And as we’d feared, a fool who’d seemingly played right into their hands. The kingdom of Sinshell wanted to hurt Dade as he had hurt them, so we’d all known they’d allowed him to wed their princess in order to get the peace and revenge they’d been desperately seeking.

But never could we have guessed that the golden ones possessed the power for something like this.

That they would trap Dade in Sinshell while foreign soldiers crawled through his kingdom as though they’d been given the key.

Not just any soldiers. Mortal soldiers who hungered to kill anything unlike them.

Years of controlled cruelty upon the kingdom who had ruined Dade’s family, every inch of it inflicted by our own hands, had now turned into a giant fucking mess.

My sword met an axe. The claws on my other hand unsheathed to drag down another screaming soldier’s face. Blood sprayed across my own and rushed down my arm beneath my sleeve.

Limbs and bodies, both human and fae, dotted the clearings of villages and the roads that stretched toward the city. Growing fires joined with new ones. The flames seemed to rise higher with the cacophony of screams and wails.

As mortal soldiers continued to swarm our land, it became clear that this wasn’t just a lucky coincidence on their part. It was carefully constructed mayhem.

Females and younglings ran for the woods, and those who hadn’t managed to were herded into livestock pens like cattle.

I kicked and sliced my way through the next throng of soldiers determined to cut me down, and then I warped to the pen in the distance. My blades struck as soon as I appeared between two men. Their crossbows fell with them, but the men behind them let their nocked arrows fly.

I roared as they made clumsy contact with some of the trapped females and charged at the soldiers. The sound mercifully attracted help from my brethren, and the red-rimmed night unfolded into a dark haze of bloodlust.

Blood-bathed terror crawled across our home, the percussion of it all unlike any I’d heard in battle before.

“You,” said a human piece of scum from the ground beneath the blade I pushed to his jugular. “A chest of gold for your mangled head.”

The distraction worked as he’d intended. A mace skimmed my side when I sensed it too late and failed to move fast enough.

Snarling, I welcomed my wolf form to better stem the bleeding and launched at the asshole’s chest. Then I ripped out his throat. His friends ran like cowards looking for easier prey, and I shifted back before advancing to the next group of human fucks.

“You’re the one who ought to be running, wolf,” taunted the same human who still hadn’t died.

I twisted back, the smoke-heavy wind burning my eye.