Cain chuckled low. “Get used to it. Things change fast around here.”
I just shook my head, but the corner of my mouth betrayed me, curving faintly. For the first time in days, the air didn’t feel quite so suffocating.
Kael’s shoulders tensed suddenly, his breath catching like he’d just been jolted awake. “I—” He gripped my arm, eyes darting between me and Cain. “I have so many things to tell you. That place… Hades, you don’t understand. I heard them talking about Ellen. They said she ran away.” His voice pitched higher, urgent. “And there’s this thing—”
He faltered, shuddering, like the memory scraped something raw inside him. “He looked dead. Dead, but young. But fucking scary. Pale as bone. Not a Lycan. Not a werewolf. I don’t even think he was—” He broke off, words tumbling into breathless fragments. “I heard him ranting, muttering about—”
“Kael.” My voice cut clean through his spiral. He stilled, chest heaving.noveldrama
I held his gaze. “We have Ellen here.”
His head snapped up. “What?”
“Ellen’s twin,” I said, letting the weight of the truth land between us. “The rebellion rescued her. She’s here, in the compound. Alive.”
For a moment, Kael just stared at me, as if trying to decide whether I was mocking him. Then something in his face shifted—relief, disbelief, and a sliver of fear, all tangled together. “You’re serious.”
“I wouldn’t joke about this.”
“How could she manage that?”
“Manage what?”
“Escaping,”
“You don’t seem to believe she did,”
“The thing, it was… I could feel it. He is the marker.”
“Marker?”
“Darius is not marking people on his own. He uses this creature. He uses the horn. They planned to mark me. He planned to imprint, the mark of Malrik on me.”
My stomach dropped as he turned his back. On him was what looked like a tattoo, but it half of what I could only recognise as a letter M.
Hades
The world spun around, every single thing losing colour in an instant. I reached for the wretched mark. Every other sound dull against the roaring of my own pulse against my ears.
I traced the jagged incomplete letter, my fingers twitching from the strength it took not to try and rip it off his body. But I knew well it could never be that simple, it would do no good.
I was less of a mark and more of an indentation scribbled into the skin. My breath caught, as I look in the cruel symbol. It pigment was darker, more arcane than simple ink. It could have been my paranoia and shock but I could hear it speak.
Ice carved its way up my finger tips, to my arms. I could feel it’s daunting coolness rake it’s sway through my chest to my heart and lungs— squeezing and tightening until my breathing thinned and turned shallow.
Though it was incomplete, horror gripped me like a wicked tendrils that refused to relent. When I spoke, my voice was not mine, not fully. It sounded distant to my still ringing ears.
Kael turned around to face me, I could see the way he tried to push down his own worry in order not to aggravate mine. He gulped but even that singular action looked painful. “I got far enough that I started to hear voices in my head. It not just some mind control, it is pressure.”
Someone behind me gasped.
Kael continues, ensuring that he held my gaze, trying to steady me even though he was the one that had been marked. “It pushes against your own thoughts, sieves through your memory like a hand through a file of documents. Then it puts in commands using your memory, aspirations and self has a …as a disguise,” he finished, his voice rasping. “So when you follow the order, you think it’s your own idea. You believe it. You’ll fight to defend it because you can’t separate it from who you are anymore.”
His words landed like stones in my gut. I’d seen mind control before—feral rage, compulsions, psychic manipulation—but this… this was worse. This was the theft of self dressed as free will.
I forced myself to take a slow breath, though it scraped ice through my lungs. “How long until it… takes hold?”
“He was close, but I continued to refuse. So they tried to weaken me physically. They beat me.”
The flames of anger were stoked at he continued to speak, fighting my hardest not to launch something into the wall.
“But it didn’t work, I refused but then they…” Kael cringed, his face contorting into something in between disgust and horror as though he was still at their mercy.
“They brought the wolfbane,” Cain supplied, his voice clipped. Long gone was the playfulness of before.
“They injected it little by little,” Kael bit his lip, hard. “Troy tried to take it, but it really did a number on me. And then it hit him hard enough to knock him out and without my wolf…”
I took over from him “…you were nothing but a man for them to break,” I finished, my jaw tight enough to ache.
Kael’s silence was answer enough. His eyes were still rimmed red, still fighting not to shake, dropped to the floor.
The image clawed into my mind: Kael, bound and bleeding, wolfsbane running like poison fire through his veins, his wolf’s presence ripped away until he was left bare in a place where being human meant being prey. I felt it in my bones, the vulnerability, the cold, the taste of iron in the mouth that never quite goes away. For more chapters visit find[ɴ]ovel.net
Little hurried footsteps permeated the fog of rage that had held my mind captive, Sage ran past me and to Kael.
Her shoulders were quaking, her little frame trembling as she patted Kael head, rubbing. “He… hurt you,” I wept. “I am… sorry… you got hurt.”
Kael blinked, caught off guard by this child trying her best to console him, even when she didn’t bother trying to console herself. “I am… sorry that… our king hurt… you.”
Kael’s mouth opened, but no words came—just a tremor in his throat, like her apology had struck someplace deeper than any blade could reach. His gaze flicked to me, as if to ask whether she understood what she was saying… or whether I did.
I did. And it was worse for it.
Her words weren’t just about the bruises or the wolfsbane. They carried something heavier, unspoken—the echo of all the things I had done in the name of war, in the name of control. And somehow, without knowing the full scope, she’d laid them bare in a handful of trembling syllables.
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