*Isaac*
I’m skipping three steps at a time as I chase after Maddy. She’s remarkably fast for someone who’s doesn’t even have a wolf, which grates my nerves to the point I’m gritting my teeth and needing to grip the walls, the banisters, or side tables to keep my footing as her tiny feet kick up carpet runners in her haste to get away from me.
“Why are you running?” I shout, but she disappears around another corner, her speed sending a whoosh of air in my direction that causes the paintings on the wall to rattle in their frames. This is insane. Me chasing her through the castle is insane. Her thinking my feelings for her don’t go farther than a business friendship-one reliant on occasionally closeness and intimacy–is particularly insane. “Maddy!”
“Leave me alone!” she cries, her voice hollow and echoing down the chamber nearing her bedroom. Her tone gives me pause, and I come to a screeching stop, my sneakers squealing on the freshly waxed tile. Her room is at the very end of a long hallway, but not long enough for me to not get to her door before she slams it in my face.
Yet, I stand still, watching her glance at me over her shoulder with tears streaming down her face before slipping into the dark recesses of her room.
A glance at my watch tells me I have approximately ten minutes until I have a meeting with my commanders at the tent city that has been erected outside the walls of the castle. After that, dinner with the Alphas who have brought their warriors to fight beside me when we leave for Moorn in two days' time. Less than two days, now that I think about it. The morning after my wedding, I’ll be gone. Off to war.
I roll my lower lip between my teeth and stalk toward her door.
“Maddy, let me in.” I jiggle the doorknob but she has it locked tight.
“Go away. Go–Go scheme with Louisa and Elodie.”
“That’s not very nice,” I mumble under my breath, fighting a sudden urge to use the powers I’ve let lay dormant for years. “I’m not scheming with them, Maddy. I already explained that to you.”
“Then why are they here?”
“If you let me in, I’ll do my best to articulate my thought process in allowing them to be here.”
“I’m not unlocking the door. Whatever you have to say, you can say it from there.” Her voice is broken by hiccups and sniffles. It guts me.
Grinding my teeth, I close my eyes and let a warm, tingling rush of power course into my fingertips, just enough to cause my hands to cast a soft, iridescent glow over the heavy wooden door and brass doorknob. The mechanisms inside the door begin to whirl and clink as my power penetrates the knob and drifts through the wood.
A rush of adrenaline washes over me like a tidal wave, and I’m momentarily swept away by my own powers. They’ve always been too much, far too much, for me to control when I use them.
Pushing past the creeping sensation that the powers I’m using now could do much more than just unlock a door, I slowly turn the knob. Maddy stands in the center of her room, the only light illuminating the room that of the setting sun. Rays of fuschia and gold light her up like a flame, her thick hair gently curling around her face as she turns to me with a shocked expression sharpening her features.
She looks down at my hands before I can tuck them behind my back. I lean my weight against the door to shut it, and without touching the latch, the door locks behind me.
“How did you do that?”
“Magic,” I tease, unable to stop myself from being an asshole. She flexes her jaw and looks me over with a critical eye until I exhale deeply and hold out my hands for her, a soft glow still ebbing through my veins. “I can’t heal the wounded like my mother, but I can unlock doors and…” Goddess, how could I possibly explain this next part? “And be everywhere, all at once.”
“What do you–”
A ripple of energy unsettles the air between us, and suddenly, I’m directly in front of her. I haven’t taken a single step. I’m just there, having broken through the folds of time and space itself. “Cool, right?”
“Oh, no, no, no,” she breathes, shaking her head as she takes several steps backward. “What the fuck was that, Isaac?”
“I see you’ve been spending more time in the servants’ quarters and picking up their colorful euphemisms,” I say casually, tucking my hands in my pockets and ignoring the sudden sharp ache in my left temple. “It’s just a little party trick. It comes in handy during times like these.”
“Which one? You being able to unlock any door or turning to mist or apparating again several feet from where you were?”
“Both,” I say after a moment of consideration, giving her a shrug. “Since we’re to be married tomorrow I assume now is as good a time as ever to show you what I really am, and why you’re in no danger here with your–with that witch Louisa here in the castle. I did tell you I had powers.”
“You never elaborated–”
“I don’t use them every often,” I cut in, a little more firmly than before. “I can’t.”
“Why not? What else can you do? Why use your powers to unlock my door and just–just appear like a ghost in here, instead?”
“I didn’t want to scare you, that's why. As for what else I can, I can’t show you inside the castle.”
“Why not?”
“Because everything in this room will be destroyed.”
Her eyes go momentarily wide. “What do you mean?”
“My wolf can do something, but I have a hard time controlling it, which is why I don’t use my powers unless it’s absolutely necessary. Like now.”
