Born To Kill The Alpha King

PHAEDRA's P.O.V My mate is going to die tonight and I already know it. I have known for three days. The way Caelan holds me a breath longer each morning. The way his eyes find my belly in quiet moments and what lives in them is no longer joy but the unbearable tenderness of a man memorizing something before it is taken from him. I press my palm to the cold glass and watch the fires start. They begin at the eastern edge of Bloodmoor, where our youngest warriors hold their posts. Boys, most of them. Full of the certainty that only survives in wolves who have never met anything stronger than themselves. They have never met Deimos. None of us have... Not truly. You do not meet Deimos. You either survive him or you don't, and tonight the answer is already settling over everything I love like the ash drifting past the window. Phaedra. Caelan's voice through the bond, low and urgent. Get to the eastern tunnels. Take Mira and the children. Now. I am not leaving without you. You are eight months with child. You are my heart. A pause. Please. I close my eyes. He is already in the clearing. I go after him because in eleven years of mating I have never once been able to do anything else. The clearing is a ruin. Bodies I know scattered across smoking ground. Warriors I fed at the long tables on cold mornings. The boy named Fen who used to bring me wildflowers as a pup. All of them still in ways that have nothing to do with sleep. The moon sits cold above it all and does not care. At the center of what remains, two men face each other. Caelan is bleeding from four places and his sword arm shakes with the effort of staying raised. He is on his feet through something that stopped being strength an hour ago. Something that lives where love and refusal meet in a person who will not leave the people he promised to protect. Across from him stands Deimos. He does not look like what grief built him to be in my imagination. He is still in the way ancient things are still, large the way things are large when they have simply existed longer than everything around them and the world has had to make room. His warriors flank him and none of them look at the bodies. They have seen too many to register them anymore. "You didn't have to do this." Caelan's voice is steady. Clear. A man making his final argument to someone who stopped listening long ago. "Whatever the prophecy named in this pack, you are wrong. There is nothing in Bloodmoor worth this." Deimos says nothing. "Please." The word tears out of me and I am already moving forward, one hand on my ceremonial blade and the other pressed to my daughter kicking hard against my ribs. Every part of me screams to stop. I move anyway. Phaedra. Caelan's voice cracks on my name, through the bond and aloud simultaneously, a sound I have never heard from him in eleven years. Run. I take another step forward. Deimos turns and looks at me. Something crosses his face, there and gone, before he turns back to my mate and moves. I see the dagger first. Caelan's own blade, the one that has lived at his hip since before I knew him, buried to the hilt between his shoulders. The hand holding it does not belong to him. Caelan does not scream. He exhales. One long shuddering breath, as though he has been holding it for days and has finally been allowed to set it down. His eyes find mine. The bond does not break the way I imagined it would. I always thought it would feel like loss, like absence, like something gone quiet. It does not feel like something gone. It feels like something still there but severed at the root, the raw end thrashing inside my chest, flooding me with everything he feels in this final moment because the bond does not know yet that it should stop. His love. His terror. His unbearable sorrow at leaving me. I press my hand to my sternum like I can hold it in. A sound comes out of me that I do not recognize. Low and broken and animal. Caelan reaches for me across the distance between them. Not with his hands. He cannot reach me with his hands anymore. But his eyes reach me and they say everything his body cannot, and I read every word as his legs give beneath him and he goes to his knees in the blood-soaked earth. His eyes stay on mine. They are still him. Still wholly, completely him. Right up until the moment they are not. I watch the light leave. No drama. No final flare. Just the slow surrender of something that was burning and then simply is not anymore. The silence that follows in the bond is its own kind of scream. My daughter kicks and the part of me that is still a mother drags the part of me that is a widow back to her feet. I run. The forest is dark and the ground tears at my bare feet and I do not feel it. I feel only the silence where Caelan used to be and the weight of her against my ribs and