The Devil Alpha
Nicolas stood at my shoulder and told me the history in the low voice of a man narrating a church.
"The night he was nineteen," Nicolas said, "the law owed him fourteen deaths. His father dead a season, the succession contested, and the old law plain as a knife: the challenger dies, and the backers die with him. Thirteen wolves backed Corvin Blackwood that night. The pack came here expecting a slaughter. It's what a nineteen-year-old does; it's what we understood." He looked across the sand at his cousin, who stood in the ring's center in judgment black, still as a held breath. "He struck thirteen names into the roll of men instead. One by one. Out loud. And he spared the fourteenth — the on