Page 5 of Renegade Kings

He needed to keep his mate safe even more than I did. It consumed his mind. It was the only instinct that mattered when it came to this place. Mate. It should have been a foreign concept, and yet it felt so right.

Dean’s hand came to my shoulder as Tank reluctantly helped him to sit up. He held onto me like a lifeline, and I doubted he knew how much I needed the anchor he was giving me right now. It was a touch that tore my mind away from the animal inside and back to the here and now.

A glimmer of worry fluttered through my head, as I feared losing myself. Could that happen? Was it possible for the animal to push the man aside and take full control? He’d done it once already when we’d shifted, but that hadn’t felt like losing myself. It was more like strengthening myself in a way I didn’t have the option to before.

Strength.

It was what we needed to survive this place, and I had so much more of it now than I’d ever possessed before. I looked down at my hands, remembering the sensation of heat passing over them as I’d forged that fiery wall in the Winter Palace.

I’d done that.

It might not have been done consciously, yet I’d made those flames from nothing but the rage that surged to life inside me. I could almost feel them now. A smouldering energy that flowed through my body, waiting, watching, and I didn’t know how to feel about that.

Everything felt so out of control right now. We’d well and truly stepped into the unknown with the naïve thought that we’d be able to deal with whatever came our way.

But this wasn’t our world. The creatures and people here lived by rules that we’d never even considered before, let alone experienced. We weren’t even the men we were before we started this journey.

And yet, even through the fears and the uncertainty, I didn’t regret a thing. I felt more like the man I was supposed to be than ever before.

There was something about this place that called to me. It sang to the power that was waking up inside me and latched onto the very essence of my soul.

I belonged here. I just didn’t understand how.

Even as that thought came to my mind, my gaze found her. The woman who had made this all possible. The one at the centre of us all.

It was her. She was the answer to every question, and now I just had to find a way to be worthy of her. To be worthy of this life.

There was no turning back now. No going home. We’d known it before we’d come here. Known that every change we made would be a permanent one, even if we hadn’t looked past getting Damon back. Looked at how life would be when we were all reunited once more. It felt like a tenuous dream now, after everything that had happened at the palace, but was it realistic to refuse to let it go just yet?

The Damon we’d faced wasn’t the man I’d grown up with. And now that the events were running through my mind, it was more than just the things he’d done.

It was his eyes. There was nothing in his eyes. Almost like he was dead inside. Had Arik broken him? Had he put him through enough to shatter the man he used to be?

Part of me wanted to think that was the answer, but then I remembered this wasn’t the world we grew up in and the possibilities were endless. Nymeria had more than just physical pain to break a person, to change a person. But maybe we could use that to our advantage.

This was a world practically dripping in magic. It ran through every person, creature, and even the air we breathed. If it was magic that had changed Damon, could magic bring him back to us? Or was I clutching at a dream because I was incapable of accepting reality? Was he lost to us? Was the man I’d always assumed him to be nothing more than childish idealisation?

I didn’t know what would be worse. That the Damon we knew was gone, or that he’d never been the man we’d believed him to be in the first place.

So I pushed it aside and let myself focus on hope for now. The hope that we could save him. That he wasn’t as far out of reach as it seemed.

Yet, underneath it all, there was still a lingering hope that Nymeria could save my brother. I just had to find a way to make it happen.

But not now, not yet. We had bigger immediate problems to deal with, and Damon would have to survive just a little longer until we could find a way back to him. The soldier in me snapped into place and my vision narrowed down to our immediate needs. We needed somewhere safe where we could regroup, assess Dean’s condition, and make a plan for our next steps.

How were we going to do that when we’d suddenly found ourselves at an abandoned Court of Nymeria?

“We need to move. We don’t know if The Endless will have followed us into the river.” Her voice sounded flat and lacked the fire it usually held. She was shutting down. Hiding away the parts of her that were hurting in a desperate attempt to protect herself.

Suddenly, my hand clasping Dean’s shirt was slapped away, and he grabbed my shoulder. “Help me up,” he grunted.

I looked at Tank, who shrugged, and when my gaze went back to Dean, something flashed through his eyes that called to the creature inside me. It wasn’t the need for violence all of us had been expecting from the alpha wolf in our midst. It was a desperation and a need that only the woman who stood at the centre of our orbit could fulfil.

“Nymeria will not bring them here,” Fizzle said as I slowly helped Dean to stand.

When he leaned heavily into me, I knew Dean was hurt more than he’d like to admit. He’d never shown weakness as a human, and I doubted that would have changed now that his nature was evolving.

We limped across the short distance to Alyssa. She hadn’t moved. Her frozen gaze was on the surface of the lake, I had a feeling it had little to do with expecting The Endless to break through the water, and more to do with the fear of turning around.

---