Page 6 of Court of Wolves

“I’ve come for the beastkind,” Samlyn said in a bored voice. “And you.”

“It’s your lucky day, Knight,” the Brightwrath said with a new sharpness to his eyes, like he was pissed off to be interrupted. “We’ll continue this later.”

“No, bring him,” Samlyn murmured, his eerie eyes passing over where Az was chained, inspecting his broken fingers, then the mess of his chest. “It’ll be a useful test.”

Test? A test of what? Az’s skin crawled with warning, a primal panic making him wrench at the chains, over and over.

“Be still,” Samlyn said with the ring of an order. Az couldn’t quell the terror, trying to rip his wrists through the chains overand over. He gave the Brightwrath a sly glance. “It is always useful to have a control.”

“Acontrol?” Dulan asked with a tilt of his head.

Samlyn reached into his robes and produced a small ampoule of brackish liquid, no bigger than his finger. Azrail struggled harder, gasping, shaking. The saint approached with smooth grace, unstopping the ampoule and grasping Az’s chin with a hand that drenched him with a sharp, animal fear. He coughed up the first mouthful of dark, herbal liquid but the next forced itself down his throat, then the next, until the vial was empty.

“Now,” Samlyn said, watching him with apathy. “Be still.”

Az froze.

His heartbeat rattled in sheer panic as his body stilled against his will. He fought and screamed, but his body was frozen. Obedient.

“Good,” Samlyn said with a mild smile. He closed pale hands around the chains keeping Azrail tethered and they fell away, letting his arms crash down to his sides. The pain in his shoulders made him want to scream. His eyes watered, the only outward sign he was allowed to give. “Now, this next test isn’t for you, but I’d like you to follow and watch. Brightwrath, bring the beast.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Jaromir Sintali had been screaming inside his mind on end for days. Every minute of every day, all he remembered was pain and silence and the saints' circle. He couldn’t stop screaming. He let Maia down. He walked into that circle to rescue Vawn because the guilt of it was eating at her soul, but there was a void in his mind between that moment and waking up here, in his beast form.

The scream built to a crescendo that hurt his brain. Az was being harmed. Tortured. And Jaro could do nothing to stop it. He’d been told to sit in the corner and not move, so he hadn’t moved for days. No matter how loudly he screamed inside, how hard he fought the metal around his throat, he couldn’t leap across the stone prison to get to Azrail. He couldn’t sink his teeth into the enforcer's arm and rip it off no matter how badly he craved that violence.

He couldn’t doanythingas Samlyn, the Provider, ordered them both to follow him out of the cell. It was a sick, twisted name. The only thing that bastard provided was horror and nightmares.

For the first time, Jaro was outside their cell, and it wasn’t the barren grey prison he’d expected. Out here it smelled ofviolets and irises, not the slow trickle of blood from Az’s body. Jaro was desperate to turn his head to look at his oldest friend but Samlyn hadn’t ordered him to, so he couldn’t. Instead he kept his head straight forward as they walked down the white marble corridor, the quiet building they moved through as beautiful and gilded as the Delakore Palace. The columns here were angular instead of rounded, the architecture… older. Overrun with flowers and plant-life in cracks along the ground, like it had been left to nature for decades. Centuries. Not quite as elaborate or ornamental as the palace and yet regal. Where the hell were they?

They reached the end of the corridor and a wide square courtyard opened up, staircases crawling the walls, paths disappearing into three tiers of arched doorways. There were so many different passages under the cracked marble dome that Jaro couldn’t count. Maybe this really was a palace. A shaft of bright sunlight slanted through a jagged hole in the domed ceiling, falling onto the tiled floor ahead of Jaro. Chunks of masonry littered the tiles, from the collapsed columns around them, from the pockmarks in the walls. Something had happened here, years and years ago, so disastrous that this palace was now empty except for the four of them—Jaro, Az, the saint, and the torturer.

Where was Maia? Where were Ark and Kheir and Bryon? If he could justrememberwhat had happened at the island, maybe he’d remember the collar being fitted to his throat and he could find a way to get the damn thing off. He’d wanted to ease Maia’s pain by reaching Vawn first, but he led them right into a trap, and now Az was cut and bruised and bleeding and thatbastardenforcer had threatened Maia. She was here somewhere, among these crumbled halls.

