The Broken Mate: The Lycan King's Forbidden Cure

Arden POV:

The order had barely left the man's mouth when the scar-faced leader spotted the indentation on the mattress. A slow, ugly grin spread across his features. He lumbered toward the shadows where I hid.

"Come out, little rabbit," he growled.

"Jocelyn wants her alive," one of the men muttered behind him. "At least until the Knight guards see what she's done."

He knelt, his foul breath washing over me. As his face drew near, I moved.

The splinter I'd dug from the headboard was clutched in my fist. With a surge of desperate strength, I jammed it deep into his eye.

A wet pop. A gurgling scream.

He reeled back, clawing at his face. I used the momentum to roll out from under the bed, snatching the hunting knife from his belt as I went.

The scar-faced leader stayed human, one hand clamped over his ruined eye. The other six roared, the sound shifting from human to beast as their bodies contorted. Bones snapped and reformed. They were shifting.

Six massive wolves, their eyes glowing red in the gloom, now stood where the men had been. They lunged.

My surgeon's knowledge wasn't just about healing. It was about anatomy, leverage, and the few seconds in which a body could be made to fail. But the cramped room also woke something that belonged to the original Arden. Caleb's warriors had drilled her in basic defensive movements because an Omega of the Sinclair line was still a political target. Her body remembered the drills even when her mind did not.

I couldn't overpower even one of them in a straight fight. My only advantage was the room—the bed, the walls, the narrow distance between bodies, and the fact that the wolves could not attack me all at once.

I didn't fight their strength. I used the cramped room to my advantage, dodging a snapping jaw and letting the wolf crash into the wall.

The knife in my hand felt like an extension of my own. A precise slice across the first wolf's hind leg. I severed the Achilles tendon. It went down, howling.

The poison was making my vision swim, but it sharpened my other senses. The world slowed. I could smell their sweat, hear the blood pumping in their veins.

I ripped the filthy sheet from the bed, flinging it into their faces. In the moment of confusion, my blade found the throat of a second wolf. Hot blood sprayed across my face.

A third one fell, but I was fading. A massive body slammed into me, crushing me against the wall. I tasted blood, my own this time. The impact sent a fresh wave of fire from the poison through my system.

My skin felt like it was boiling from the inside out.

Time was up.

My right hand had begun to tremble. My left knee nearly buckled beneath me. I was not winning this fight; I was buying seconds. Every wolf I dropped left less room for the ones still standing, and every second brought the toxin closer to my heart.

With my last ounce of strength, I grabbed the oil lamp from a nearby table and hurled it at the moth-eaten curtains.

Whoosh.

Flames erupted, climbing the dry fabric in seconds.

The remaining wolves hesitated, momentarily blinded by the sudden light. One recoiled from the heat and crashed into another, buying me the seconds I needed. It was all I needed. My knife was a blur, a silver arc of death in the flickering firelight.

One. Two. Three.

They fell.

Seven bodies lay amidst the growing inferno. I staggered, my body a symphony of pain, and launched myself through the second-story window.

Pain exploded through my ribs when I landed. My knees nearly folded, but the shouts behind me were louder than the pain. I didn't stop. I ran.

Into the forest. Toward the river.

The cold water was my only chance to slow the poison's final, fatal surge.

By the time I reached the riverbank, I was on the verge of collapse. I plunged in, the icy shock a welcome agony against the internal fire.

The cold did not cure me. It only slowed my pulse and bought me a few more minutes before the poison reached the rest of my nervous system.

The two pains warred within me, tearing me apart. My consciousness began to fray.

And then I felt it.

A powerful, cold, and stable source of energy in the water nearby. It was like a beacon in the storm of my own failing life force.

Something ancient stirred beneath my skin. It was not a thought or a memory, but an instinct buried deeper than either. I did not know what it was. I only knew that it pulled me toward the cold energy in the water.

It was a man. He was floating, unconscious, a faint black aura clinging to him like a shroud.

My body, without my permission, latched onto his energy. I tried to pull away, but the poison had turned me into something starving. The moment my fingers brushed his life force, something inside me seized it.

My blood, my very soul, began to draw from him, pulling his immense life force into myself to fight the poison.

The burning in my veins subsided, replaced by a cool, steady strength. The black aura around him seemed to shrink, as if something in my blood had forced it back.

But the exchange was not harmless. The cold strength entered me with a bitter, metallic taste, and something black brushed the edge of my consciousness before recoiling. I had drawn power from him, but I had also touched whatever was poisoning him.

But as I grew stronger, he grew weaker. His breathing became shallow.

I surfaced, gasping, my mind clear for the first time in hours. I looked down at the man whose life I had just siphoned. He was still alive, but barely.

The surgeon in me noted his condition. The pragmatist, the survivor, made a decision.

I couldn't leave him conscious. Especially not one this powerful. I turned him onto his back and found a pulse beneath his jaw. Too slow, but present. For one terrible second, I considered holding him under. Then my training—and some stubborn remnant of the woman whose body I wore—stopped me.

I adjusted his position so his face remained above the water, then brought the side of my hand down in a sharp chop against the back of his neck. It would keep him unconscious. It would not kill him. If he lived, he would not remember my face clearly.

Without a backward glance, I swam to the opposite bank and disappeared into the trees.