erased.

Darien had already joined Alec at the lane mouth. Three bandits were down between them and more were coming. Alec covered Darien's back. Darien covered Alec's. They fought like men who had done it a hundred times, which I supposed they had. Their swords sang when they moved. Specter steel, Adonis steel, both channeling their wolves through the blade the way all good Alpha steel did. I felt the pressure of their beasts riding the metal from across the square.

Two bandits broke off the pack and came for me.

My heart slammed up into my throat. My palms were slick under my gloves. I had sparred. I had trained. I had put real Alpha soldiers on their backs in my father's practice yard. I had never taken a life.

Draw the Shadow Gladius, my father's voice said in my ear, steady and low. If you are in danger, daughter, draw it.

I was in danger.

I took one breath and let it out. I was not drawing the Shadow Gladius. Not today. Not for two men who had made their choice coming into this square. I had my own blade. I had my own hands.

"I don't want to hurt you!" I called under the helmet, and heard how thin it sounded.

They did not answer. The first one lunged.

I let him come. I pivoted off his strike, swept his guard wide, and drove my sword up through his ribs. He dropped. I did not watch him drop. The second was already on me. Our blades rang together, once, twice, and I caught him on the third pass through the throat.

Blood hit my forearm. It was warm.

Warm.

I had read about killing. I had listened to my father's captains discuss it the way they discussed weather. No one had mentioned the warmth.

My stomach rolled. I forced it down. I spun, braced, and that was when I saw the next wave coming, six more, cresting the lane directly toward Alec and Darien with their backs already pressed to the cottage wall.

They would not make it through six.

Something inside me broke.

Not my self. Not my mind. The sheath at my back went from hot to burning, and the seal that had sat between me and my wolf for twenty-five years thinned like paper held to a candle. She did not come all the way out. She could not. The Shadow Gladius was still doing its work, still holding her inside. But her strength, her hearing, her speed, the sharpness of her teeth where mine were blunt and human, poured through the blade's seal and into my body like hot water poured into a cold cup.

The world slowed.

I could hear every heartbeat in the square. I could hear the fabric of a man's shirt sliding against his shoulder blade as he raised his arm to swing. I could smell which of them had eaten breakfast and which had not. I let out a sound that was not quite a word, and it came out low and wrong and not entirely mine.

Then I went at them.

I do not remember all of it cleanly. I remember my sword and the sound it made. I remember my feet moving faster than my thoughts did. I remember the taste of iron in the back of my throat. I remember that when the last of them dropped, the square was quiet, and I was standing in the middle of it, breathing like I had run from one border of Aderian to the other.

My blade was dark to the hilt.

"What kind of monster do you have fighting for you?"

The voice was the first bandit, the one Leo had tied up. He was staring at me. They were all staring at me.

I turned my head.

Alec. Darien. Leo. Six soldiers of Specter. Not one was moving. Not one was saying a word. Alec's mouth was open. Leo's hand was on the hilt of his sword and had forgotten to let go. Darien's green eyes had a line of hard gold running through them, and his nostrils were flared, flared wide, the way a wolf scents something he knows he knows and cannot place.

Alec took a single slow step toward me. Then another.

He crouched in front of me.

"Wren." His voice was quiet. "Little bird. It's me. It's Alec."

I looked down at my hands. Blood ran off my fingers into the dirt. I looked at the men on the ground. I had done that. I had done all of that. The sheath at my back had gone quiet again, cool against my spine, and my wolf was curled small inside her cage, panting. The seal between us felt thinner than it had ever felt before, and part of me, the part that was still my father's daughter, knew that it would never go back to what it had been.

Alec's eyes found mine through the slit of my helmet. Deep blue. Steady.

For one sickening beat I did not recognize him.

I knew that was wrong. I knew those were the eyes that had watched me grow up. But my wolf was still too close to the surface, and she had killed, and I had killed, and something in me was afraid he would look at me and be afraid.

"It's okay, Wren." His voice did not shake. "I'm here."

I could not answer. Too many things were screaming in my head at once. The dream. The valley of dead. The helmet with the sun on it. The weight of a future I had run from my whole life now dragging me down into its throat.

Alec reached for me.

I stepped back. "Careful, Alec."