Chapter 9
He didn't flinch. He didn't scream.
He reached up with his left hand, grabbing the thick boiled leather of his cuirass at the collar, and ripped it down the center.
The leather split with a sharp pop. The frayed linen beneath tore away, baring his broad, scarred chest to the bitter arctic air and the crimson light of the dying moon.
Directly over his sternum, carved into the skin above his thundering heart, was an intricate, pulsing glyph of obsidian.
It was the master keystone.
The dark glass was embedded an inch deep into his breastbone, radiating a web of black, necrotic lines that branched across his ribs like the roots of a poisonous tree. It was the central hub where all four floor-chains converged—the final, absolute lock holding his soul to the altar.
Heath looked up at her, his amber eyes burning with an incandescent, holy fire.
He reached out and wrapped his large, calloused hand around her right wrist—the hand holding the heartbane dagger.
Wrenley tried to wrench her arm back, panic clawing at her throat. “Heath, stop! Stop, please!”
“Take it, Wrenley,” he commanded, his grip unbreakable even in his weakened state. He pulled her forward until she was kneeling between his thighs once more, until the needle-sharp tip of her black alloy blade rested directly against the center of the obsidian rune on his chest.
She could feel the violent, frantic hammering of his heart against the steel.
“Heath, don't do this,” she sobbed, her composure entirely shattered. The elite, cold-blooded assassin of the Northern Council was gone, reduced to a weeping girl clinging to the only man who had ever seen her for what she was. “I won't kill you. I won't!”
“You are not killing me, my fierce, beautiful wolf,” Heath whispered, his thumb stroking the trembling tendons of her wrist with infinite tenderness. “You are releasing me. You are giving me an honorable end by the hand of the only woman I will ever love.”
Across the hall, Garyth’s voice rang out, sharp and impatient.
“What are you waiting for, rogue? Strike! Strike his heart, and claim your freedom!”
The Council enforcers began to pound the hafts of their spears against their shields in a terrifying, rhythmic cadence.
*THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.*
The subterranean quakes responded in kind, matching the soldiers’ rhythm, beating against the bedrock like the footsteps of a rising god. The fissure across the hall widened to three feet, swallowing two pillars that collapsed into the black maw below with a deafening crash.
The eclipse reached its apex.
Above, the last sliver of white lunar light vanished. The world plunged into a terrifying, blood-red twilight.
The runes along Heath’s chains flared violently, shifting from violet to a sickening, necrotic black. The veins across his chest turned purple, swelling as the abyssal force beneath the floor began to drain the final droplets of his life force.
A choked, agonizing groan ripped from Heath’s throat. He was losing control. The lock was giving way on its own.
“Now, Wrenley!” Heath choked out, his amber eyes wide with urgent, desperate love. His hand tightened over hers, guiding the dagger, his knuckles white. “Drive it home! Take the credit! Take the gold!”
“I love you,” she sobbed, her fingers trembling against the hilt, caught between his irresistible strength and her inner wolf’s agonizing screams.
Heath looked up into her tear-streaked face.
He didn't look at the two hundred blades waiting to butcher them. He didn't look at the gaping abyss tearing the hall apart. He looked only at her, his lips parting in a faint, beautiful smile that defied the darkness closing in around them.
“Run, little wolf,” he whispered, his voice soft, sweet, and absolute in its devotion. “Before what sleeps beneath me wakes.”
With a final, desperate surge of his fading strength, Heath pulled her hand downward.
The heartbane blade struck the center of the obsidian rune.
*CRACK.*
The sound was not that of metal cutting flesh. It was the sound of a cosmic seal shattering like cheap glass.
The obsidian glyph on his sternum fractured into a thousand spiderweb lines of blinding, white-hot fracture.
For half a second, the universe held its breath.
Then, the entire continent tore open.
A primordial, cataclysmic roar—a sound born of ancient darkness, uncounted millennia of hunger, and apocalyptic wrath—ripped upward from the subterranean abyss, blasting the granite floor to powder and shaking the mountains to their very roots.
