The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (54 page)

An uncomfortable silence fell
between them. Words rose in Madden’s throat, begging a voice, but it was
several attempts later before he mustered the courage to set them free.

‘We don’t have to go back.
You could kill him. MacTire. You could challenge him in contest and claim the
throne. It is yours by birth.’

‘Jesus, you know you sound
just like her? The Morrígan.’ Connal spat the name into the dirt.

‘There’s nothing waiting for
you up there. Or for me. We’re in the same boat. I’ll be a hunted man for the
rest of my life, and if what you say is true, once the moon wanes, you’ll be a
dead man walking. That bitch screwed you over once already. She’ll do it again.
You owe her nothing. I don’t deny I want to avenge my sister and her son. Your
son.’

The muscles in Connal’s back
tightened visibly.

‘MacTire fucked us both over
,’ the doctor said.
‘
I know you want the same thing. You could take him,
Connal. I’m not strong enough, but you are. You could change everything.’

Connal hauled himself up on
his feet and for the first time since Madden had dragged him there, his male
presence truly dominated the cave.

‘You know what, Doc?’ Connal
cranked his head around to level Madden with a penetrating stare. ‘I've been
there once. And it didn't exactly work out for me first time around. So, I
appreciate the vote of confidence and all that, but I’m no fucking leader.’ He
moved, and his huge form shadowed the mouth of the cave as he scanned the
barren landscape. ‘I’m getting out of here, Doc. With or without you.’

In the dirt where the Savage
had sat, Madden discerned a line-perfect depiction of Ashling DeMorgan’s face.
Etched into the stone, it captured every delicate nuance of her expression, and
the doctor knew then and there he was fighting a losing battle. ‘With you,’ he
replied.

A
sh's fingers shook as she reached to button up the
back of the dress Mac had laid out for her. What happened in the temple earlier
had shaken her more than she could afford to admit. She had just enough of her
sanity intact to know Connal hadn't spoken to her from the grave, but her
psyche was screaming a message she couldn't ignore. His death, Setty's death,
couldn't be for nothing.

She was on her own, and yes,
she was scared half to death, of this place, of these subterranean creatures,
and if she was honest, of what she was becoming.

But Connal had been right,
Mac too. She was stronger than she knew, and she was not going down this time
without a fight.

That black pool in the temple
was her ticket home. She knew it, could practically smell Dublin's streets in
the scent that rose off the water with the red fog.

If she could just stick it
out ‘til the full moon, she could find a way to escape.

She didn't want to think too
far beyond then, death was still a terrifying prospect. Better on her own terms
though, and if her grandmother really was the Morrígan, then maybe it was time
to call in a family favour. If Granny could keep Connal alive, surely she would
do the same for her own flesh and blood. Ash chose not to dwell on the fact
that her supposedly all-powerful granny was, at this moment, lying in the Tir
na nÓg nursing home drooling mashed potato.

Fighting for calm, she took
up the brush Mac had brought her. Wide and new, it was a welcome gift when her
hair had started snarling more than her host.

Her strokes were rhythmic,
from root to tip
,
combing out the tangles. It was a weakness of hers,
one of the few happy memories she retained of time spent with her mother.
Instantly soothing, her head fell back of its own accord and she fought the
urge to purr.

Something stirred in her
peripheral vision. Warily, Ash’s eyes caught on MacTire’s movements in the
mirror as he stepped confidently into the room. The brush paused, mid-stroke.

‘There isn’t much time,’ Mac
said, ‘my men are assembled for the Contests.’

A purr came from his throat,
not hers, the brush dropped from her hair to be replaced by his hands. ‘They
grow impatient for their audience with you.’

He filled his palms with the
wealth of her dark hair, following the sleek cascade down the curve of her
spine to shape the rounds of her ass. ‘I will make them wait a few minutes
more,’ he growled.

She was on the other side of
the room in an angry lash of movement.

Ash’s face heated with
flustered indignation as she warded him off. ‘Don’t go getting hearts in your
eyes, Wolf-Boy. What happened between us back in the temple was nothing.’

He pursued her across the
room. ‘That was
not
nothing.’

Defiance kicked her chin up,
made her brandish the red paddle brush more firmly. She set her face into its
cold mask. ‘Less than nothing. About as satisfying as a good sneeze. I should
have known all that pumped-up muscle was compensating for something.’ Her eyes
dipped to where his lower half was encased in studded brown leather, and she
quirked him a pointed look. Her lips curled in a smirk as his expression
clouded and his stance shifted. Displayed to his full advantage, the King
really was ripped, but his arrogance, and the creepy dead wolf draping his
broad shoulders, evoked disgust more than feminine appreciation.

‘You lie.’ Mac’s jaw
twitched.

