Page 55 of Direbound (The Wolves of Ruin #1)

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

T he rhythmic echo of my footsteps is starting to drive me mad, but I can’t stop pacing. Anassa’s eyes follow me as I walk back and forth across the cell, rubbing my temples to massage away the headache that lingers even though my wounds are gone.

It feels as though we’ve been waiting here forever. Anassa told me that her mate and rider were successful and that they’re on their way to the dungeons. They’re with Venna, waiting until there’s a change of the guards and they can slip in unnoticed.

The minutes crawl by agonizingly slowly. I’m worried about what Killian’s doing. I’m worried about where Saela might be. I’m worried Anassa’s mate is going to get caught long before they reach us.

Then, footsteps. I finally hear boots in the corridor again and look instinctively towards Anassa to gauge her reaction—and her gaze has softened. The rider’s footsteps are joined by the click of massive direwolf claws on stone. Relief floods me.

And then Stark walks around the corner.

I stare unblinking, struggling to understand why he’s here, what he’s doing, why he’s looking at me like that.

Anassa rises within the cell, padding towards the enormous shifting shadow that is Cratos. The instant she’s near him, her entire demeanor changes.

Her muscles relax. Her flanks shiver. She holds her head lower than I’ve ever seen and approaches the bars. Anassa presses her nose to the metal and Cratos steps forward to touch his nose to hers, his sides expanding as he takes a deep breath.

A second later, something in our bond shifts dramatically.

She has suddenly drawn aside curtains that I didn’t even know existed, blinding me with light and heat and satiation . A small choking sound clicks in my throat, and I clutch my chest as my blood is set on fire.

My vision blurs at the first impact of her emotion, unshielded for the first time since we bonded.

Her true feelings about Cratos are earth shattering. The intensity of Anassa’s desire for her mate crushes the air from my lungs and sends slow, addictive heat through every inch of me. Her longing crackles across the channel of energy between us and seeps into my blood.

It pulses through me with each rapid heartbeat and drowns out common sense and everything I thought I knew.

My lips tingle. My fingers itch. My muscles want to move, to take, to go .

To him, I realize.

Stark’s dark eyes watch me steadily, and a shiver passes over my spine. I clench my jaw tightly as hyperawareness heightens my senses. I swear I can hear his heartbeat from clear across the cell. Feel his breath in my own chest. Sense the heat of his skin.

Logically, I know this is Anassa. Her bond with Cratos is overtaking my own consciousness.

But that knowledge doesn’t dampen the intensity or help me resist the pull.

It’s like looking at him with new, keener eyes. As Stark approaches the cell bars, familiar things about him suddenly seem different—the predatory grace of his movement, the strength in his hands as he grips the bars, the way his kill tattoos disappear beneath his collar as his head tilts.

Fuck, his eyelashes are long.

I want him to turn his head so that I can see that hidden scar beneath his jaw again.

The sheer insanity of that thought impacts me with force. I take a scraping step back and gather my energy to block Anassa’s emotion. But I stop short.

I don’t want to cut her out again. It feels wrong.

So I settle a thin filter in place in my head, just enough to come to my senses and stop gazing at this brutal, infuriating, ruinous man as if I’m on the verge of ripping his pants off and going to town.

Once the initial rush of it passes, all that’s left is shock and fury.

“ You ,” I growl, hands in fists.

All this time, it was Stark .

That day on the mountain, it was him. The day he glared right at me in a sea of Rawbonds, it was him. When he sunk a needle into my neck, it was him. When he threatened my life. When he made it his life’s mission to kill me in training. When he jabbed me in my injured torso and asked Anassa if she wanted to heal me…

They were talking. He could hear her.

When I found that book and they both refused to tell me about it—they were talking . It felt like they were colluding, because they were .

Fuck, how did I miss this?

I step closer, slamming my hand against the bars. “Did you know the entire time?” I keep my voice pitched low, aware that the guards may have returned outside, but my tone is poisonous.

He doesn’t even slightly flinch. “Of course.”

And he has no iota of remorse for keeping it from me, either. It’s clear as day, right on his face. He doesn’t give a shit. And I’m furious at him, but beyond that, a hundred questions fill my mind.

Why didn’t he tell me? Why has he made my life hell? How did he hide this so well?

Has he felt this… this pull from the start?

When I open my mouth to ask, what comes out is a stammered, sort of pathetic, “Wh-where’s Venna?”

He raises a brow. “Outside, in the shadows, on watch. I only had a moment to slip in here during the change of the guards. She’s prepared to distract them or knock them out when I need to leave. Here,” Stark says, passing something through the bars.

I struggle to tear my gaze from his dark eyes. For a second, it feels like it would be easier to pry the iron bars between us open.

For what? I don’t know. To punch him in the jaw. Or?—

“Take it,” he says.