Jaro’s screams filled his skull, as useless as the paws that carried him down more perfectly straight hallways, past pots fullof overgrown flowers. Green and violet and blue burst against dusty marble everywhere he looked, blooms crawling up the entryways of rooms that were eerily empty and silent. Where were the people who had lived here? Were they still in Venhaus, or had the saints taken them elsewhere? He knew of marble palaces in the Aether kingdoms. Was this the seat of power in Aetheon? Were the queens there hosting these dark saints like Ismene hosted… he couldn’t remember. The name wasright there,the memory out of his reach. His screams turned to roars of fury inside his head, the emotion choking off his air as he walked, calmly, obediently after the grey saint who glided ahead of him.

Jaro wanted to bare his teeth and snarl. He walked on without so much as a twitch of his lip, through a pale arch suffocated by flowers and vines into—shit.

Samlyn led them into a coliseum.

CHAPTER FIVE

Jaro waited for Azrail to erupt with fury, to scheme them a way out of this, to unleash his protectiveness on the dark saint and the torturer like it was a weapon in itself. But Az stood beside Jaro and said nothing. He didn’t even flinch. LikeJarodidn’t flinch. And he understood with nausea that Azrail was as trapped as he was. Not collared but caged all the same.

The coliseum stank of sulphur and rusted steel, nothing like the floral aroma inside the building. Huge blocks of white stone made up the curved amphitheatre, rising to the grey, clouded sky like rows of steps, so many rows there had to be a hundred of them. All empty except for the first row where people he recognised but couldn’t place sat to watch the spectacle. A beautiful, ageless woman with skin like polished onyx. A stern, broad-shouldered man with little hair and the bearing of a soldier. A smaller, older woman with hair like silk dyed vermillion. A guy a little older than Jaro with battered leather clothes, rich sun-darkened gold skin, and brown hair in an untidy bun. He looked at the sandy floor of the coliseum with an emptiness on a face formed of angles and sharp planes.

Familiarity buzzed in the back of Jaro’s head, the beautiful, smirking woman plucking at some suppressed memory, but the man was the one he stared at the longest. That emotionless man wasVawnbut he was nothing like the rebel Jaro knew from the compound. He was thinner, his features sharper, his height enhanced by the weight loss, but it was his face that was the most drastic change. Vawn was a smartass and a joker. He was always grinning or smirking, eyes always glittering. Now there was emptiness in both his eyes and his face.

Jaro was glad when the thread of Samlyn’s command in his collar pulled his attention to the sand, noting splashes of darkness and crimson in places. Evidence of battles that had taken place before their arrival.

“You can come with me, forsaken one,” Samlyn said in a papery voice, heaving a sigh like he found the spectacle tedious before it had even begun. The fur on the back of Jaro’s neck pulled tight as Azrail and the torturer followed the grey saint across the coliseum, joining the others on the pale step. Jaro remained where he was. Samlyn didn’t need to speak to command him like the others, like Enryr had. The collar was tight around Jaro’s throat, pinching when he moved, when he wasallowedto move, and somehow Samlyn communicated his orders with the sheer power of his silence.

That was how Jaro knew he was to wait at the edge of the sandy floor even when the door closed with a resounding clang behind him, kicking his heartbeat into a sprint. His heart seemed to be the only part of his body they couldn’t control, his mind the only thing free to run.

He tried to lift his paws, tried to shrink back when the solid stone door across the arena floor grated open, revealing a thing of nightmares. His body had its orders and refused to retreat. If Maia had been safe, if she’d been happy with the others, with Vawn saved, Jaro could have borne this. But knowing she wastrapped in this place, in another cell with only saints knew what was happening to her, it made him want to scream.

The creature that slithered out of the door across the coliseum was exactly as Jaro remembered. Seven feet tall, it was like the grotesque offspring of a lizard and a wild cat but twice the size of each. Green-black scales covered it from the horns on its rounded head all the way to its powerful tail and the paws that flashed with wicked-looking claws. It would have stalked Jaro’s dreams if he’d closed his eyes once since they left the saints' circle.

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