Page 278 of Cruelly Bitten

Or maybe it was the fact that they looked so much alike, shared the same bloodline, and supposedly desired the same outcome.

Regardless, it left Cam in a predicament, one he was currently trying to fight.

He couldn’t afford to go easy on the lycans attacking him now. They wanted him dead; thus he had to respond with equal force.

Some might shy away from that, try to save their lives and detain them until they could work out the misunderstanding.

Old Cam might have done that.

But new Cam was too smart to even accept that as a possibility.

He struck them down with superior force, killing without remorse. This was about survival, not taking over as king or being the hero everyone wanted him to be.

My Cam was a villain.

A dark heart.

A predator with a penchant for practicality.

He wouldn’t bow. He would slay.

For himself. For me. Forus.

We would survive this.

We would persevere.

We will move forward.

I kept that mantra playing in my head as I followed Lily, her swiftness in the vents suggesting this wasn’t her first time crawling through an obstacle course like this one. If we weren’t in the process of fleeing for our lives, I would have been tempted to ask her.

The growls and snarls in our wake grew quieter with each passing second.

We slowed as we reached a cross section of the vents, Lily glancing left and right as though uncertain of which way to go.

She eventually chose left, then paused about ten feet down by a grate. She peered through it, her brow furrowing. The space was too small for me to join her. We were lucky that we fit in these vents. Cam would have struggled to follow me, which explained why none of the lycans had bothered to try.

Of course, Lily and I weren’t their intended targets in this fight.

Or I didn’t think we were, anyway.

We would just be collateral damage.

“This is one of the royal suites,” she whispered to me. “Looks like the lycans have already ravaged this room…” She moved out of the way to let me see through the grate.

And yeah, it’d definitely been destroyed. “Jasmine…” I trailed off, noting the female’s horror-stricken expression. Her head was on one side of the room. Meanwhile, her mutilated corpse was on the other, the claw and teeth marks making it clear that she’d been mauled by a wolf—perhaps multiple wolves.

“Yeah,” Lily said, moving forward again. “We need to find an empty one.”

“Then what?” I asked her.

“We wait,” she replied.

My brow furrowed. “Wait for?—”

A hand curled around my ankle, yanking me backward and out through the vent I’d just been peering through. My lips parted on a scream that ended on a choke as my shoulder blades met the wall.

It was all so quick.