The Wolf King | A Fantasy Romance

Chapter Four

Shouts fill the castle and torchlight flickers as I'm carried through a labyrinth of stone corridors.

I struggle against my captor, but his thick arm only tightens around my waist.

I do not know where I'd run to even if I did escape him. Sebastian? My father? Would that be any better? Would it be worse?

Trapped as I am, something wild seems to have knocked loose inside me. It rattles around in my chest and I do not feel the hopelessness I should be feeling. The anger I have caged since my mother died surges hot and free through my veins.

I am not stone. I am not a statue.

I am fire.

And somehow it has taken this man, this beast, to make me see it.

I pound against the alpha's back. "Get off me, you bloody horrible brute." My hair catches in my mouth. I kick my bare feet and hit nothing but air. "Get off me. You'll die for this, you horrible—" I cut myself off as we turn a corner.

There are two guards lying in a pool of blood. The alpha steps over the bodies, and I'm forced to stare down at their lifeless faces as he continues onward.

The reality of my situation slams fully into me.

These men are dangerous. They're killers. They're Wolves.

Of course being taken away from my homeland by the enemies of my people is worse than staying. Of course it is. And yet. . .

The alpha cuts through one of the servants' passageways, almost as if he knows where he is going, even if I am lost, and a scream from a lady-in-waiting pierces my ears. She catches my eye as we pass, then runs in the opposite direction, her dark hair falling free from her cap.

The alpha won't make it out of here.

They'll imprison him until the full moon, then skin him alive.

The thing that's knocked loose in my chest becomes frantic. My heart pounds wildly in my chest.

"She's gone to get help, you horrible brute," I hiss at him. "There are guards stationed only a couple of minutes away."

"Aye?" he says, his voice low. He quickens his pace, half running down the servants' staircase. "Thank you."

I cling onto his shoulders, my fingers digging into his muscles, my body jolting against his back. "I wasn't. . . I wasn't trying to help you!" I say, shrilly.

Although I wonder, as I say it, if that is entirely true.

The alpha goes left, then right, bursting into a wider corridor. I recognize the mural of warriors slaughtering Wolves on the wall. It shows our victory in the Battle of the Beasts a century ago, and it is close to the western entrance hall.

He is almost free of this place. I am almost—

"Halt." A male voice cuts through the quiet.

The alpha stills. Two guards block the corridor ahead. They have the sigil of the Southlands, a sun, painted onto their shields. My father's men.

"Is that the princess?" one says incredulously.

The other chuckles. "Oh, I don't envy you, dog. Do you know what they do to your kind up here?"

The rattle of swords signals three more guards stepping into the corridor behind us. I breathe in sharply.

"Don't kill it," says one of them—a burly looking man with the silver star of the Borderlands on his breastplate. "Lord Sebastian will want to spend some time with this one."