the distance I am putting between her and the man who took her father before she ever had one. She kicks again. Lower. Harder. A tightening seizes my whole body so fierce it steals the air from my lungs. I press my palm to my belly and keep moving. Not yet. The words are silent, desperate. Please baby, not yet. Hang on for mama. Please, not now. Another tightening. Closer. Lower. My legs nearly buckle with it. Please. I am sobbing now, running and pressing my hand against her like I can hold her inside by will alone. Just a little further. Please, baby. Not now. Not here. She does not give me further. My body stops taking instructions. The roots of an old oak catch me as I go down. She arrives with no one to help me and nothing to offer her but my own shaking hands. Blood soaks into the leaf litter beneath me. Distant fires paint the sky orange through the canopy. My pack is burning and I cannot think about that because she is almost here and someone has to be present for her first breath. She screams the moment she arrives. Furious. Alive. Devastatingly, impossibly alive. Thirty seconds. I allow myself thirty seconds of weeping. Then I stop. She is here. She is breathing. She has already lost everything tonight except me. I intend to be worth something for as long as I have left. The bleeding tells me that is not long. I do not pray to the Moon Goddess. I am finished with her. She watched this night happen and she allowed it and I want nothing more from her, not ever. I pray to what existed before her. Before divine order. Before the gods decided which magic the living were permitted to speak aloud. Tonight I speak the forbidden kind. The footsteps reach me before I finish. Six royal wolf guard through the trees, torches low, their markings unmistakable. I stand up. Shaking. My daughter in one arm and my blade in the other. Every part of me burning with the effort. "Show mercy." My voice comes out clear as water. "I am begging you. Show mercy." They stop. The dark between them deepens. Deimos steps through. Up close he is worse. Still in the way glaciers are still. Patient the way things become patient when they have outlived everything that ever challenged them. His eyes move over me, the blood and the blade and the infant, and then reach my face and stay there. He takes one step toward me. I raise the blade. "Aima kai astéri." My voice does not shake. Fear has burned itself to nothing and left something clean and merciless behind. "Blood and stars. I call on what was before the moon. Before mercy. Before the goddess chose her favorites and left the rest of us to burn." He goes still. I s***h at him. Quick, deliberate. He moves out of range before the blade arrives, almost elegant, and something in his expression threatens to become amusement. Good. Let him be certain. Pain crests through me and my knees buckle. I catch myself on the oak. I straighten. I place her in the hollow of the root behind me. Her dark eyes find my face and I let myself look at her for one breath I will carry into whatever comes next. Then I face him with empty arms. "You want me. Then hear me first." Quiet. Without a fragment of mercy. "When this is done you will take her to the Selene Coven. My mother's bloodline. You will leave her at the gate and you will walk away and you will count it the only honest thing you have ever done." He watches me with something that is not contempt and not cruelty. He steps closer. I let him. When he is within reach I move past him, one swift arc, and the blade finds the back of his hand. His blood wells dark in the torchlight. Before he can pull back I close my bleeding palm over his and hold. "Aima pros aima. Zoi pros thanato." The words rise from somewhere older than my voice. The air thickens around them. "What I bind in sacrifice, the dark shall hold. This will kill me. And it will bind his life to hers." My eyes stay on his. "Any harm that finds her finds you. Any death that takes her takes you." One breath. "She is your undoing, Alpha King. She was always meant to be." White fire erupts from the earth in a perfect ring around us. Cold fire, not orange, burning nothing but illuminating everything. It carves into the ground, into the air, into him, marking him in symbols older than his crown, permanent and rooted and his whether he wants them or not. Deimos hits his knees. The sound that leaves him is not the sound of a king. I look at my daughter one final time. She has stopped crying. Her eyes are open and they are on me and they are so ferociously, completely alive that the part of my chest that has been fracturing all night finishes breaking and becomes something else. Peace. I press the blade to my heart. "Ekdikisi," I whisper to her. Vengeance. "You will be his undoing, little wolf." My eyes stay on hers. "Make him remember my name."