Chapter 9
*Section Twelve is ready,* she thought, the steady mantra calming the fire in her blood. *The gold is loaded into my carriage at the eastern postern. The safe-conduct writ is inked. Ten minutes, and I am gone.*
"The moon touches the highest ridge," Torin rasped, his voice echoing off the vaulted timber ceiling. He didn't sit. He leaned forward over the obsidian table, his knuckles white against the dark stone. "The terms were agreed upon at twilight. The Silverpine Mine becomes joint territory. The buffer zone is established. Sign the sheepskin, Ozias, or let the drums sound."
Ozias didn't move. He sat back in his high-backed timber chair, his large, calloused hands resting on the armrests, radiating the lethal calm of an apex predator watching an insect buzz against a windowpane.
"The ink is dry, Torin," Ozias replied, his spoken baritone rumbling deep in the floorboards. "The blood-seal requires only the prick of our thumbs. But you seem in an uncommon hurry to bleed."
Audra opened the invisible door.
She let her mind brush Torin’s temple.
The envoy’s thoughts were not those of a statesman concluding a bitter war; they were the thrashing, hyperventilating shrieks of a man running through a burning hallway:
*Keep him talking. Look at the water clock—five minutes until zenith. Five minutes until the sappers ignite the pitch beneath the eastern foundation. Chieftain Gunnar was right—Ozias will never let us keep fifty-five percent of that quartz. He’ll strangle us with refining tariffs before the spring thaw. The only peace for Frostbane is an ash heap. When the blast tears through the iron wall, the confusion will take his guard. Two bolts to his chest, one to the throat.*
A cold jolt of pure adrenaline shot through Audra’s veins.
*A blast?*
Her eyes flicked toward the eastern timber wall. Behind the heavy woolen tapestries, the support pillars were anchored directly into the granite bedrock. Pitch. They had smuggled alchemical pitch into the foundation piers during the afternoon recess, bypassing the neutral wards by using dormant volatile oils that carried no wolf scent.
Torin wasn't just planning an assassination; he was planning to bring the entire roof down on both delegations, relying on his guards' heavy armor to survive the cave-in while Calder’s line was crushed in the dark.
*Fools,* Audra thought coldly, her mind spinning with lethal calculations. *Desperate, barbaric fools.*
She turned her gaze toward Ozias, intending to read his combat posture, to see if his scouts had caught the smell of sulfur outside the perimeter.
She breached his mind.
What she found inside Ozias’s skull almost knocked her to her knees.
It wasn't tactical suspicion. It wasn't the measured readiness of a commanding general.
It was a raging, fractured tempest of utter devastation:
*Nathan’s scent is off. Why is his hand resting on the hilt of his short blade? The southern gate sentinels didn't answer my whistle when we crossed the courtyard. Damn them all to the black lochs—the elders sold me out. Elder Vane and the council councilors... they made a pact with Gunnar’s emissaries behind my back. They think I’m too young. They think my obsession with the rogue translator makes me weak, makes me unfit to lead the bloodline.*
The thought spiraled into an agonizing, raw crescendo that made Audra’s own chest ache with phantom suffocations:
*If my own wolves strike from behind, I can't hold the dais. The iron wards are suppressing my shift—my wolf is locked in my throat. I can take six of them with steel, but if they surround us, Audra is directly in the crossfire. Look at her. Standing there like a swan on a frozen pond. She doesn't know. She thinks this is a court of law. She thinks a piece of parchment will stop a pack of starving wolves.*
A sudden, fierce, possessive roar tore through his inner voice:
*I will tear out Nathan’s throat with my bare teeth before he takes a step toward her. I’ll burn this entire valley to cinder. If I fall tonight, she dies with me—no, by the moon, no. She has to run. The eastern postern. I have to break the line, grab her by the waist, and throw her out the rear door before the blades come out. Run, Audra. Look at me and run, damn you!*
Audra stared at him, her breath catching in her throat.
Ozias’s spoken face was an unreadable slab of marble, his amber eyes glittering with cold authority, but beneath that mask, the man was drowning in his own perceived slaughter. He thought his own Beta was leading a mutiny. He thought his council had betrayed him. And in the middle of his impending doom, his entire tactical priority was not saving his empire, nor saving his throne, but throwing his own body across hers to ensure she reached the postern gate.
*You stubborn, magnificent idiot,* she thought, a fierce, forbidden heat blooming behind her ribs.
He was wrong about Nathan. Audra had swept Nathan’s mind three minutes ago when the Beta took his position at the door; Nathan’s only thoughts were about the cold draft on his neck and whether the stable hands had properly salted the wagon tracks for the morning departure. Ozias was suffering from Alpha delirium—the heightened, paranoid hyper-vigilance that struck unmated sovereigns when their territory was threatened and their mate was exposed to danger.
His instincts were screaming that blood was coming, but because he couldn't see the unseen strings, he was misinterpreting the source. He thought the strike was coming from his own loyal wolves, while Torin was sitting across the table with a match in his boot, waiting for the moon to align with the skylight.
Two Alphas. Two armies. Both of them blind, violent beasts stumbling through the dark, ready to slaughter each other over shadows and lies.
And she was the only one in the room with eyes.
"Alpha Ozias," Torin said, his voice rising, sharp and jagged as chipped flint. "You have not answered. The moon is two fingers from the zenith. Will you take the silver pin and seal the parchment, or do we declare the armistice dead?"
Ozias’s right hand moved slowly off the timber armrest.
Audra saw the subtle shift in his weight—the tightening of his quadriceps, the slight flare of his nostrils as he gathered air into his lungs. He was preparing to launch himself across the table. He was going to initiate the slaughter himself, aiming to kill Torin before Nathan could stab him in the back, choosing to die fighting rather than be cornered like a beast in a pit.
*Three seconds,* Torin’s mind counted down with gleeful, deranged anticipation. *Two... the wick is burning in the low drain...*
"Hold."
The word was not loud, but it possessed the clear, ringing resonance of a struck silver bell.
Every head in the pavilion snapped toward the center of the dais.
Audra did not step back. She did not bow. She moved with deliberate, hypnotic grace, stepping out from behind the black obsidian table and positioning herself squarely between the two warbands, directly on the raised center flagstone where the ancestral bloodlines met.
The braziers cast long, flickering shadows across her face, accentuating the high, aristocratic line of her cheekbones and the icy, untouchable grey of her eyes.
