CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: WHAT THE FOREST KNOWS
1124 Words
Sienna's POV
Cold pressed in from every side. Something under me burned anyway. Sweat turned to ice the second the wind touched it.
Every time I closed my eyes, the arena came back. Not a memory. The whole thing again, sound and ache of what I'd done out there.
"Sienna."
My eyes opened before the word finished. I knew that voice.
This wasn't stone or sand. I was on my back in a forest, branches thick overhead. Damp pine needles under my shoulders and palms. Soft dirt beneath. Smoke drifted through the trees.
I tried to push myself up. Pain tore through my ribs and put me back down. I lay there and breathed through it.
"Feeling better?"
Duke stood several yards off, arms at his sides. He didn't come closer. He just watched.
Pieces of the fight kept surfacing. No order to them. Juvien's voice still sat faint in my skull.
I shook my head and tried again. Upright this time, the world tilting before it leveled.
"You saved me," I said, the words coming out shallow.
My hands moved over the damage. My dress was barely recognizable, stiff with dried blood and dirt. The wounds from the Omega female had closed, but the skin over my sternum felt tight. An ache pulsed from the center of my chest with every heartbeat.
"Did you touch me?"
His mouth twisted. "And if I did? You were dying on my sand. I don't waste investments."
Getting up took two tries. My knees buckled on the first and held on the second. I stood there letting the anger do the work my legs weren't ready for.
I walked toward him. His shoulders squared, his eyes tracking my hands as they closed into fists. Nothing else on his face moved.
He closed the distance before I did. Both hands came down on my shoulders, heavy and flat. Not comfort. Weight, holding me in place.
"Why punish yourself? You threw yourself into the sand to see if you'd break apart."
"And I didn't," I said, pushing against his hands. His grip didn't move.
"No." His hands stayed where they were. "You didn't. And now I'm going to take what you showed me and make it into something Lucas and Damien won't know how to handle. I want you to have your revenge."
"Revenge," I repeated.
"Lucas," he said, low and deliberate.
That word landed and stayed there. I looked at the trees. Something wrong about the ground before I understood why. Same slope I remembered. Same angle in the wind through the canopy. I'd been here before.
I reached for the memory and hit a wall of dark energy.
Duke turned and started walking through the dead leaves. "Why ask me anything? Are you planning to go back? He's moved on, Sienna. He's building something permanent while you're here with blood on your face and pine needles in your hair. His mate is carrying his child right now."
Everything in me went still.
Ivy pregnant. Not a shock. Some part of me had already known. My stomach turned.
I thought about Lucas describing our future. Detailed, specific. All of it built for someone else's life instead of mine.
Under the grief, something held steady. A pulse against my ribs that wasn't mine. Damien's presence, frayed and distant. Still there. Still holding.
"Get off me, Duke."
Louder than I meant it, filling the space between the trees. Something moved fast through his eyes.
"No one calls me that." His voice dropped. "You have nerve, little spark. Maybe I haven't pushed you hard enough yet."
"Get me out of here." I looked away.
"I will." He let out a breath. "But first, climb on. We have a dinner to get to and you look like you've lost a war. Tomorrow the real training starts. No Gammas, no Omegas. Just me."
He turned his back to me and bent forward. Climbing onto the back of a man like him went against whatever pride I had left, but I looked at the miles of dark forest ahead and knew what my legs would do.
"Put me down the moment we hit the gates."
The second I settled onto his back, the air changed. Beneath me his body shifted, bones cracking and reforming. Between one breath and the next, the man was gone. A massive black wolf carried me instead.
He moved through the undergrowth fast. Branches parting and closing without catching. I locked my fingers into thick dark fur and kept my face low.
A calm settled over me I didn't trust. Speed and open air, the things I'd wanted before any of this. Here they were, and the thing carrying me was nothing I should forget.
Lucas used to drive through trees like these with his hand on my thigh. Telling me I was the only anchor he had. He called me that and then cut the rope the first time it cost him anything. Now I was holding onto something that saw me as a weapon to sharpen.
The wolf locked up and went rigid. Four paws bracing hard enough to tear up soil. A growl built low in his chest. His snout pressed once against my hand. Stay quiet. Then he shifted back and caught me before I hit the ground.
"She's here." Duke wasn't looking at me. His eyes stayed fixed on the dark gap between two oaks, where the shadow sat wrong. "My wards weren't broken. They were dissolved. Whoever did this didn't push through them. They erased them."
"Who? Who is here?"
"Your stepmother." In the moonlight, his face looked like a man doing math he didn't like the answer to. Something in his face looked familiar. I'd worn it myself once. "Lucas realized Damien hasn't marked you. He sent the most dangerous thing he has access to."
"Morrigan," I said.
"We move now." Duke checked his watch. "I can't face her alone when she's hunting. Not in a blood-frenzy. She's here to remove the evidence of his weakness. You're that evidence."
Duke was afraid. That scared me more than anything he'd said so far.
He grabbed my hand and ran. I ran with him. Branches found my face in the dark. My pulse hammered loud enough to drown our footsteps.
Then the voice came from somewhere in the trees. Not raised, not rushing. Present everywhere at once.
"Sienna. I know you're in there, little bird. Don't make me come fetch you."
The cold that hit me had nothing to do with weather. Mist thickened between the trunks until I could barely see through it. Shapes moved at the edges. I could feel their attention on me.
The forest had been quiet before. It wasn't anymore.
- Writer
