Chapter 9
The realization slammed into my chest like an iron mace.
*The Scapegoat.*
"You understand now, don't you?" Raymond smiled, a grotesque display of yellowed teeth. "Logan performed the forbidden Scapegoat Severance. He reversed the polarity of the bond. To the eyes of cosmic law, Logan did not break his vows—*you* did. The entire divine penalty of perjury before the Moon Goddess has been assigned to your soul. The sky does not punish him. The sky is coming to execute *you*."
A suffocating cold seized my throat, instantly eclipsed by an explosion of murderous rage.
"And the High Court?" I choked out. "They think he ascends blameless?"
"To the High Court scribes, he is an immaculate widower whose mortal anchor died of a tragic pack blight, leaving him pure and free to take Lady Seraphina's hand," Raymond sneered. "And by the time the High Sovereign places the crown upon his head tomorrow at dawn, the retribution storm above our valley will have pulverized you into nothingness. The cosmic debt will be marked paid. The evidence of his perjury will be ash. House Silverpine will rise to royal blood, and your disposable little life will have served its singular purpose."
He raised his hand and gestured to the four enforcers behind him.
"Restrain her. Drag her up to the ancestral altar and bind her to the stone rings. The celestial storm breaks in two hours. Let the sky have its sacrifice."
The four enforcers moved forward, their boots crunching on the straw, blades leveled.
My inner wolf—starving, half-rotted by the necrotic drag, battered by weeks of poison—suddenly raised her head inside my consciousness. She didn't whimper. She didn't cower. She let out a roar of primal, unadulterated hatred that rattled my ribs.
*Kill them.*
I didn't wait for them to close the distance.
I kicked the heavy brass chest between us with all my remaining strength. The massive trunk slid across the smooth flagstones, slamming into the shins of the first two enforcers with a bone-cracking thud. They yelled, stumbling backward.
Before the third warrior could raise his short-sword, I lunged.
My silver dagger flashed in the torchlight. I ducked beneath his wild swing, sliding my blade with vicious precision through the gap in his leather armor beneath his armpit. He choked, dark blood spraying across the stone as he collapsed.
"Seize her!" Raymond shrieked, backing away toward the doorway.
The fourth warrior swung his blade in a vicious horizontal arc aimed at my neck.
I didn't have the strength to parry. The necrotic pulse in my chest flared, blinding my vision with sparks of violet light. I threw myself to the floor, rolling beneath the arc of the steel, but the tip of his blade caught my shoulder, slicing through the tactical leather and biting deep into the muscle.
Pain flared—hot, sharp, and clean.
It cleared the gray fog from my brain.
I sprang up from the roll, using my momentum to drive the pommel of my secondary dagger straight into the bridge of his nose. Cartilage shattered. He staggered back, blind with blood, and I followed through with a sweeping kick that drove his head hard against the corner of the marble altar. He dropped like a sack of grain.
Donald stepped into the doorway, returning from the catacombs with a drawn sword, his eyes wide with horror as he saw the blood-soaked floor.
"Clara!" he stammered, his sword trembling in his grip. "Stop! You can't fight the edict of the High Court—"
"Get out of my way, Donald," I said, my voice dead, freezing, stripped of everything that had once made me a merciful Luna.
He raised his blade. "I cannot let you leave."
I didn't waste breath on words. I closed the distance in two strides.
He was stronger than me, broad-shouldered and uninjured, but he was hesitating—weighed down by the guilt of a coward. I used his hesitation against him. I feinted high with my right blade, and as his guard snapped up, my left hand drove the flat of my dagger hilt directly into his throat.
Donald gagged, dropping his sword as he collapsed to his knees, clawing at his windpipe.
I stepped over him without a second glance.
Raymond was already scrambling up the spiral staircase, shouting for the courtyard sentries.
I pursued him up the dark stone steps, my boots leaving bloody smears in the damp dust. My wounded shoulder throbbed with every heartbeat, but it was nothing compared to the agony tearing through my mating mark.
With every second that passed, the invisible tether tightened.
It was no longer just drinking my vitality. It was pulling downward, vibrating with a high, piercing frequency that set my teeth on edge. The air in the stairwell grew heavy, thick with the smell of ozone and approaching thunder.
I burst out of the lower catacombs into the grand chapel of the manor.
Above, through the stained-glass dome depicting the ancient wolves of the northern peaks, the sky was not the deep, velvety black of a mountain night.
It was bruised.
Violent, swirling eddies of electric violet and rusted iron clouds choked the heavens, spinning in a massive, churning vortex directly over the Silverpine valley. The wind outside roared like an army of screaming ghosts, tearing tiles from the roof and rattling the heavy oak doors of the chapel until the iron bolts groaned.
The sky was looking for its oathbreaker.
And its eye was locked squarely on me.
***
I didn't run to the courtyard. There was nowhere to run.
The celestial drag held me pinned to the earth like an invisible spear through my sternum. Every step away from the center of the valley felt like pulling against ten thousand pounds of tension.
I dragged myself toward the sacred cavern beneath the ridge—the very place where the ritual had begun.
If I was to be executed by the heavens for a crime I did not commit, I would not die like a rat in Raymond's cellar. I would face the sky on the stones where Logan had knelt, where he had spoken his lying vows, where his treachery had poisoned the earth.
I staggered into the cavern.
The air here was suffocating. The carved limestone channels on the floor, once glowing with soft phosphor light, were now smoking with a foul, acrid black steam.
The circle was open.
High above, through the natural chimney fissure in the cavern roof, the swirling eye of the storm was visible. A ring of blinding violet light spun against the blackness of the clouds, cracking with silent, jagged tendrils of celestial lightning that illuminated the jagged stalactites like the teeth of a giant beast.
I collapsed onto my hands and knees in the center of the ritual ring.
"Logan!" I screamed at the open sky, the sound ripping from my throat, raw and bloody. "Look at me! Look at what you left behind, you coward!"
The clouds answered with a deafening crack of thunder that shook the mountain to its granite roots.
A blast of concussive force slammed downward through the fissure, flattening me against the stone.
The mating mark on my collarbone exploded into blinding light.
It wasn't red. It was a vile, blazing violet, matching the color of the storm above. The necrotic veins that had spread across my chest and neck flared with searing, unholy heat, burning through my skin until the scent of scorched flesh filled the cavern.
