Page 35 of Traitor Wolf (Bonded by Fate Duet #1)

Before she could answer, movement in the bowl’s reflection caught my attention.

The letters shifted; images replaced them.

My mother’s hands, cracked and dry, kneading dough that did not exist. Sable’s curls, singed from fire.

Tyrus, with a cut split across his knuckle, looking up at me with empty eyes.

The Dregs under early light, tin roofs and clotheslines, and raining ash. My chest ached.

Then the images changed: Kaelric kissing me under the moonlight, dancing together as my family cheered behind us, hoisting their fists in the air; Mira running over to me to show me a new blanket she knitted; plates filled high with food.

Then it all dissolved, and the words were back.

Choose what to keep. Choose what to lose .

I was so confused. One barrage of images had been scary, full of all my worst fears. The others were happy, filled with hope.

I placed my hand on Valkaryn’s hilt. She thrummed under my skin as if she had a heartbeat of her own.

‘Say it,’ she urged. ‘Say what you already know.’

“I keep my people, love, food, health, and all good things,” I said out loud to the door with the wolf eye over it, “but I choose to lose my fear,” I told the door with the blade symbol hanging over head.

Upon my declaration, the wolf door opened like a held breath released, and the sword door turned to flat stone, impassable—just as the clock ticked off another fifteen-minute mark and Kaelric’s scream rent the air.

I burst out through the threshold of the open door and through a corridor. Wind came whipping at my face, cold and fast, tasting faintly of iron and snow.

‘I’m okay, keep going, ’ Kaelric urged.

The labyrinth wall on my left rose high. To my right, a sheer drop fell away to a black void that seeped from the Earth’s throat.

‘Closer,’ Kaelric said to my right, from the void.

‘What?’ I inched that way.

‘Catch me, Brynn!’ Kaelric screamed as I peered up frantically, my feet teetering on the edge .

‘Stop!’ Valkaryn screamed, a pulse of purple light shooting out from my hip.

I froze, shaking my head as confusion washed over me.

‘It’s not him, child. It’s an illusion,’ Val told me.

I swallowed hard just as I heard my mother weeping from the darkness below: ‘Brynn, save me. They ambushed our train. We never made it. I need you to save me.’

“Mom!” I kneeled on my hands and knees, peering over the ledge and into the void.

‘Brynnie!’ Sable’s sob came from the blackness, and I had the strangest urge to jump.

The clock above chimed again, and Kaelric’s scream was the only thing that brought me out of my trance. Another fifteen minutes had passed? How?

I peered up to see him still hanging on the stone pillar. His mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear anything.

‘It’s a trap. You need to run. It’s sucking you in,’ Val told me.

Why couldn’t I hear Kaelric?

Was my mother okay?

‘Run, run, run!’ Val screamed so loudly inside my head that it chased everything else out.

The illusion shattered around me into drifting shards as I stood, backing away from the blackness and running.

I reached another door; this one was filled with runes I did not recognize. A deep exhaustion pulled on me, and my eyes went half-lidded.

‘The train attack drained you, combined with using my power here. We need to stay focused and finish strong,’ Val told me. ‘I can cut through the runes.’

‘You’re doing a great job. Don’t worry about me,’ Kaelric said softly in my head. I was relieved to be able to hear the real him again.

This place was a nightmare. I’d long lost track of where Kirk might be. I no longer cared. I was just trying to survive myself. Like Cassian said, this trial was designed to kill me, magicless and separated from my wolf. Oh, how I prayed he was okay.

I dragged the tip of Valkaryn’s blade through the first two runes and then made a loop, going through all of them. It broke whatever magic held the door, and it popped open with a hiss.

The next space opened into a courtyard, colder than the passage before, the air laced with the metallic bite of magic. My steps echoed, each one drawing me toward the figure waiting in the center.

Corvessa Solvaris.

There was no dais, no armed Watchers fanned in a display of power, no fluttering cloak designed to command attention.

She stood alone, sleeves rolled to the elbow, hair braided tight against her head, sword slung at her hip.

Without the trappings of authority, she was smaller, more human.

It might have pleased me, if not for the way her gaze locked on mine.

Her eyes were shards of polished obsidian, black yet gleaming, and the faint blue-white glow from the clock above caught her cheekbones like a blade’s edge.

Her mouth pulled into a slow grin.

“Hello, little rat,” she said, her voice silk over steel. “I wondered how long it would take you to get here.”

