Chapter Seventy Eight

NOLA REYNOLDS

The brown werewolf’s iron claws slapped into the forest floor noisily behind me as we pounded through the dark cluster of trees, dodging the vines and forking bony branches that jutted out into the narrow dirt path.

I gritted my canines, the tears swirling underneath my eyes managing to leak over my sparsely furred face before I felt the force of a whimper push past the calcium barricade and into the night.

It was almost as though a flood had been let loose, the insistent pounding of my heart and the echo of crickets and night owls and bats surrounding us dying away in the memory of what I had done.

I’d abandoned him! Abandoned the Lycan King when he protected me to his dying breath! Here I was running through the woods and back to the castle like some dark-humored Cinderella, what the fuck was wrong with me?

I heard Kalden’s groan beside me, the timbre of his cry urging me to dig my hind legs faster into the dirt so that I was almost certain I looked like some caricatur