The Luna He Rejected Is The Millennium Wolf

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE BLADE AND THE STONE

Sienna's POV

Two eyes opened in the dark tunnel and fixed on me, slow and deliberate.

My heels caught on the uneven wood and I stepped back before I'd decided to. My wrists were raw where the iron had bitten into my skin, and the air around me sat thick with sawdust and old metal. The metal at my wrists was cold, etched with runes that pushed a low hum into my bones, and I could feel it in my teeth every time I moved.

Clara wasn't looking at me. She had turned toward Kael, her fingers resting at his jaw, and the sight of it turned my stomach.

I reached inward, searching for the bond. Damien was there, barely, a faint flicker in my chest, and I was the only thing standing between him and whatever was coming for him.

"What are you waiting for, you b***h?" Clara hissed.

"Release her," Kael said, his voice quiet and final, his eyes on me without expression. "Let her bleed properly."

Clara's fingers dug into the silk of her gown. "Kael, look at her. She insulted me." Her voice dropped to a jagged whisper. "Are you going to let her live when your brother is as good as dead?"

The word dead hit my chest and stayed there.

Kael leaned back in his chair. Something crossed his face that wasn't aimed at me, but he didn't answer Clara. He just lifted two fingers and signaled the gates.

The monster came through, a wall of scarred flesh and bone with its jaw hanging open and its breath coming in wet, ragged pulls. Each step it took made the stage groan under its weight, and the crowd's noise dropped to almost nothing as it crossed the boards toward me.

"Go on! Go on! Go on!" The chant locked into a rhythm, coming from every side of the arena at once. This wasn't a fight they were watching. It was a sacrifice, and they wanted to be part of it.

A guard unshackled my wrists, and the sudden weightlessness made my arms shake, blood rushing back into my fingers in a hot, prickling rush. He tossed a short, rusted blade onto the wood, and it landed with a dull clink before he stepped back without looking at me again.

I didn't reach for it right away. I held Clara's stare instead, standing in my own skin without Juvien behind it, and the air on my bare arms felt colder than it had a moment ago. My collarbone had already started to ache from the strain of just standing still.

The monster charged, and the stage shook under its weight with every step. I didn't feel fear the way I expected. It didn't arrive slow, building the way it usually does. It hit me all at once, sharp and clear, and somehow that made it easier to move.

Sienna, don't watch the weapon. Watch the center of gravity. If you can't be stronger, be sooner. My mother's voice came to me from somewhere I hadn't visited in years.

I threw myself sideways in a graceless, desperate lunge, and his foot caught my shoulder on the way past. I heard a sickening pop as my collarbone gave, and the floor came up fast, rough wood scraping the skin from both palms as I hit the ground.

The beast roared at the miss and swung again, faster this time, giving me no room to recover. His backhand caught my ribs and threw me into the arena wall hard enough to rattle my skull. For a second I couldn't tell which way was up, and the noise of the crowd blurred into one long sound with no shape to it.

River Moon daughters don't win by strength. We win by refusing to stay down.

I moved before the thought finished. As the beast lunged again, I dropped under its reach, my vision already blurring at the edges, and drove the rusted blade toward the soft tissue under its chest. It bit deep, deeper than I expected, and the beast's whole body flinched around it.

The crowd sucked in a breath all at once. A human girl had just cut into something that had never been cut before, and for one second nobody made a sound.

See me. I don't know who I was saying it to.

It didn't go down. It let out a high, outraged sound and drove its fist into the floor beside my head, close enough that the impact traveled through the wood and into my bones. I gripped the blade until my knuckles went white, while my eyes started to sting from the strain of holding onto Damien's thread at the same time.

"She's... surviving," Clara whispered into the sudden quiet of the arena.

I pushed forward. The combat drills my mother had beaten into my muscles years ago took over before my mind could catch up, no power behind any of it, just rhythm, the kind that doesn't need thought to keep going.

Strike. Step. Breathe. Strike.

I went for the joints, the eyes, the throat, anything that might slow the mass of it down, and my mouth filled with copper, hot and thick and constant. The crowd had gone quiet by then. No human should have lasted this long, and every person in that arena knew it.

Then the beast caught me. Its hand closed around my throat and lifted me clear off my feet, my legs kicking uselessly in the air. I couldn't breathe, and the edges of everything went dark before it slammed me into the floor. The impact stole what air I had left, and the kick that followed drove into my stomach and sent me skidding across the wood until I hit the far wall.

I curled around the pain and tried to get my legs under me, but they wouldn't move, no matter how hard I told them to.

Not again. Juvien, are you waiting for something?

I closed my eyes and waited for the blow that would finish it. It never landed.

A sound like a thunderclap moved through the arena, the sound of real force hitting flesh. When I opened my eyes, Clement was standing between me and the beast, his back to me and his shoulders set like he'd already decided how this would end.

He hadn't moved on his own. From the corner of my eye I caught Kael's fingers tap the armrest of his chair twice, slow and deliberate, a signal meant to be seen by exactly one person in that room.

Clement grabbed the monster by the throat and threw it back into the dark in one motion. The body hit stone somewhere behind the gates, and the sound rolled through the whole arena before fading into silence.

"Sienna, are you okay?" Clement asked, turning toward me, his hands steady as he reached down.

"Yes," I whispered. "Barely."

"I know what you've done," he murmured, his jaw tight, his eyes refusing to meet mine.

He didn't wait for a response. He pulled my arm over his shoulder and walked me straight off the stage, my feet dragging against the wood the whole way, too weak to carry my own weight.

"Clement! Stop!" Clara's voice cracked through the arena as she came to her feet, but Kael's hand closed around her wrist without a word and pressed her back into her chair before she could take a step.

The arena held its silence behind us as we moved into the hallway, where the dry heat gave way to cooler air. We passed door after door, the sound of my own breathing loud in my ears, until we reached one that smelled faintly of perfume, and underneath it, something metallic. Ozone and blood.

The door opened and my heart stopped.

Damien was on the bed. The gray I had seen on his skin before had deepened into something solid, a lifeless crust spreading across his hands and face, the skin hardening into cold, jagged stone while I watched, inch by inch.

My legs gave out. I went down beside him, my fingers finding his hand, and the cold of it drove straight through my palm and up into my arm before I could pull back.

The coldest thing I had ever touched.