KA-THUNK!
The ground shakes with the impact of something landing right in front of me.
It’s Damianos, with a huge set of dragon wings now sticking out from the back of his suit.
Not enough time to hit the brakes, I’m running downhill and I’ve got too much momentum behind me. So another football shove it is. I dip my head, hold my hand out, and charge at him like a Sunday night bull.
It’s like running hand first into a stone wall. He doesn’t budge and I go flying backward, dropping the crown and landing on my butt.
Okay, she-wolf down. But still not a skinny girl in a movie. I roll to my knees, prepared to take off again.
But this time when I reach for my crown, pain, sharp as a razor slices up my left arm. What the Fenrir wolf?
Still not a crying-ass bitch. But there’s some major anime face teeth clenching going on when two large legs appear between me and the crown I was reaching for.
Damianos crouches down, filling up my eye line. The front of his shirt now has a muddy handprint on it.
“You’ve ruined my suit.” His voice is weirdly calm, considering the suit looks like it cost more than my dress and crown combined.
Who cares about his voice, Ola? Run, run, we’ve got to run! both my wolf and my human scream at me.
But I can’t…
The pain in my arm, it’s bigger now. Acrid and bitter. It’s the sort of pain that can’t be reconciled even by gotta-get-away adrenaline.
I raise my left arm, not wanting to see, but having to look….
There’s a jagged edge of ivory sticking up where my wrist used to be.
My bone, I realize inside the fog of pain and confusion. The broken edge of what used to be one long radius.
Like crashing into a stone wall…
Oh…my…Fenrir Wolf. Charging him at that speed broke my arm.
I turn away from the sight, and every delicious thing I ate at coronation comes spewing out of my mouth.
Damianos releases a heavy sigh. “And now you’ve ruined my shoes.”
Pain…pain…so much pain. And because of the collar, I can’t shift into my wolf. My vision blurs, then darkens. Then I’m falling sideways…back into the mud.
Damianos rises to stand above me.
“Ola….” He retracts his wings and reaches down to pick up my crown. Then, with what only seems like a modicum of effort, he crushes the precious symbol of my sovereignty between his large hands like an aluminum can.
“Don’t do that again,” he says, before tossing my crown away like so much trash.
That’s the last thing I see before the world fades to black.
Chapter Ten
KNUD
“I know you like the guy, but you’ve gotta let me kill him.”
Layla’s pretty face crinkled up into a laughing smile as she chided, “Knud, my love, you can’t kill my father just because he asked us to move.”
“This is what you call asking?” Knud hitched their baby son higher on his hip so that he can use both hands to point out to his wife, “He waited until we left our apartment, changed our locks, and had a robot hand us an envelope with the address to this place!”
“To be fair, you did tell him we were thinking about finding a bigger apartment.”
“Thinking about a bigger apartment!” Knud repeated with emphasis on the thinking and apartment. “Not a castle with a moat!”
“It’s not a castle with a moat,” Layla argued, “It’s a Tudor style mansion with a private boat dock on a manmade lake.”
“I could fit all seven members of my immediate family in here, their wives and kids included! It’s a friggin’ castle!”
Anybody only overhearing this conversation would think Knud was exaggerating, but he wasn’t. They were standing in the nursery. Technically the smallest bedroom in the house, but it was larger than the main bedroom in the apartment they used to live in up until last Thursday when they made the mistake of leaving to attend the vow renewal ceremony with Knud’s triplet brothers.
A fine art mural of their son’s name, RUSTANOV was printed in huge block letters across the interior wall. And there was a bed encased in what looked so much like a one-man rocket ship, Knud couldn’t say for sure it was only a replica.
“Wocket! Wocket!” Rustanov squirmed down from his father’s arm, at the same time Knud asked Layla, “Jesus Christ, how long has he been planning this?”
“I have no idea,” Layla admitted. “Believe me if I had, I would have told him it was too much.”
“Too much is an understatement, babe!”
As their son toddled over to the bed, Knud went over to the set of drawers underneath the ST in Rustanov’s name. He’d bet his favorite stethoscope that they’d already been pre-stuffed with clothes—and yep, sure enough, the first thing he found in the top drawer of folded-up shirts was a miniature hockey jersey with RUSTANOV printed across the back.