Chapter 265 265
Damien POV
“Fabrice on your six!” I shout, hurling a sword through the air.
He catches it cleanly and, without breaking stride, slices straight through a rogue’s neck. Clean. Efficient.
We won’t need the backup weaponry after all. This is nearly over.
They have no leader. No one driving them forward, no voice to rally them or stoke their courage.
They were pigs sent to slaughter.
Some of them have already dropped to their knees in the mud, hands raised high in surrender. Lucas and Théo are on them immediately, binding them without hesitation. No risks. If they’re down, they stay down.
Fabrice hasn’t left my side once during the entire fight. Not for a second. I can’t decide whether to find it endearing Aurélie clearly told him to stay close and report back or downright insulting. As if there’s even a remote chance I’d be injured.
If my hands weren’t busy tearing through rogues, I’d bloody kill him myself.
“Alpha,” Lucas’s voice cuts through the chaos in my mind. “Their numbers are dropping. There doesn’t appear to be a second wave.”
I finish ripping the heart from an arrogant bastard who thought he could take me down and toss the corpse aside.
A handful remain those foolish enough to keep pushing forward, trying to close the distance between Fabrice and me. Unlike the others, they’re still clinging to their orders, still too stupid to realize they’ve been played.
Geneviève really is the queen of manipulation.
But this? This is the best she could manage?
Poorly trained rogues, barely disciplined. It’s as if she scooped them off the streets and gave them a crash course in combat if she even bothered with that.
“Stay sharp, Lucas,” I reply. “This feels too easy.”
I turn and let out a low, lethal growl at a kid who can’t be more than eighteen. The sound alone sends him scrambling, terror flooding his face as he bolts toward Lucas and Théo, hands thrown up in surrender.
“Well,” Fabrice says with a smirk, watching the kid flee, “if this is how she trained warriors at the Bloodnight Pack, I should’ve convinced Aurélie to invade your lands years ago.”
“Fuck off,” I snap back, though his banter pulls a short laugh from my chest. Still I wouldn’t be much of an Alpha King if I didn’t remind my beta of his place.
He turns toward me, mirroring my laugh
And then he freezes.
His body locks up completely. His eyes glaze over, unfocused.
Damn it.
She needs to trust us to handle this. To stop mind-linking him now of all times.
I keep my attention on him. We’re not fully clear yet, and Fabrice is deep in a mind-link so deep he doesn’t notice the rogue sprinting up behind him.
The bastard is fast. Determined. Closing the distance with lethal intent.
I shout Fabrice’s name.
Nothing.
It’s like he’s not even there.
I launch myself forward just as the rogue leaps, intercepting him midair. The impact is brutal. Final.
Blood explodes everywhere across Fabrice’s armor, his face.
That’s how close it was.
The spray seems to snap him out of it. His eyes refocus, locking onto me standing before him, a dead, decapitated rogue crumpled at his feet.
“What the fuck?” I start to roar. “You need to watch your”
I stop.
He’s gone pale. Deathly pale.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, tossing the severed head aside.
“I can’t feel her,” he says, panic bleeding through his voice. “I mean I can feel the mate bond, but she’s unconscious.”
His eyes widen as his hands clutch at his hair. His body tenses, his wolf clawing at the surface, desperate to break free.
“Can you feel Aurélie?”
The question lands like a blade in my chest.
I push through the mate bond immediately. I’d kept my block up so she wouldn’t feel my emotions during the fight but now I tear it down.
I feel her.
But it’s weak.
Fading.
Wrong.
Pain floods the connection. Panic. I feel her struggling gasping, fighting for air.
It feels like she’s
Drowning.