Wild Wolf (Darkmore Penitentiary Book 4)

“Mason,” I gasped, scrambling across the ice and dirt which separated me from him, the blood of the Dragon he’d killed in his final moments staining the ground all around us.

Benjamin hadn’t shifted back into his Fae form upon his death the way most Fae did and the hulking mass of his dead body shadowed the fallen form of Cain before him.

I dropped to my knees at his side, taking his hand and gripping it fiercely, tears burning the backs of my eyes as his fingers failed to curl around mine.

“You can’t leave me,” I told him, a snarl riding up my throat with the words, my skin tingling with power as I called on everything I was, trying to force healing magic into his flesh.

But I couldn’t find the thread of his magic to bind mine to. Couldn’t find that intrinsic piece of him which defined the place his soul and his power mixed, creating an alleyway for my own magic to tether to his.

My view of his features shimmered and blurred, tears marring the bloodstained skin, making it harder for me to look at him.

His shirt had been burned from his flesh in several large patches, the curse which I had given him standing out starkly even through the blood and gore that stained him. It had spread. Further and further it had spread until it coated him like he was a canvas constructed for its art.

I shook my head, my insides twisting into a sharp-edged knife as I looked at the stain on his flesh and felt the weight of their burden. The moon had cursed him for my sake and now I felt the heavy shackles of responsibility weighing down on me too. I’d done this. I was the one who had spoken the words. His fate might have been different without this tarnishing his destiny.

“I won’t accept this fate,” I growled, my gaze lifting from Cain’s too-still features and finding the sky above where clouds shrouded the celestial being who was bound to me as surely as I was bound to it. “I won’t.”

My skin tingled as power grew within me, the cool light of the moon shimmering to the surface of my flesh and lighting me up from the inside out.

The clouds themselves seemed to pay attention as more light spilled from me, coating me in armour and calling out to the moon to face me and they parted to make way for her to see me.

Moonlight puddled over us, dripping from the sky, soaking us in its light as surely as if we had been doused in water.

I clung to Cain harder, my eyes burning with the brightness of the moonlight as I glared up at the sky and bared my teeth.

“He paid with his life for mine,” I spat. “He gave everything so that I might survive. But what is my survival worth if I can find no joy in it? Every moment of my life has been tarnished by the pain I have suffered in one form or another. At the hands of my papa, in the brutality of war, from the loss of the man I loved to that underground hell and now this? How much more will you watch me suffer?”

The moonlight continued to spill from the sky, falling over us in sparkling lumps which appeared like snowflakes. They tumbled past me, all of them moving with purpose, directing themselves onto Cain, touching down on his skin and melting into his flesh in every place where the curse had stained it.

I sucked in a sharp breath and held it, my tears spilling down my cheeks then falling still as I watched in amazement while the moon washed him free of the curse, every piece of it fading away until nothing at all was left.

But as I tightened my hold on his hand, expecting his lids to flutter, his grip to close around mine, his lips to part on a ragged breath, instead I was gifted nothing but that stillness.

I shook my head, refusing to believe that the moon would abandon me now, when I needed her more than ever, when I was so close to shattering without her.

Because she had heeded my call to break the curse.

But that wasn’t enough to return Cain from the claws of death.