Chapter 141 The Brotherhood
ADRIANA
None of them moved.
We stood in that light that had no source, four of them and me, and the stillness had an energy to it that I recognized from the training field, the moment before something begins, when both sides are assessing the other and neither wants to be the one who reveals their full hand first.
I had no intention of being that person.
“I should tell you something before we start,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect. “You’re not going to be able to kill me. I want to be clear about that now so that when it doesn’t happen, neither of us has to pretend to be surprised.”
The Grandmaster’s mouth curved. Not a smile exactly. The expression of someone who has heard overconfidence before and found it mildly interesting.
“We have heard similar things from wolves like you,” he said. “Every one of them believed exactly what you believe right now. We are still here. They are not.”
“I’m not like the others.”
“No.” He tilted his head slightly, studying me with those dark eyes that had looked at too many things for too long and stopped being moved by most of them. “You’re not. You’ve been considerably more trouble than the others. I’ll give you that much.” he nodded, sounding almost impressed. Like he found me a worthy opponent.
I like that. I needed to keep him talking. Yara was telling me it wasn’t time yet. There was something she was building toward, some threshold she needed me to hold the space open for. So I talked.
“Tell me about the brotherhood,” I said. “How it started. I want to understand what I’m dealing with.”
He looked at me with the particular expression of a man who enjoys his own knowledge and rarely gets to display it to an audience who might actually grasp it. I had read him correctly.
He’s arrogant.
“The cult was not created by men,” he began. “It was created by the goddess herself, in the earliest days. She made the first wolves, the founding brothers, seven kings, one for each of the first packs. She gave them everything. Power beyond what any being before them had possessed. She equipped them as the apex of what she could create.”
I tracked the other three brothers with my peripheral vision while keeping my face and attention directed at him. They were positioned in a loose formation. Each one placed to cover an angle. They were going to move simultaneously when the order came and they were going to come from multiple directions at once.
I filed that away.
“And then she changed her mind,” I said.
His expression flickered briefly. Surprised that I had known this. Good.
“She determined that what she had created was a mistake. That she had given too much to beings who were not ready to hold it responsibly. She moved to reclaim it.” He paused. “The brothers refused. Seven kings, one decision, unanimous. They were not going to surrender what they had built. So they found a way to ensure the power stayed — they turned it toward darkness, because power used for darkness cannot be recalled the way power used for light can. It roots differently.”
The sound of the battle outside made my ears perk. I wondered where Elijah was. Whether he had gotten free. Whether Hazel’s unit was still intact.
I stayed focused on the man in front of me.
“So the goddess let them go,” I said.
“She had no choice. They were no longer what she had made. They had made themselves into something she had no claim over.” He looked at me with something that might have been pride if it weren’t so cold. “And the brotherhood has existed since that day. Our knowledge passed from generation to generation. Our purpose unchanged. We take back what the goddess tries to use against us. Wolves like you, her so-called corrections, her attempts to counterbalance what she cannot reclaim. We have been eliminating your kind for centuries. You are the last of this generation.”
“You killed my father,” I said.
Something shifted in his expression.
“Your father was useful for a time. He brought information. But he was a coward at his core. A man who could instigate endlessly and execute nothing. He wanted something he had no business wanting. He discovered there was a special wolf in his vicinity and he wanted her power for himself. He had no idea it was his own daughter.” He paused. “We couldn’t allow him to interfere. So we removed him.”
He said it with the same tone you’d use to describe moving an object out of a walkway.
I thought about my father, who he had been and what he had done and what it had cost me. And that pang in my chest returned. It wasn’t grief in the sense of the word. Not the grief I felt when I thought of my father. Losing him hadn’t done much damage to me. He was dead to me long before he took his last breath. But, I still mourned a part of it. I let myself that five seconds, then I let it go. I didn’t have room for it tonight.
“Adriana.” Yara’s voice, urgent now. “Cut yourself. Your blood calls the sisters. Elijah’s pocket knife, use it now!"
The brothers were beginning to shift their weight.
“The knife,” Yara repeated. “Now, before they move.”
I reached into my jacket pocket and closed my fingers around the handle of the small blade Elijah had pressed into my hand the previous evening without explanation, as if he had known without knowing. I pulled it out.
The Grandmaster’s eyes went to it.
“What is that for?” His voice had changed. Not afraid but alert in a new way, recalibrating.
I drew the blade across my palm cleanly. The pain was immediate and sharp and then gone, replaced by the warm spreading of blood across my skin.
The room changed.