“I would hardly say this is a necessary time–”
“Maddy, do you not trust me?” My tone is harsher than I mean for it to be. She looks up at me, then down her feet. I step forward, attempting to close the distance between us, but she takes a step back.
“I don’t understand why you invited them here.”
“My father insisted on it.”
She looks up at me, her eyes shining in the light of the sunset. That stormy, blueish-gray color looks even more dramatic contrasted against the rays of gold streaming across her face.
“I didn’t know they were coming until they showed up. That’s the truth. This was my parents’ doing, but I support the idea of them attending the wedding. It gave me the opportunity I needed to face the woman responsible for what you went through.”
“That doesn’t matter to me. Revenge doesn’t matter–”
“It matters to me. To think that my wife–” My own words are like a knife to the gut. Wife. It means so much to me, more than it should, given the circumstances. She catches my sudden hesitation to continue and takes another step away before turning her back to me.
“I don’t want to talk about this right now. You should go. I’m sure you have… a lot to do to prepare to leave for battle.”
That strikes a nerve. “Maddy, you may think that’s the most important thing to me–”
“It is, isn’t it? You got what you wanted. Me being here, masquerading as your fiancee, marrying you tomorrow. It earned you those warriors, and now you can go off to battle without feeling like you didn’t do everything you could to protect your kingdom–”
“I did this for my family.” The air in the room goes still and heavy with a charge that threatens to bring the castle down to rubble. I step toward her, and she has nowhere else to go now, the wall directly behind her. “I had no choice.”
“I don’t understand–”
“My mother has visions. Ella has visions. I’ve had one in my entire life, and it was the reason I insisted my father give me the throne I wasn’t ready for. It was the reason I spent the last three years of my life becoming something I wasn’t, something cold and brutal and merciless.”
I can feel my power begin to throb again in my fingertips, begging for release. Begging me to let go of my restraints.
“I was sixteen. I went to bed like normal, and when I woke up, I knew my future. I knew the date of my own death.”
“Isaac–”
“I saw a battlefield littered with the bodies of my friends, my people, my warriors. I saw cities toppled and flames touching the sky. I saw temples coated in the blood of the people who worshiped there. And then I saw my parents and my sister nailed to their thrones, dead and decaying. And she came to me, Maddy. The Goddess. She showed me her Diamond of Faith, that ultimate prize that my father risked his life to return. The same diamond that saved my mother’s life when I was born. It saved me, but now I owe the Goddess a debt. She showed me two outcomes, one with the death of my family and the erasure of my kingdom, her kingdom, her people. She said an Alpha King must die, so I decided I would be that Alpha King, not my father.” I rested a hand on the post of her bed.
Maddy’s eyes shimmer with tears, but she says nothing.
“I came into my wolf the next morning. But there was a catch, something even my mother can’t sense. I was born to be the Goddess’s ultimate warrior, and my powers are tailored to that.”
“Show me.”
“I can’t,” I say.
“I can’t let you do this–”
“I don’t expect you, Maddy. I was ready to go into war against a threat that has even the Goddess’s hackles raised without a second thought. I was ready to lay down my life. I planned on having Ella take the throne in my stead. It’s her right as second in line, but the Alphas wanted me to marry, and I needed their men beside me in the event I failed, or died before I could face Alpha King Kane, so I had to marry. I had to find a Luna for my kingdom. And then, you… you showed up again. You were the only thing that ever broke me out of the fucking trance I’ve been in since my sixteenth birthday. You were the only thing that could take my mind off the fact I am going to die when I’m twenty-four birthday. And when I lost you, I could focus. I could think clearly again.”
Maddy’s face screws up in a pained scowl, tears rolling off her lashes. “I’m sorry to have wrecked your grand plans of laying down your life for your kingdom–”
“You are the only thing keeping me from running into the battlefield right now and falling on King Kane’s sword to fulfill whatever fucked up prophecy I’m in the center of. You are the only reason I want to fight for a way home, and it’s killing me, Maddy, knowing I finally found you at the same moment I’m called away by the Goddess. The only regret I have in life is that you and I didn’t have more time.”
Maddy’s face cracks, her eyes squeezing shut against her tears. I want to touch her, to pull her to my chest and feel her warm weight against mine, but I can’t. I can’t touch her right now, not when my hands are still trembling with power, and the leash I have on the beast inside is starting to fray. I want to rip the world apart, shatter it to pieces, and lay it at her feet if it gives us only a minute more to be together.
But my watch buzzes, alerting me to the time. The commanders need me.
“Be dressed and ready for dinner at eight. The Alphas of the ten nearest territories will be dining here tonight. You’ll sit to my right.” I turn and walk out the door, choking on the three words I’ve left unsaid.