‘Did I touch a nerve, Mac?
Wounded your little boy ego? You can’t even compete with your brother. And he’s
dead.’ Steel laced the last word, fortified by her ire.

Mac’s jaw hinged open in a
gape.

‘Nobody has ever said no to
you, have they?’ she said. ‘You think it’s your God-given birthright to be
handed everything you want on a platter. You’re nothing but a spoiled,
over-privileged brat.’

She jerked something from the
pocket fold of her dress and his eyes followed the motion. Rebelliously, she
fastened the cord around her neck, the coin nestling at the base of her throat.

The dare was all in her eyes:
Come on, take it from me.

‘Connal was never ruined,’
she told him. ‘His adversity made him stronger, a real man, and that scared the
ever living crap out of you guys, didn’t it? That’s the real reason you killed
him. Get this into your thick skull, Mac. I. Don’t. Want. You.’

Mac ran a hand down his
bristled jaw and the handsome bastard had the nerve to look smug. ‘I think the
lady doth protest too much,’ he laughed.

Her hands flew up, grabbing
the air in front of him like she was going to wring his neck. ‘Oh my God! Your
arrogance never fails to astound me,’ she hissed.

The frozen snarl of his
wolf-scarf mashed into her chest a second before Mac’s lips descended on hers
in a vicious kiss, possession bruising her mouth as she was hauled up against
the wall of his muscle. He rode the iron rope of his erection to her belly and
heat bloomed at the apex of her thighs.

Son of a bitch. Every
time.

Apparently hate wasn’t enough
to curb her body’s responsiveness to his lust. She tore from his mouth, her
whole body turning from him. ‘I hate you, you bastard. I hate you for the
cowardly way you murdered your own brother, I hate that I’m stuck here in the
Mines of fucking Moria, and I hate this godforsaken blood tether that turns my
own body into a traitor to my own will. I want rid of it.’

His voice was level as a
stone skimming still water. ‘I think you’ll find it’s too late for that,’ he
said.

Alarm threatened to shake her
voice but she stilled it, wiping the back of her hand over her mouth. ‘I don’t
understand, what do you mean?’

‘The
exchange of
eitr
is the very essence of intimacy. When you bit me,’ his hand brushed the marks
on his throat, tenderly, ‘you bonded us more deeply than any blood-link.’

Fear had a tenacious hold on
her, and it poured from her in a rage. She stalked up to him and jabbed her
finger to his chest. ‘No! I was defending myself from you. Your wolf attacked
me.’

‘Delude yourself, if you
will, Ashling, but that was no defensive bite. That was a deep-penetrating rush
of hundred-percent-proof, high-octane lust. And you know it.’

She was resolutely denying
it, but his satisfaction and conviction had her faltering. 'The proof is
written in your flesh, Ashling.' His fingers cuffed her wrist and he dragged
her palm up in the space between them, tapping a second crescent scarred boldly
beside the first. In the light, the two marks made a full circle and she looked
away. '
You
completed this. Not I
,
'
he said.

Ash was the one now rendered
speechless.

He took advantage of her
bristling silence to stroke her hair back over her shoulder. ‘Did you know a
wolf’s sensitivity to smell is a hundred times that of a human?’ His nose ran
along her throat, lips a whisper to her jugular. ‘Even now, in your anger, you
smell of sex. My
eitr
is leaching from your pores, more potent than any
pheromone.'

Slapping her palms flat to
his chest, Ash heaved him away from her with a furious snarl, biting back with
words as her teeth sharpened. 'Then your sense of smell is out of whack, Big
Mac. My perfume is pure
eau de homicide
. I don't want you. Deal with
it.' An electric storm brewed between them, sparking them off one another like
a pair of live wires. The atmosphere crackled with expectation. Violent,
rousing, intense.

He flashed his canines in a
smirk and hauled her back into his body, his fingers roughly delving between
her legs. Ash caught on too late, clamped her thighs together, but his fingers
were already sweeping through the evidence. She was dripping arousal like
molten honey. Mac’s growl was dark and ferine in her ear.

‘Get yourself under control,
Ashling. My people have waited long enough to see you. We will finish this
later.’

‘D
on’t they ever leave?’

Connal sat crouched at the
narrow mouth of the cave. He’d been studying the behaviour of the sinister
creatures for some time now. Unmoving, they stationed themselves like gargoyles
around the surrounding peaks. He plucked a stone from the dirt and pitched it
at the nearest bird. The projectile struck home, just below the eye, but
instead of scattering, the thing merely swiveled its neck, head cocking to one
side until Connal was reflected in its glassy eye. A silent threat.

‘Nope.’ Madden sat back in
the shadows, working what remained of his robe into makeshift clothing for two.
He’d picked out threads and was using them to stitch the long pieces of red
silk together.

‘How’d you even make it past
those things in the first place?’ Connal asked.

