Page 70 of Renegade Queen
Dean was looking at me curiously, and I realised he was waiting for my answer to the same question.
“I don’t think I could leave her even if I wanted to,” I confessed. “My lion…”
I didn’t have words to explain it, and acknowledging that I had a lion inside me was strange enough.
But Dean nodded in agreement. Of course, he understood. He was going through the exact same thing.
“Do you think they have shifters here?” I asked him.
Dean shrugged. “I suppose it’s possible. No one seemed that surprised by what we are, so they must have come across them at some point.”
“Maybe… Damon.”
I didn’t want to say it aloud. Maybe we could find someone to bite my brother? I wasn’t even sure if I just wanted it for the reassurance that he’d never leave. We’d spent our entire lives together, and it made sense to me that if this was going to be the new stage in my life, he’d move on to the same. That he wouldn’t want to, didn’t even feel like a possibility.
Dean hummed in agreement. He didn’t need me to explain. We all had the same weird reliance on each other. Of course, he’d understand what I was trying to say.
Maybe it was insanity, but what in our lives had ever made sense?
A hand on my shoulder had me jolting awake in confusion, mainly because I didn’t remember going to sleep. But also because of the silence in my mind. It felt like the first time I’d been alone in my head since this whole thing had started.
“We need to get ready to move,” Alyssa told me.
She was kneeling beside me, and my hands itched to pull her into my lap. I’d give anything to nuzzle my face against her neck, sink my fangs into her skin and mark her as mine for all to see.
Yep, the lion was back.
He chuffed in delight at Alyssa being so close to us, and I didn’t even realise it was happening as my hand wrapped around the back of her neck and I pulled her down to my lips.
It was only a soft kiss, but it was the type that spoke of a familiarity we hadn’t yet had a chance to develop, even if it was already there. I could feel something between us, and the way she hummed as her lips met mine made me hope she could feel it too.
When she pulled away from me, I resisted the urge to drag her beneath me as I tried to discover all the other noises she’d make for me.
“How long is this passageway until we come up into the palace?” Dean asked from close by.
When I looked over her shoulder and found him watching us, there wasn’t any jealousy in his eyes. This was a new and strange situation we all found ourselves in, and it was bewildering how none of us had any problems with it. It wasn’t natural, and yet it was all at the same time.
Alyssa stood up, turning to look at my friend, as I stretched the aches from my limbs. Falling asleep on the hard ground wasn’t exactly comfortable, but it wasn’t the first time I’d had to do it either.
“It’s not far. We come out in the old wine cellars. We’ll need to be careful in case they’re using them for something else, but this side of the palace was never used that much before. Of course, back then, the cells weren’t really needed either. Who knows what Arik is doing down there now.”
I grimaced at her words. But she did have a point. We had no idea what state Damon would be in when we found him, and we should have considered that before now. We didn’t exactly have transport out of this place.
“We need to make our exit plan,” I told them both. “We all need to know our exit points and a backup rendezvous in case we get separated. If Damon’s hurt, we’ll need a way to move him.”
Alyssa crouched down and grabbed a stone from nearby as she started to draw out a plan of the lower levels of the palace in the dirt. The bigger it got, the more I realised how out of our depth we really were.
We were talking about breaking into a stronghold containing an unknown number of enemy combatants with no exit strategy. There was no way we were going to pull this off.
“Our best route is back the way we came,” Alyssa explained, pointing out where the cells were located and our route there. She was right that they were fairly remote. The most there was on those levels seemed to be storage and access to the kitchens. The inhabited part of the castle was on the floor above the kitchens, so two floors above our destination.
“Can you use your magic to determine how many people are in our path,” Dean asked.
Alyssa cocked her head to the side as she thought through her options. “I could perhaps feel their connection with Nymeria if I tapped into it, but they’d most likely feel me doing it. They might not know what it was, but it would alert them to something being out of place.”
“Damn, I was hoping you’d be able to, like, suck the air out of their bodies and incapacitate any guards,” I joked, but now that I thought about it, that would have been a handy trick to have on our side.
“Sorry to disappoint.” She laughed.