I lifted Valkaryn. My arm ached from the weight, every muscle sore from the labyrinth. “Is this the final test?” My eyes scanned the courtyard’s shadows, certain her Watchers would spring from them.

She nodded, stroking the hilt of her sword with idle confidence. “And I assure you that you will not be able to pass through me.”

Her hand snapped out, and a bolt of lightning, raw and jagged, ripped through the air toward me.

Valkaryn reacted faster than I could think, magic flaring into a shield.

The strike hit with a thunderclap that jarred my bones and left the scent of burned ozone in the air.

I stumbled backward, lungs seizing. She had just tried to kill me.

Above, the dais loomed. Cassian’s chair was still empty. I swallowed hard. If I was going to die here, I might as well do it knowing the truth. “Where is Cassian?”

Her smile deepened, but it was a cold thing that did not touch her eyes. “With his brother.”

The words slid under my skin like ice water. Dead? No, that wasn’t what she meant. It couldn’t be.

Corvessa drew her blade with a hiss, stepping forward. “You know,” she said lightly, “it was terrible about that fire. I hope your family made it out.”

The sweetness in her tone was false, cloying. My breath hitched.

“You lit the fire,” I said. “In the Dregs. You did it.”

I had to know. I couldn’t die not knowing.

“We all do what we must to keep rot from the beams, little rat,” she trilled. “Far better one street smoke than a whole city collapse.”

The fatigue I felt earlier reached fever pitch. I didn’t shout or roar. I simply moved, Valkaryn gripped firmly in my fist as I lunged for Corvessa’s throat.

We met in the center, steel to steel. The collision rang through my bones. Corvessa fought like she spoke, clean, deliberate, without waste. But she didn’t rely on steel alone.

The air around us dropped in temperature so sharply that my lungs ached to breathe. Frost coiled across the stone beneath my boots. She swept her hand, and the frost surged upward, ice lancing from the ground toward my legs. I sprang backward, but a shard caught my thigh, tearing fabric and skin.

‘She tried to murder your entire community,’ Valkaryn said, her voice low and edged with hunger. ‘Do you want me to kill her quickly, or slowly?’

A pulse of heat from the blade kept my blood moving despite the cold.

My eyes darted up to the clock. Kaelric hung blindfolded over the chasm, seconds bleeding away.

Kirk’s wolf still hung bound, which meant somewhere Kirk was still trying to free him, to win the mountain’s favor.

As much as I wanted Corvessa’s life in payment for the flames that had consumed the Dregs, I wanted victory more.

‘Quickly,’ I told her, too tired for anything else. ‘And I want to do it.’

For the fire, for Cassian, for everything.

Corvessa raised her palm, and a wave of ice roared toward me, thick as a wall.

I slashed Valkaryn through it, shards breaking like glass.

She followed with a whip of lightning that cracked so close my ears rang.

I ducked, lunging close to her, so close, but she spun with inhuman speed, her blade biting a line across my shoulder.

Cold magic swirled around her in a cyclone, drawing the heat from my skin. My fingers began to stiffen on Valkaryn’s hilt. Corvessa flicked her hand again, and the moisture in the air froze solid, locking my boots to the ground in crystal shackles.

Valkaryn thrummed in my grip.

‘Get ready.’ She told me.

Every muscle in my body tensed, and then a blanket of violet magic erupted from the blade, blasting through ice and air alike. Corvessa moved to block, but was too late. The purple light saturated her skin, and she froze in place, eyes wide but unable to move.

I rushed forward, not knowing how long this would hold.

“For the Dregs,” I whispered into her face and carved Valkaryn cleanly through her neck.

Her head hit the stone with a dull thud. Her body followed, folding in two pieces.

I looked up at the clock. One minute left.

“Kaelric!” I screamed, leaping over Corvessa’s corpse as the door behind her burst open. There was a narrow hallway with stairs ahead. I took them two at a time, breath tearing from my chest.

At the top, Kaelric stood bound on a stone column, darkness yawning below. I edged onto his platform, Valkaryn cutting through the ropes at his wrists and ankles. The magic bindings dissolved into smoke, leaving raw welts behind .

He ripped away his blindfold, then leapt, catching me and steadying us on the staircase’s edge.

The clock struck the hour as both stone columns vanished like sand in a strong wind.

To my left, Kirk’s wolfkin screamed as he fell into the abyss. Kirk’s roar followed, raw and broken down below in the labyrinth.

Kaelric’s grin split his face, causing my knees to go weak. “You did it, magicless human. You won the Arcane Trials.”

And with those words, the mountain awoke.