Chapter 12
1045 Words
VALIK POV
He gave me a name.
It was a name I’d never heard before.
A man, he informed me. A rogue leader. Feared in the lowlands.
Maethys’s grandmother had stolen from them. He wanted revenge.
It slid too easily off his tongue.
A lie.
I knew it the moment he said it.
Not because I knew the name. Because he watched my face too closely afterward, searching for reaction, trying to see if it landed.
He was testing.
I kept my expression blank.
“What else,” I demanded.
The prisoner leaned forward, warming to it. “She was moving fast. We were to end it before…”
“Before what,” I snapped.
He paused. His eyes flicked away.
That was real.
He didn’t want to say the next part.
He swallowed and forced a smirk. “Before she became a problem.”
A problem for who.
He said it like the words tasted wrong.
“Fine,” I said, cold. “You’ve told me enough.”
His face lit with triumph. “Then you’ll release me.”
I stared at him for a long beat.
Then I turned toward the door.
Behind me, Zach inhaled sharply.
The prisoner blinked. “Alpha?”
I didn’t stop walking.
The prisoner’s smile faltered. “Alpha, you gave your word.”
I paused with my hand on the door handle and looked back over my shoulder.
“I did,” I said evenly. “You won’t die in this room.”
Hope surged in his face again—fast, stupid.
Then he realized what I meant.
“What—”
I opened the door.
“Guard,” I called into the corridor. “Double restraints. Leave him here.”
The prisoner lunged against the straps, fury flashing. “You animal—”
Zach stepped into the doorway, blocking him from me. “Watch your mouth.”
The prisoner’s eyes widened—then narrowed into something sharp and venomous.
“You think you can do this?” he spat. “You think you can keep her?”
The words hit like a thrown stone.
My wolf rose.
The prisoner saw it and leaned into it anyway, because now he was desperate, and desperate men made mistakes.
“She was nothing,” he hissed. “A trembling little thing in the trees. Filthy. Weak. You should’ve let us finish—”
The room went very still.
My vision narrowed until there was only his face.
Zach shifted uneasily beside me, sensing the snap-point.
The prisoner’s breathing turned hard. He realized—too late—that the insult had landed on something protected.
He tried to recover, tried to pivot back into bargaining. “Listen,” he said quickly, voice changing. “I can still help you. I can tell you—”
“Tell me,” I said, and my voice sounded calm enough to fool idiots.
He latched onto it. “We were hired,” he blurted. “Not by a man. Not truly. By—”
His gaze flicked, involuntary, to the iron ring on the table. His skin had blistered slightly where it touched.
I noticed.
Filed it away.
He swallowed, and the word came out like a curse.
“A coven.”
Zach went rigid.
My wolf—who had been straining at the leash since I’d left Maethys alone—finally stopped fighting it.
Permission.
Not moral permission.
Instinctual permission.
This was not pack business anymore.
This was threat.
This was hunt.
The prisoner saw the shift and tried to scramble backward, as if the chair could save him.
“Wait—” he started, breath ragged. “I can tell you which—”
I moved.
It wasn’t a decision. It was motion.
My hands hit the table, and with one violent wrench I tore the wrist rings free from their bolts. Metal screamed. Wood cracked. Then I ripped him from the chair and threw him into the hall like nothing more than a doll.
His eyes went wide, the first real fear finally breaking through.
He tried to scream.
I didn’t let him.
I was on him in an instant.
Threw him up against the wall.
I stared into his eyes with one hand wrapped around his throat.
My wolf surged up and my teeth—half-shifted—sank into the soft part of his throat.
Hot blood flooded my mouth.
He choked. Gurgled. Limbs flailing uselessly.
I tore.
His body sagged, still twitching.
Silence dropped, heavy.
I let him fall to the floor, blood flowing towards the drain.
Zach didn’t speak.
The guards didn’t move.
I stood there breathing, slow and controlled, as if I hadn’t just ended a life with my teeth.
As if the violence hadn’t been waiting under my skin for days.
A coven.
The word repeated itself in my mind, ugly and unfamiliar. A group. Organized. Intentional.
Something that had wanted Maethys dead before she even reached us.
Before she woke.
My hands clenched.
Not from rage now.
From focus.
I stepped out into the corridor. The guards flinched and straightened, eyes fixed on the blood at my mouth, the red on my hands.
“Clean this,” I said flatly. “Secure the other prisoner. Then both rooms.”
A guard swallowed. “Alpha—what should we—”
“Do it,” I repeated, and the authority in my voice made him move.
Zach followed me as we walked back up the corridor, away from iron and blood and old stone.
“You said he wouldn’t die in that room,” he said after a moment.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my wrist. “He didn’t.”
He died in the hallway.
Zach’s eyes flicked to me. “The coven.”
I nodded once.
He let out a slow breath. “What is a coven.”
“I don’t know,” I said, and that truth tasted like a threat. “But I’m going to.”
I didn’t.
Yet.
But I would.
And whoever had sent those men into my territory—
Whoever had wanted her dead before she woke—
Was about to learn what it meant to put a target on something I’d decided to protect.
- Writer
