THE LYCAN KINGS SILENT MATE

Chapter 5

"Behind me. Now."

Eva didn't argue.

The shapes moved as one — not vampires, not the golden-eyed scouts from the shop, but Lycans, full-shifted, fur matted with tunnel filth, eyes flat and unblinking in the torchlight. Alistair's growl ripped through the confined space like a physical blow.

"Renfield's pack," he said. "Damon bought your own men, Marcus. Impressive."

A voice answered from the dark, dry and amused. "Not bought, Your Majesty. Convinced. There's a difference, and you're about to learn it the hard way."

The first wolf lunged.

Alistair met it head-on, no hesitation, no wasted motion — a fist to the throat that dropped it mid-air, a knee that sent the second one crashing into the tunnel wall hard enough to bring down a shower of two-hundred-year-old brick. He fought like something out of a nightmare, fast and brutal and utterly without mercy, and Eva pressed herself against the stone and realized, distantly, that she was in the way.

She grabbed a fallen torch instead.

"Eva, don't—"

She swung it into the ribs of a wolf circling behind him. It yelped, staggered, and Alistair finished it with a single vicious strike she didn't have time to watch. Three down. Nine to go.

"I said behind me!"

"You're welcome!"

A fourth wolf broke past him, faster than the others, aiming straight for her throat, and Eva didn't think — she swung the torch up on instinct and felt teeth close on fire instead of flesh. The wolf screamed and reeled back, and in the half-second it was blinded, a hand closed around Eva's arm from the opposite direction and pulled.

Not Alistair's hand.

She went down hard, torch skittering away, and looked up into Marcus's grinning, bloodied face.

"Hello again."

Alistair turned at the sound of her cry and took a claw across the shoulder for the distraction, blood spraying dark against the tunnel wall. He didn't slow down. If anything, he got faster, uglier, less like a king and more like something ancient that had stopped pretending to be civilized the second Marcus's hand touched her.

"Let. Her. GO."

"Or what?" Marcus hauled Eva up against him, one arm locked brutal and tight across her collarbone, and pressed something cold and sharp — silver, she realized, with a lurch of understanding — against her throat. "You'll level the tunnel? Kill your own mate to spite me? Do it. I dare you."

Alistair went utterly still.

Eva felt her own pulse hammering against the blade. Six years of gloves, of careful distance, of never once touching a stranger's skin — and it was Marcus's forearm against her collarbone, bare skin on bare skin, that finally cracked something open in her chest.

The vision hit her sideways, violent and unbidden, the first one she'd had all night.

Marcus. On his knees. Alistair's hand around his throat. A date she didn't recognize scrawled behind her eyes like a brand — soon, weeks at most — and the particular, specific horror of watching a man die by exactly the hand currently three feet away from her, snarling, furious, promising the same thing without saying a word.

"He dies," Eva gasped, before she could stop herself, "by your hand. Weeks from now. I just saw it."

Marcus's grip faltered — one half-second of genuine, human fear breaking through the mask — and it was enough.

Alistair closed the distance in a blur she couldn't track. The blade never touched her throat. Marcus never finished his sentence. What was left of the pack scattered into the tunnel dark, howling, and Eva found herself hauled against Alistair's chest, both of them breathing hard, blood — his, hers, Marcus's, she genuinely couldn't tell — soaking through what was left of her sleeve.

For one heartbeat neither of them moved to separate. His arms stayed locked around her, his face buried against her hair, and Eva felt the frantic, uneven rhythm of his heart beneath her palm — proof, more than any words could have offered, of exactly how close he'd come to losing her.

"You saw him die," Alistair said finally, low, disbelieving, not yet loosening his hold. "Skin to skin. You saw it."

"I told you the gift doesn't turn off." Eva's hands were shaking. "It just needed a reason to work again."

Somewhere above them, sirens. Somewhere behind them, the scrape of retreating claws on stone. Alistair pulled her toward a service ladder bolted into the tunnel wall, already moving, already thinking three steps ahead in a way that made her chest tight with something that wasn't quite fear anymore.

"We're not safe here," he said. "We're not safe anywhere in this city. Not until Damon's dead or I am."

"So what's the plan?"

"The plan," Alistair said, hauling the grate open above them with one hand and pulling her up into the cold night air, "is that you stop being a bookshop owner tonight, and start being a queen who knows exactly how her enemies die before they do."

Eva's stomach dropped. "That's not what I—"

"It's the only thing that keeps you alive." He met her eyes, grim and certain, and behind him the first hint of dawn was cracking gray along the rooftops. "Damon knows what you are now. Marcus will tell him everything before sunset. Which means we have exactly one night to get you behind my walls before every enemy I have decides you're worth more than my crown."

A black car screeched to a halt at the mouth of the alley, and a woman in a long coat stepped out, silver-eyed, unreadable, already scanning the street like she expected a fight.

"Your Majesty." She didn't blink at the blood, the wreckage, or Eva. "The North Gate's been breached. They're already inside the city."