Chapter 187: You Will Come Back Crawling

EDELINA

My breath caught.

"...Convince your boy that I am you," he continued, tilting his head. His voice dropped into a low, intimate register that sent the hairs along my arms rising. "Ride on the embers of your remaining life. Walk into the dungeon wearing your skin, and get him to unlock my prison with a mother’s tears. It would be so easy, Edelina. You are so tired after all."

"Lycaon."

He stopped.

The coldness in his eyes receded. His shoulders slackened, and he drew a long breath, as though trying to shake off something that had settled over him.

"I’m sorry," he said, his voice rough. "That was... I’m frustrated. I’ve been trapped in that box for so long, and I don’t always..."

"No."

I stepped back, a cold, lucid anger rising to meet the fear twisting in my stomach.

"That was you. That was exactly you." I held his gaze, refusing to let him hide behind an apology or whatever excuse he was about to offer. "I know you, Lycaon. I have always known you."

I drew myself up. "You suck."

For a heartbeat, neither of us moved.

"Fuck this," he muttered. Then he lunged.

I kicked without thinking, my heel catching him squarely in the knee. The impact staggered him, buying me just enough time to twist away and run.

The grass whipped against my legs as I sprinted across the meadow. The strange brass-colored sky seemed to dip closer, pressing down on the horizon, and the ground blurred beneath my feet. Behind me came the sharp crack of breaking bones, followed by a wet, tearing sound that made my stomach turn.

I didn’t look back. I didn’t need to.

A black wolf the size of a giant moose burst through the grass behind me, its paws tearing into the earth as it charged. I could hear it gaining on me, its breath and the thunder of its footfalls growing louder with every second. There was no world in which I could outrun something that size, but I ran anyway.

Then the ground changed beneath my feet.

Vines erupted from the soil, thick and pale as ropes, twisting around my ankles before I could leap over them. I stumbled, caught myself, and tried to wrench free, but more vines surged up around my knees and coiled around my waist.

I clawed at them, pulling until my fingers ached. They only tightened, winding around my body with a relentless, almost deliberate patience.

Panic threatened to swallow me.

I thought of my bedroom, the window, the plain grey ceiling above my bed. I thought of waking up, of tearing myself out of this place before Lycaon could do whatever he had decided to do to me.

"Leave. Leave. Wake up."

I didn’t have much time before his wolf struck me from behind.

I hit the ground hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs. The vines surged over my arms and across my chest, binding me in layers of green until I could scarcely move. They wound around me like the wrappings of a corpse prepared for burial, pinning my limbs against my body.

The wolf’s weight settled heavily across my back.

I struggled beneath it, but the vines held me fast. Then the weight lifted, and the growling stopped.

There was no wolf anymore.

Only a man’s hand closed around my shoulder and turned me onto my back.

Lycaon knelt over me, his face inches from mine. He had returned to his human form, but there was nothing human in the expression he wore. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his amber eyes burned with a hunger I had never seen directed at me before.

"I will be taking that body," he said.

His hand tightened on my shoulder. Before I could wrench myself away, his fingers began to lengthen, the nails sharpening into curved claws.

"No!" I screamed. "No, no, no!"

I woke with the word still lodged in my throat.

The room was black and cold, and my nightgown clung to my ribs, soaked through with sweat. My heart hammered so violently that I could feel the pulse of it in my fingertips. I dragged in a breath, then another, each one coming out ragged and uneven as I struggled to convince myself that I was awake.

Then something stung along my throat.

I touched it gingerly.

My fingertips came away dark with blood.

For a moment, I simply stared at them, unable to make sense of what I was seeing. Then I threw back the sheets and stumbled across the room, my bare feet slapping against the cold floor. I reached the mirror and switched on the little lamp beside it.

A thin red line marked my neck. The cut was shallow, no longer than a finger, but its shape was unmistakable. One clean stroke, as though a single claw had dragged across my skin.

My stomach turned.

I leaned closer to the glass, searching for some reasonable explanation, some sign that I had scratched myself in my sleep or caught my neck on something sharp. I found nothing.

Then the mirror began to fog.

I watched, too frightened to move, as condensation spread from the center of the glass, swallowing my reflection beneath a milky haze. Slowly, a line appeared in the mist. Then another. The letters formed one after the other, as though an invisible finger were writing on the other side.

You will come back crawling.

The words glistened in the condensation, their edges already beginning to run.

I stared at them, and the cold that had settled in my chest during the nightmare spread into my arms, my stomach, my knees. He had followed me out. Somehow, impossibly, he had followed me out to haunt me.

"Fuck you," I whispered.

My voice trembled, but I forced the words out again.

"Fuck you."

Louder this time, with enough anger to drown out the fear, at least for a second.

"Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!"

I swung my fist at the mirror.

The glass shattered beneath the blow, cracking in a spiderweb of jagged lines before fragments spilled into the sink. Pain ripped across my knuckles, sharp enough to bring tears to my eyes. I snatched my hand back and stood there panting, watching blood well from three shallow cuts.

The message had broken apart with the glass. Each fragment held a piece of the sentence, the words fractured and scattered among distorted reflections of my face.

A harsh sound came from the window.

Caw.

I spun around.

A raven sat on the outer sill, a dark silhouette against the moonlit glass. One bright eye remained fixed on me, unblinking, as though it had been watching the entire time.

Then it tilted its head, slowly and deliberately, the way a person might when studying something that had finally caught their attention.

"What the fuck?" I breathed.

I crossed the room in four strides and yanked the curtains shut, my pulse pounding as though I had just outrun something far more dangerous than a bird. My skin crawled beneath the damp fabric of my nightgown. I stood with one hand gripping the curtain, listening to the silence beyond it and trying to slow my breathing.

Then something occurred to me.

It was the middle of the night. Ravens were not nocturnal.

I pulled the curtains aside and shoved the window open, letting a rush of cold air wash over my damp skin.

Nothing.

The sill was empty. Below, the courtyard lay silent beneath the moonlight, its silver glow spilling across the stone paths. The trees stood motionless, their branches casting long shadows against the walls. There was no movement among the rooftops, no flutter of wings beneath the eaves, not so much as a stray feather on the windowsill.

I leaned farther out, scanning the dark line of the palace wall and the empty spaces between the buildings.

Where the hell had it gone?

A knock sounded at my door.

I flinched so violently that my shoulder struck the window frame.

"Who is it?" I demanded, my voice still unsteady.

"The sentinel assigned to your quarters, Your Majesty." The young man’s voice came muffled through the wood, uncertain but respectful. "I heard some noise. Is everything all right?"

My gaze drifted back to the broken mirror. Jagged pieces of glass lay scattered across the place, and a dark smear of blood marked the fragments nearest the tap.

I closed my eyes briefly.

"I broke a mirror," I called back, forcing my voice into something approaching composure. "It’s nothing. An Omega can clean it up in the morning."

There was a short pause.

"Very well, Your Majesty."

His footsteps retreated down the corridor, fading into the palace’s quiet.

Only then did I release the breath I had been holding. I leaned against the window frame, suddenly aware of how badly my hands were shaking. My throat stung where the claw had cut me, and my knuckles throbbed with every beat of my heart. When I looked down, a thin line of blood traced the creases of my fingers, bright against my skin.

Lycaon was insane.

I had always known it, somewhere beneath the years of resentment, the attraction I had never entirely managed to kill, and the foolish hope that he might still be capable of choosing someone other than himself.

I had simply never been this close to proof.