Madden stood, winding a strip
of fabric around his hips. ‘They only arrived after we did.’ He cursed at the
improvised loincloth.

‘Not your usual slick
tailoring, Doc?’ Connal laughed.

Madden ignored him.
‘Normally, they nest higher up, in the clifftops,’ he said, ‘we must have drawn
them down.’

‘I’m not so sure.’

‘Huh?’ Madden hunkered down
beside Connal to peer out at the craggy vista.

‘It’s not us they’re
watching. Look.’ The scene spoke for itself. Every one of the creatures had its
sights trained, not on them, but on the habitations down in the valley.

The doctor frowned. ‘I’ve
never known them to behave this way. Something must be attracting them.’

‘You think it’s Ash? You
think they sense her presence?’

Madden turned to meet
Connal’s questioning expression. ‘She is the Morrígan’s
grand
daughter,’
he said, ‘and the raveners are DeMorgan’s miscreations. Whatever the reason,
we’re still effectively under siege. We’ve no choice but to wait it out.’

‘You ever see somebody take
one of those things down?’ Connal asked.

‘A ravener?’ Madden’s brows
lifted, ‘No. Not without a weapon. Those demon-varmints will rip the head off a
wolf’s shoulders and spit it back out without even blinking.’ A bundle of
fabric landed in Connal’s lap. ‘Here, put this on, would you?’

‘So modest,
Thegn
.’
Connal laughed, dragging himself up to try the scrap of material on for size.
‘And here I was, hoping the full frontal might scare the bastards away.’

‘Don’t flatter yourself, Wolf
.
It’s
not that intimidating.’

Connal cut the doctor a
sidelong glare, but a raspy laugh escaped his throat. ‘You know, I’m almost
starting to like you, you arrogant son of a bitch.’ Hands on hips, he modelled
the ragged silk sarong. ‘Not bad, Doc. Not bad at all. Can you cook too? You’ll
make a fine little homemaker one day.’

Madden narrowed his eyes on
the male. ‘Quit yanking my chain, Wolfman, and find us a way out of here. Full
moon is two nights away, and unless we make it to a conduit by then, you’re
looking at another whole month of my favourite, finger-licking fleshworm
recipes.’

Connal’s face scrunched in
disgust and Madden cracked an evil grin.

‘Hold up,’ Connal raised a
hand,‘the raptors are carnivorous, right? What if we used the fleshworms as
bait? Think we could lure them from their perches long enough to make a run for
it?’

Madden blew out a breath.
‘Damn. I dunno. Maybe. They’re carrion eaters. It’d be risky, though, a real
Hail Mary manoeuvre.’ He scrubbed a palm over the nape of his neck,
espresso-coloured eyes gleaming in the half-light. ‘You’re insane. You do know
that? It’d take a lot of bait ...’

Connal grinned. ‘Where’s the
nearest conduit to the surface?’ he asked. The Doc was starting to buy into
this hair-brained escape plan, and Connal was determined to run with it before
either of them saw sense. ‘How much of a time window do we need?’

Madden’s lips thinned into a
grim line. ‘There is a conduit I can guarantee leads straight to Form, but it’s
in the Temple of the
Thegn
Masters.’

Connal arched a brow. ‘Let me
guess, Doc. This temple of yours is down there,’ he stabbed a finger towards
the labyrinth of firelit caves at the base of the valley, ‘right in the heart
of the wolves’ den.’

‘Affirmative,’ Madden
exhaled, aligning himself beside Connal to stare down at their seemingly
impossible destination.

‘We do have one advantage.’
Madden spoke with the calm reassurance mastered by medics the world over.
‘Assuming the Contests go ahead, MacTire and every male down there will be
distracted for hours. If we can get past the raveners, we should be able to
slip in unnoticed. I know every passage like the back of my hand, and as a
t
hegn,
I have unrestricted access to the
Temple. I’m assuming you can take care of any chance encounters.’

‘When?’ Eyes laser-focussed
on the settlement, Connal’s question was steeled with determination. Ash was
down there, somewhere in the patchwork of lights dotting the darkness,
suffering humiliations and tortures only the Gods knew. And it was all his
doing.

‘The contests should be held
tonight, some time in the next few hours.’ Madden pointed to a dark crater on
the horizon. ‘The arena will be lit. That’s how we’ll know it’s time.’

‘Tonight.’ Connal rested his
forehead to the cold stone, arms braced above his head. ‘Do you know where
they’ll be keeping Ash?’

‘They’d want her on display,
at the Contests,’ Madden said warily.

‘What?’ Connal growled. ‘Then
how the hell am I supposed to get her out?’

Madden paused, clearing his
throat. ‘You could challenge MacTire.’ He held up his hands at Connal’s glower.
‘It is your blooded right, and the perfect arena for it. The pack would be
forced to accept your authority.’