I finally manage to look down. The hair on the back of my neck rises instantly. My headache throbs. Stark’s hand is closed around the delicate bend of the crown’s metal, his fingers curled around the incredibly lifelike pelt of one of the wolves.

I stare at it for a moment, that reaching feeling aching in my bones.

The crown looks delicate despite its obvious age, with fine detailing and intricate spires. Two beautiful golden wolves leap towards each other, their lithe bodies curled around the ring of the crown from tip to tail. Their muzzles meet at the center as if they’re engaged in an eternal dance.

Cradled between their outstretched paws is a huge, ancient opal.

The stone is the twin of the one in the necklace my mother gave me, glinting with the same age-old luster.

I reach for it slowly. When my hand closes around it, the cool metal heats. It pulses, a shivering ripple moving through the air. Just holding it in my hand, my lungs tingle with something electric and my blood pulses with power.

If holding it could do this, what would wearing it feel like?

Slowly, I lift it to my head. As I do, my eyes follow the incessant pull back to Stark. He’s watching me with a restrained expression on his face, like usual.

Except… his lips are slightly parted. And his hand is so tight on the bars that his knuckles are paling.

I shut my eyes as the wolves’ tails slide over my temples and slip into my hair. As soon as the metal settles on my head, a sharp sting of pain strikes like a bolt of lightning through my brain.

And I sink.

I fall right through the dungeon floor, its walls ripped away and replaced by rushing darkness. I’m vividly aware of my body melting away from my mind, left behind as I fall and fall towards an encroaching spin of color.

Suddenly, I’m jolted into place, my consciousness settling like it’s stepped over a familiar threshold.

I’m in the castle, except it’s not the one I know.

Its high ceilings and echoing halls are the same, but the atmosphere is different. Warmer. Vivid. I know instinctively that this is a memory or a vision. There’s a sense that what I’m seeing isn’t immediate, as though time and space have blurred at the edges.

Yet it’s too real to be a mere dream.

When I turn, that subtle warmth crystallizes. I can suddenly make sense of it.

Peace . That’s what it is.

The corridors are unified. The cold stone walls that have since been erected are no longer here. The division between the Bonded and royal sides of the castle are gone.

Massive wolves pad freely through the halls, their claws clicking and their tails swinging. They move alongside humans. Common humans, by the look of them. Not Bonded.

People talk and smile. A peal of bright laughter rings like a bell from somewhere out of sight. A direwolf to my right huffs loudly and whips the human he’s walking beside with his tail, and she just grins up at him as they walk past me.

Turning, I look back down the long hall, back towards what I know as the Bonded side of the castle. This feels real. More than real, actually. Right . As though the cold and dark world I know as reality is nothing but a nightmare.

Those walls between us… like someone’s shoved a frigid piece of metal between two halves of one heart.

Something tugs at me. A glimmer of light in the corner of my eye. A whirling of the surrounding hallways. I’m drawn forward on a wind I can’t feel until I’m suddenly elsewhere.

The throne room, glittering in all its splendor, outshone in its beauty by...

The woman sitting on the throne. She’s pale, with long silver hair that falls in a shining waterfall over her shoulders and down to her hips.

Atop her silver hair sits the golden crown with its twin wolves. At her throat, my opal necklace. At her hip, the wolf-pommel sword. And at her feet, the largest direwolf I’ve ever seen, with glossy silver-white fur.

I know this woman. I’ve seen her before, carved into a hidden wall in the tunnel that joins the royal wing to the Bonded side of the castle. And again, drawn in Stark’s ancient book.

She has a calm expression on her face as she leans forward, readjusting the weight in her arms. An infant, swaddled in a fluffy fur blanket. She nurses the baby at her breast, smiling up at a servant when they ask her something before turning back to her child.

Everything about her radiates power. Her beauty. The crown. The sword. But her child, too.

The precious, compassionate, unashamed way she holds them. I can sense their connection in the air, warm and quiet. The same peaceful atmosphere from before infiltrates my heart, looking at them. Mother and child.

And then it all shatters. There’s a distant sound, like the crack of magic shattering the air.

The doors burst open. A woman rushes to the throne, wearing some sort of military uniform. Her dark eyes are wild. “Queen Chiara, Siphons have infiltrated the palace!”

The queen hastily tucks her breast away, her infant immediately letting out a needy wail at being denied. She rises quickly, clutching her child in her arms and descending the dais. The direwolf follows, looming over the scene.

“Take her,” Queen Chiara orders, handing the breathless woman her child. “Protect my child with your life. Get her out of the castle and hide her .”

“M-My queen,” the second woman sputters out. Her eyes widen as Queen Chiara rips the opal necklace from her neck and presses it into her hands.

“This will safeguard you,” she says, then turns without hesitation and grips the enormous direwolf’s fur.

She mounts the beast effortlessly, finding her seat with unearthly grace as her silver hair falls against her back. She looks like she belongs there.

