Chapter 12: The Blood Sigil's Toll

My brother’s blood had just been used to turn the safest fortress in the northern realm into a slaughterhouse, and the bitter hope in my chest felt like a blade twisting between my ribs.

​Jagged shards of shattered ward-stone rained across the great hall as the crimson shockwave tore through the ceiling. Before the razor-sharp obsidian could touch my skin, Damian’s massive frame enveloped mine, his heavy cloak shielding my head as he drove us behind the stone dais.

​A chorus of feral howls erupted from the freezing ravine outside. Without the ancient boundary wards, Alpha Kael’s shadow-rogues were already swarming the outer courtyard.

​"Stay down, Aria," Damian commanded, his voice dropping an octave as dark veins spider-webbed beneath his collar and his nails lengthened into lethal obsidian claws.

​"They didn't come for a siege," I breathed, staring at the steps where my brother’s silver medallion still smoldered. "A blood sigil that strong only holds the barrier open for ten minutes. This isn't an invasion—it's a trap."

​Across the hall, Alpha Julian Vance staggered to his feet, coughing through the dust with terrified eyes. "He lied to me," Julian stammered as the hooded emissary beside him threw off his cloak. "Kael swore that rune would only project Marcus’s voice—"

​"Pathetic," the assassin hissed, drawing twin blades coated in smoking green wolfsbane.

​Instead of defending Julian, the assassin kicked his knee out, using the fallen Alpha as a springboard to launch himself straight toward me.

​Damian didn't even draw a weapon. With a roar that cracked the marble pillars, the Lycan King intercepted the assassin in mid-air. His clawed hand clamped around the man’s throat, slamming him into the stone floor with bone-shattering force.

​"Who gave you the Sterling blood?" Damian snarled, pressing his knee into the assassin’s chest. "Speak, or I tear your wolf out through your ribs."

​The assassin’s lips curled into a dying grin as black foam bubbled between his teeth—a suicide capsule crushed inside his jaw. Within seconds, his eyes glazed over into silence.

​Outside the iron doors, the clash of steel and snarling beasts grew louder as Damian’s guards held the courtyard. Knowing we had only minutes, I snatched a silver dagger from a fallen guard’s belt and vaulted down the steps.

​Before Julian could scramble toward the exit, I drove the tip of my blade through his mud-stained coat, pinning him hard against a cracked stone column.

​"Aria, wait!" Julian gasped, trembling as the silver edge pressed against his jugular. "I swear I didn't know Kael rigged that medallion to break Thorne’s wards!"

​"You brought my brother’s blood here to blackmail me into returning to your bed," I said, my voice colder than the winter gale blowing through the ruined doors. "Tell me how you got this medallion, Julian, or I end you myself."

​Sweat poured down Julian’s pale temple. The arrogant Alpha who had cast me aside was gone, replaced by a cornered coward realizing he had been a pawn all along.

​"I didn't meet Kael myself!" Julian blurted out, his chest heaving. "Celeste brought it to my study yesterday morning! She said her cousin intercepted an Eastern Ridge courier near the border and found Marcus’s crest!"

​My blood ran ice-cold. Celeste. The meek, fragile healer Julian had chosen over me.

​Using the hem of my cloak, I picked up the scorched medallion from the floor. Beneath the metallic stench of dark magic and my brother’s scent, a faint, sickly-sweet aroma lingered in the grooves.

​My breath caught. I had cataloged every herb in the Silvercrest apothecary for five years.

​"Damian," I whispered, turning toward the Lycan King as he wiped blood from his claws. "This isn't Eastern Ridge poison."

​Damian’s molten gold eyes narrowed as he stepped beside me, inhaling the faint trace rising from the silver. His jaw locked. "That’s lunar nightshade. It only grows in the subterranean caves beneath Silvercrest."

​"Marcus was never in the Eastern Ridge," I said, horror and fury colliding in my chest as I looked at Julian’s stunned face. "He’s been locked beneath your own packhouse the entire time—and Celeste is tending the cells."

​Before Julian could answer, the towering stained-glass window above the throne exploded inward in a shower of glass and freezing snow.

​A monstrous white wolf crashed onto the upper gallery, dragging a rusted iron cage behind it by a silver chain. Inside the cage, slumped in torn rags, was a tall man with my father’s dark hair and a brand burned across his cheek.

​Marcus.

​Standing atop the gallery railing above the cage, a woman in a blood-red cloak pulled back her hood, smiling down at us while holding a lit torch directly over my brother’s oil-soaked bars.

​"Hello, Aria," Celeste’s sweet, venomous voice echoed through the hall. "Choose quickly—your crown, or your brother’s ashes."