Chapter 15: _ A Dead Prince

This was impossible. A mistake. A sick, twisted curse from the ancestors. I was Prince Ivar Wulfram of the Wolf Realm. I was royalty, a warrior, a master of extraction who would one day claim the sovereign Alpha throne.

My mate was supposed to be a princess. A female of high blood, revered, powerful, clad in silks and loaded with ancient mana reserves to feed my core.

Not a dragonless girl from the gutters. Not a nameless commoner in a threadbare shawl who didn’t even possess a spark of magic to her name.

The sheer horror of the realization sent a tremor through my body. The internal shock violently severed my grip on the invisibility. .

CRACK.

Crimson sparks and black static erupted around me. The air tore open, throwing me off balance, and I tumbled hard onto the wet flagstones, landing heavily on one knee.

The broad-shouldered girl shrieked, whipping a hunting knife from her belt. The other girl stumbled back, clutching her hairbrush like a weapon.

I gasped for air, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped beast. I raised my head, wiping a lock of messy red hair from my forehead, and looked up.

Elira was standing right in front of me.

My emerald eyes locked onto hers. Her pupils were dilated, her breathing shallow, caught in the same dizzying haze that was currently tearing my chest apart.

She felt it. Even without a wolf, a beast, even without magic, the mate bond had slammed into her just as hard.

"You..." I choked out.

"Who are you?" she demanded, stepping forward. "Why were you—"

Realization hit me like a splash of ice water.

I was visible.

She saw me. Her friends saw me. I was wearing my tailored red coat, my silver house trim, my bare face exposed to a girl who was supposed to be nothing more than a nameless piece on a chessboard.

Zev is going to kill me.

If Zev found out I had compromised the entire operation—that I had lost control of my magic because my wolf decided a dragonless initiate was my destined mate—he wouldn’t just be furious. He would strip me alive. The plan would be ruined before it even started.

My reputation, my leverage, my pride... all of it thrown into the dirt over a commoner.

I couldn’t stay here. I couldn’t look at her for another second without my wolf driving me to my knees to claim her.

"No," I growled through gritted teeth.

I summoned every drop of raw power left in my core. A harsh green aura burst from my spine, ripping through the fabric of my coat.

With a WHOOSH, a pair of emerald wings tore free from my back, sweeping a cloud of dead leaves, dust, and gravel into their faces.

I’d acquired those wings from an Elven girl who wouldn’t stop sending me those god-forsaken fae-veined letters last semester.

I hadn’t even finished mastering the flight mechanics. They were heavy, unstable, and agonizingly awkward to control.

But I didn’t care. I needed to escape. I needed to run from her, from the bond, from the terrifying certainty in my chest.

I met her eyes one last time, letting the shock of the bond burn into my memory, then snapped my wings downward.

WHOOSH.

The air blasted away beneath me. I shot into the freezing grey sky, clearing the archway in a second.

The air at three hundred feet was a swirling gale.

"Up! Get up, you useless pieces of blood-trash!" I screamed into the wind, slamming my left wing down to catch a thermal draft.

It didn’t work. The Elven wings were built for light, graceful gliders, not a broad-shouldered, six-foot-three wolf shifter carrying heavy muscle. The green feathers buckled under my weight. The wind caught my right side, flipping me violently upside down in midair.

"Dammit! Fly!"

An agonizing spasm shot down my spine. The connection between my nervous system and the borrowed wing roots was fraying fast.

Below me, the slate roofs, stone towers, and jagged abysses of Last Bastion spun in a sickening wheel of grey and brown. I wasn’t flying. I was descending like a meteor.

I whipped past the high arches of the central library, missing a granite spire by less than two feet. The wind ripped through my hair, deafening me, tearing the breath straight out of my throat.

I can’t land in the courtyards. If the Wardens see me—if they catch me crashing like a broken bird—it’s over.

Through the haze of spinning sky and terror, I spotted an unkempt training field near the outer boundary wards. It was filled with sharp granite boulders and uneven terrain, but it was empty.

I dragged my left wing inward, forcing my body into a steep dive toward the dirt.

"Hold... just hold for three seconds–"

The wing joint snapped.

A sound like a breaking tree branch echoed in my ears, followed by a burst of white-hot agony across my shoulder blades.

The green light vanished. The wings dissolved back into my back, leaving me in total, screaming freefall thirty feet above the ground.

I didn’t even have time to brace.

I hit the stone hard. The force bounced me off a granite slab, rolling me helplessly over the dirt until I slammed into the iron fence and stopped.

First, there was silence.

I lay face down in the dirt.

Pain didn’t come right away. There was only an emptiness, followed by a wave of heat so intense it felt like liquid iron had been poured into my veins.

I tried to breathe. Air wouldn’t come. My lungs were punctured, trapped beneath a caved-in ribcage.

Slowly, agonizingly, the sensation returned, bringing a universe of unimaginable agony with it. My left arm was bent entirely backward at the elbow, the bone protruding through my red coat.

I couldn’t feel my legs. My skull throbbed with a dull pressure, and hot blood was pouring out of my ear, pooling in the gravel beneath my cheek.

Fractured spine. Broken collarbone. Ruptured spleen. Skull fracture.

My wolf whined deep within my broken chest, its power whimpering, far too weak to initiate a full shifter recovery. The physical damage was too much. My body was shutting down.

I stared at the dirt, watching my blood soak into the grey soil.

A wet laugh bubbled up in my throat, spitting bloody foam onto my lips.

Prince Ivar Wulfram. The brilliant strategist. The feared shifter. The royal.

Lying in the dirt like a slaughtered dog on the side of a training field, dying because I panicked over a dragonless girl.

Zev would never find out. Raice would never even know I was a threat. I was going to bleed to death in the cold dirt, entirely alone, while the girl who carried my bond walked around with a silver pin I’d been stupid enough to drop.

My vision began to blur, dark edges creeping inward, swallowing the grey sky. My heart gave a weak flutter.

Let it end, I thought, letting my eyelids fall as the chill of death settled into my bones. It’s better this way. A dead prince is better than a ruined one.