She looks powerful.

Her eyes linger for one painfully short moment on her child before she turns her head and urges her direwolf onward. I’m dragged with them, my perspective shifting between my own eyes, the queen’s, and the keener vision of her wolf’s. I look back at the child one last time as she’s hurried away, a lonely ache in my heart.

She’s gone. The queen must fight.

We fly through the hallways, moving at impossible speed. The weight of her crown presses down on my head, too, as the wolf’s powerful muscles propel us forward. My essence flies weightlessly alongside them, spurring them on.

We reach a segment of the castle that’s in chaos. Wolves fight and die. Siphons flood the hallway, obvious due to their unnatural speed and beauty. Flashes of magic explode, causing the air to shiver with energy.

The queen rides past it all. She’s hunting.

Eventually, she finds her prey. A tall Siphon man who…

My entire being shudders. He looks unsettlingly like both Killian and his father, with piercing blue eyes and the same sharp features.

The queen doesn’t hesitate. She draws the wolf blade and attacks, streaking through the hallway on her wolf and slashing at the Siphon’s head, aiming to decapitate him. But her blade clangs against his, and he manages to redirect the force of her blow and duck.

A terrible laugh echoes all around us. “Chiara Sturmfrost, finally come to play!” he bellows, opening his arms wide. Then a heinous darkness glints in his eyes. Pure malice. He leans in like he’s sharing a secret. “Did you know that I slit your husband’s throat already?”

Queen Chiara’s fury and grief fill my veins, like a mountain’s given way and crushed my soul. She swings messily in a rage, and the Siphon parries. She uses her direwolf’s power well, the two moving as one.

But the Siphon is fast. Strong . His eyes see everything, long before her blows can land.

“What is your endgame, Brightbane?!” the queen screams.

Brightbane . Like Lucien Brightbane, the Siphon king of Astreona. But this man isn’t him—a relative or ancestor, perhaps?

There’s another flurry of blows. One of them clips his shoulder, but the wound doesn’t even begin to slow him down.

“Nocturna will never bow to the Siphons!” Queen Chiara shouts. Her direwolf snaps at Brightbane, whose eyes widen as he rolls out of the way.

He pants, grinning cruelly up at her. “What choice will they have when the queen and her progeny are all dead ,” he spits.

That final word sends a cold snap of pain through the Queen.

“Your three older children were alarmingly easy to kill, and my men have gone after the baby. By daybreak, the Sturmfrost line will be over.”

The direwolf lets out a long, low groan as if feeling its rider’s pain. Queen Chiara’s grip loosens on her sword. Her eyes cloud over. The agony only a parent could ever feel…

It gives him an opening. She manages to deflect a few merciless blows, but it isn’t enough. Her fight’s gone out of her.

My children, I can almost hear her whispering. My children.

Brightbane knocks her sword out of her hands, snatching it off the stone. The wolf attempts to stumble backward, but in one fluid movement, Brightbane spins and the sword slashes the beast’s throat.

Bright red blood spills over silver fur.

Queen Chiara screams. The direwolf staggers and falls, thudding thunderously to the floor. I watch in horror as an ocean of blood pours from the wolf’s throat.

Then the queen collapses next to her wolf, her silver hair floating on the surface of the ghastly red pool of blood.

Her gaze falls deathly still, her life taken by their severed bond.

Brightbane’s voice is the last thing I hear, ringing over the scene of her death. “Your Bonded will be my instruments of vengeance.”

It’s almost a blessing when the vision begins to fade. The light and color dissipate with the remnants of the queen’s energy.

Darkness finds me. And in that darkness, a familiar voice. The same one that echoes across my dreams.

“ Chiara Sturmfrost is dead. Meryn Sturmfrost has returned. Long live Queen Sturmfrost. ”

Waking from the vision is like a rapid, quiet dawn. Weak light pours over me, spreading slowly over the cell around me and my trembling hands. I’m back in my body, back where I began.

But everything feels different.

I lift my head. Stark is still standing there, staring at me on the other side of the bars. His eyes are searching mine. For what, I don’t know. But he’s pressed against the bars like he’s reaching for something.

My mind whirs, the ephemeral vision imprinted on me like an afterimage. The pieces click into place.

Queen Chiara’s opal necklace, given to her baby, then passed down my family line.

The visions my mother received, that I received—disjointed, overwhelming and eventually all-consuming, but containing truths.

Anassa, a direwolf of immeasurable power who had waited years for a rider, then forced a bond on someone unwilling.

The crown of leaping wolves on my brow that feels as if it’s meant to be there.

My tongue is thick in my mouth, but somehow I find a way to say words that sound implausible and, at the same time, absolutely right.

“I’m the rightful queen of Nocturna, aren’t I?” I ask.

Stark’s eyes spark, he takes a single step back, and he bows down on one knee, hand to his chest. “Welcome home, my queen.”