Page 14 of A Warrior's Fate

“I’m sorry?” Isla almost stopped moving from the shock. She thought she’d heard him wrong.

“Goddess, help me.”

The words were uttered in a breath beside her, and Isla snapped her head, fury in her gaze, from Sebastian to Adrien. The Heir’s face was laden with guilt.

“Did you know about this?” she asked.

Adrien hesitated. Not fear but wariness was in his eyes. He knew her wrath well. “He told me yesterday at the dinner. He hadn’t told anyone else but my father and his own beta and asked me to keep it in confidence.”

Isla resisted the urge to knock Adrien upside the head, Imperial Guard be damned.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said, even though he’d already stated his case. Her fingers wedged into the tresses of her hair that she’d twisted into a high bun, surely messing it after she’d spent all too much time getting it perfectly smoothed. “I can’t believe this.”

Participating in the Hunt wasn’t just a split-second decision. It required contemplation and planning, approval by the Imperial Alpha. To get anything to his attention took time, even if one was another leader, so this had to have been weeks in the making.

Which meant Kai knew last night when they spoke in the garden that they’d both be descending into the earth-bound hell at the same time.

I’m going to kill him.

“I did it,” Adrien offered, pulling Isla from her thoughts with the wrong notion of her upset. “Other alphas have. It’s a rite of passage for everyone. If you’re second to an alpha, that’s still pretty damn—”

“I don’t care about being second,” Isla breathed, shaking her head and looking towards the ground like it would offer some solace.

I care about staying alive.

She’d finally managed to get the alpha off her mind, scrubbed him enough from her senses so that she could think straight. It may have required a late-night shifted run through the woods, and addressing her pent-up frustrations by her own hand when she made it back to her room, but it was done. As she wrapped the customary hunter’s cloths around her wrists and ankles and draped herself in the traditional silks when the sun rose that morning, her focus was on herself and her objectives as they were supposed to be and had been before she’d met her mate.

But who knew if her mental fortitude would hold?

When she lifted her head, she realized Adrien and Sebastian were looking on for some elaboration. Not in the mood to divulge, she conjured a lie.

“The Hunt isn’t a requirement to be an alpha, and only two actual alphas have competed in it. The rest were just heirs, and he doesn’t even have one of those.” Isla found herself becoming increasingly irate as epiphanies hit. “If he dies in there, there’s no leader of that pack. His bloodline ends. It’s…it’s reckless and stupid and—”

“Do I hear Isla questioning an alpha?” Sebastian heckled, maybe saving her from saying something that could be misconstrued as treasonous.

Isla threw him a scowl.

“You care a lot about the Alpha of Deimos,” Adrien quipped, though she glared at him too, not forgetting he’d known what was happening without telling her.

“I don’t,” Isla snipped. “It’s just going to be an absolute disaster for the hierarchy if he dies in there.”

“Well, alpha was never his to take,” Adrien said. “He’s proving to everyone that he’s worthy of it.”

As angry as she was, Isla understood.

Forged and welded with labyrinthine patterns, protected by the wards and blood-runes of witches, the Gate into the Wilds didn’t extend as tall as the stone in which it was set. Isla had her eyes fixated on it as she sat alone on the grass, stretching and trying to put herself in the right headspace again.

As the strength of its mystical reinforcements waned with time, it had long been debated whether to remove the passage entirely, bringing down the wrought iron and filling it with rock. But those who proposed the notion had been shot down. Despite the fact it had been centuries since its glory, people still clung to the fact that before the Wilds became the accursed region that it had, it was another kingdom full of their brothers and sisters that had been leveled, destroyed, and hexed by the most powerful witch their world had ever encountered. No other spellcasters from the witches’ continent across the ocean had been skilled enough to break it. At least, not the ones willing to do dealings with wolves. Which wasn’t many, if any of them.

Isla had learned the world hadn’t always been so divided. That there was a time when wolves and witches, the dwellers of the night and the sea, and even the immortal fae lived amongst each other through the five regions of the mortal plane. But that history was so ancient, thousands of years in the past, that they barely taught it anymore. All that mattered now was the wolves had settled and flourished on their own continent, and the veil between the four realms—the mortal, immortal, divine, and damned—had been entirely sealed, the fae banished along with it.

As Isla looked away from the Wall, trying to ease her mind of images she’d envisioned of what horror she’d be stalking into, she spotted him.

Kai, walking past in his hunter’s silks. Midnight-black—one of Deimos’s signature colors.

She scowled.

He was surrounded by a horde of people—councilmen, guards, other warriors, the respected reporters who’d gained entry to cover the revered event. Isla couldn’t imagine having so much commotion hovering around her just before she was to look death in the eye.