Page 219 of Onyx Cage: Volume II

Nodding mutely, I left to give them the privacy to say goodbye. I needed to make sure our battalion was ready, convince them that we hadn’t yet lost this war.

I needed them to fight like there was hope, even if I didn’t feel that myself. In one more hour, we would be heading to the battle.

They, at least, deserved to feel like there was a chance we might come back.

CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE

My ears rang with the sound of dying men.

The addition of Elk’s forces was exactly what our enemies needed to renew their strength and to begin hammering the final nail in the coffin of my armies.

Each new onslaught of soldiers was like the weight of an iron chain tightening around my men a little more. It dragged at their arms, broke their stance, and smothered some of the fight in their eyes.

Still, they pressed on, not one of them willing to surrender just yet. Every last one of them would fight to the death, just as I would.

I spun, slicing through the neck of a Wolf soldier with one saber before bringing the other down across the face of one from Elk.

My eyes were stained crimson with their blood. It coated everything from the steel of my blades to the plates of my armor, before soaking the ground beneath my feet.

Distantly, I registered Kirill’s battle cry, Taras’s sharp warning to Yuriy, and Henrick’s call for help. All we could do was hold the line to the palace behind us, defend the women andchildren within our walls, and the injured soldiers who would be executed the moment we fell.

I threw everything into each strike, each parry, desperate to carve my way through the sea of navy and gray. There were so many of them. Too many. And though word had reached us that our troops in the West were on their way here, they were being chased by Ram’s soldiers.

And more Obsidian soldiers were heading up from the South.

Three soldiers charged toward me at once. I blocked the sword of one and dodged out of the way of another, just in time for the third man to land a hit with his shield.

I stumbled backward and used the momentum to spin around, dipping low to aim for the opening in their armor. All three cried out as I sliced through their calves, falling to their knees before I used the same move to free their heads from their bodies.

It didn’t seem to matter how many men I killed when there were so many more flooding in to take their place. This never-ending bloodshed, the constant need to kill again and again, adding more bodies to the frozen ground but never seeming to make any progress, was its own kind of hell. One we couldn’t seem to escape from.

But if we could just hold the line… A horn blew behind us. One loud, panicked note to alert us that the castle walls had been breached. I cursed under my breath.

I briefly caught sight of Taras and his contingent of men falling back toward the castle. Toward his wife and unborn child.

I swallowed down the bile rising in my throat, throwing myself into the fight with absolutely everything I had left. If I could slow them down, buy him a little more time before the armies flooded our halls, I would give him that.

Because, unfortunately, it wasn’t a matter of if we would lose this battle, but when.

For all of my strategy and my carefully laid plans, here we were, so close to the end of it all, where Iiro was going to get everything he had ever wanted.

Everything but her.

A bitter smile twisted my lips, spurring my exhausted limbs a little more. That was the one thing I had done right, at least.

I would die knowing I had given my all to protect my clan, and that my wife was safe. Safe. And alive.

And in the end, that was all my weary soul could care about. Maybe I had failed my duke by not being the heartless monster he raised me to be. Failed my people by not protecting them from my father or this war.

Mila’s words haunted me as I pushed forward, ducking out of reach of a Wolf soldier in time for one of his clansmen to run him through.

There are no good choices in war.

But with each swing of my blades, I couldn’t help but disagree with her. Couldn’t bring myself to regret this one thing I had done right. At the end, when it mattered, my wife would survive.

The sound of an explosion knocked me backwards, rattling my bones as a flash of bright violet light lit up the sky. Screams of pain erupted, the scent of charred flesh and burning leather choking the air from my lungs.

Panic swept through me for a single, heart-stopping moment. Had Ram’s armies finally made it to finish us off?