‘If I didn’t know better,
Doc, I’d say you planned on getting me down there all along. Get it into your
thick skull,
Thegn
. I’m not your champion, and I want nothing to do with
this cesspit, beyond getting her out of it.’

‘Do you have a choice?’
Madden countered.

Connal gritted his teeth. ‘I
can’t
leave without her
.
’

‘What if you don’t find the
Morrígan in time? What if she denies you, Savage? What then?’

‘She won’t deny me. She
can’t.’ Connal refused to entertain the possibility. How could he explain that
watching Ash dying once had broken something in him?

‘Will you just lay down and
die?’ Madden asked, ‘Or will you come back and fight for your life? And for
hers? You have a birthright ...’

‘There will be no challenge,
Thegn
.
If …
when
we make it back to Dublin, we go our separate ways. End of.’

The doctor didn’t know it,
but he was backing a lame horse. Connal was in no condition to fight MacTire,
even if he wanted to. No, this could only happen one way. He’d bargain with
everything he had to get her out of there alive. DeMorgan loved to fucking
bargain. No doubt her price would be unpalatable, but he was prepared to pay
it.

His bite had doomed Ash. He’d
handed her into the arms of his own psychopath brother. Eyes screwed tight,
Connal sucked in a ragged breath. What if MacTire had touched her, or … fuck...
hurt her? Anger and frustration simmered beneath the surface of his calm
exterior. He wanted to believe he was a different man to the one whose
vengeance had once decimated an entire race, but the way he felt about Ash
DeMorgan made him wild, and reckless.

‘Connal?’

‘Yeah,’ he cleared his
throat, ‘lets get to work. We’re going to need a lot of flesh worms.’

T
he arena wasn’t the one she’d been expecting. She’d
anticipated being down with the untame again. Instead, she found herself in a
large, open-air crater. The moonless sky shimmered down, a shade of dark-red
differentiated against the black shadows. Flames crackled in pits indented in
the ground, delineating a circumference of rock big enough to park a
double-decker bus. It was nature’s Colosseum, and she was to bear witness to
the Contests.

‘Try to relax. They sense
your tension.’ Mac’s palm was warm at the small of her back as he ushered her
towards the far wall. Every eye in the place locked in on her. Ash cringed into
the King, but he sidestepped her attempts to hide. Spotlighted and vulnerable,
she cranked her chin up and walked with an imperious air she stole from the
male at her side, her fear firmly quashed into her little toe. Wouldn’t do to
reveal the true depths of her terror in front of this crowd.

You are stronger than you
know, she repeated, over and over. It had become a mantra.

They’re fascinated, she told
herself, they don’t want to eat you, they want to fuck you. Break you.

Be unbreakable.

Easier said than done, when
the foundations of her soul were quaking. Her nightmares were here in their
hundreds. She let Mac direct her around the outskirts of the arena, passing the
tiered benches cut into the walls, until they reached a larger rock formation
where Mac had carved himself a fancy throne.

Of course he did, she laughed
internally. A bench would never do for the Royal Ass.

Her gaze fell to the start of
a similar structure beside his. Someone had begun to chisel another seat. Oh
hell no.

‘Would you prefer to sit in
my lap, Ashling?’ His question startled her. Had she spoken out loud? Mac was
seated and patting his knee with that egotistical smile on his face, the one
that made her want to smack it off. She thought better of it when she looked
back out to the expectant wolves.

‘No, this is good. I’ve got
my own chair.’ Smiling sweetly, Ash folded herself cross-legged into the nook,
arranging the delicate blue material of her dress to cover her legs. One thing
she had to give him, the clothes he gave her were beautiful. Mac watched her
with fire in his black eyes as she readjusted a braided strap and brought the
heavy fall of her hair over one shoulder. She was fidgeting under his stare,
nervously waiting for the proceedings to start. In the corner of her eye, she
caught Mac motioning for the wolves to line up before the throne. Before her.

They were powerful specimens,
the bodies they’d snatched those of ancient warriors. Well duh, they were
Viking brutes, Ash thought. Clothed in nothing but strips of leather below the
waist, the men were imposing in more senses than one. Ash flushed when she
caught Fite’s glare from amongst the pack, his skin paler than the rest,
standing out. She took to searching out the ones she recognised, while Mac
called orders in grunting syllables. The language wasn’t familiar to her, but
it didn’t take a translator to know he’d commanded them to kneel; falling to
one knee, they sent howls to the open sky. The sound was so strange coming from
the throats of men, like a kitten barking, the visual didn’t fit the audio.

Mac leaned into her and the
wolves rose, pairing off. ‘Battle and competition are in our blood, Ashling.
The tradition of the Contests goes back to ancient times.’