Chapter 149

• Dane
• I stepped quietly, without anything else to say, from the corpse of that councilman–the withered blue flesh spread grotesquely on the gray stone floor, the half-Lycan claws curled inward, frozen in agony. Poison and fear thickly hung in the air while torchlight cast jagged shadows across the chamber's high walls.
• The guards dragged their boots on the ground, scooting back and forth. But once again, they did not pay attention to me, as if a single glance could have sent them scurrying to drag the corpse away while its weight scraped the stone with a dull, sickening drag behind it. I turned and did not look back. Let it be a lesson carved into their minds.