The devices were brutal, designed to ensure a slow and painful end for their enemies. Addison, however, remained blissfully unaware of the details. No one shared the specifics with her, only letting her believe that her mates had set up extra defenses to keep rogues out and ease her worries.
While the warriors at the border waited like hunters for their prey to stumble into their traps in the forest, Zion often broke away for patrols.
From ti to ti, he would run the periter, not only covering his own section but also venturing into the others’ areas to check. To him, if even one section fell, Addison would be in danger, and he refused to let that happen.
That was why his patrols were diligent and ticulous, his senses sharpened to every detail of the surroundings. Now that he knew Greg was involved in this ss, along with the Grey Wolf he had clashed with, Zion kept his guard higher than ever.
Then Zion suddenly froze in his tracks.
’Shit! I forgot to tell Addison!’
The realization hit him hard. When he’d first returned, he had been so agitated and aggressive, as he was so consud by what he walked into, that everything else slipped from his mind. Only now, while thinking about that bastard Greg, did it strike him that he truly hadn’t ntioned it to Addison at all.
"Shura, see? I lost my focus because you’re always getting jealous!" Zion growled, even as his mind raced for a way to reach Addison.
He could patrol the periter, but he couldn’t just abandon the border to go find her himself. More importantly, he couldn’t risk sending anyone else as a ssenger. They still didn’t know if there was a mole among them, or if one even existed, and carelessness could expose what they knew.
That ant every word had to be chosen carefully. If the wrong information slipped out, it could fall straight into the ears of a spy. After all, as the saying went, walls had ears.
"The fuck?! You’re putting this all on ? Weren’t you just as agitated? You wanted to tear that bastard apart with your own hands! And don’t act like you’re any less jealous. You nearly lost your head when we found out Maxwell was mating with our woman while we were away. So quit throwing all the bla on ."
Shura grumbled, refusing to give Zion much attention. Its mood was already sour; being stuck at the border ant it couldn’t even see its mate, and that frustration was eating at it.
"Sigh... alright, fine. We’re both at fault. But what should we do? Can this even wait before we tell Addison?" Zion asked. He was still a little shaken by the mistakes of his past, how keeping things to himself had led to painful misunderstandings.
Now, he felt he had to be open with Addison, to let her know everything he thought or discovered.
"Aren’t you the smart one? Then use that brain of yours and figure it out," Shura muttered, curling up and deliberately turning its back so its rear faced Zion’s mind’s eye, a clear sign that it was dumping all the stress on him and wanted nothing to do with the matter. After all, Shura couldn’t see Addison anyway.
"Alright..." Zion exhaled heavily, resigning himself to the weight of it all. Then he pushed forward, picking up his pace as he continued his patrol along the periter.
Even after finishing his patrol, Zion couldn’t break away from his duty at the border. At the sa ti, he couldn’t exactly summon Addison there just to speak with him. In the end, he resolved to tell her everything at the first chance he got.
What mattered most was that this ti, he wasn’t deliberately keeping secrets from her, not like before, when he had brought Claire into his territory and treated her with such care without telling Addison a thing.
That silence had led to a painful misunderstanding, one he had practically designed to hurt her. It had been his wrong choice, his mistake. And now, he refused to repeat the sa foolishness ever again.
With his mind finally at ease, Zion doubled down on protecting his stretch of the border. Rogue intruders who tried to slip into the forest rarely got far; either Zion’s massive wolf would intercept them, or they’d stumble into one of the traps laid by Zion and the warriors and et a grisly end.
When Zion captured soone, he interrogated them on the spot. If they refused to talk, he showed no rcy by snapping their heads off with his bare hands or biting it off with his wolf’s mouth; he killed without hesitation. It was brutal by design.
If the enemy’s leader was watching, the ssage would be loud and clear: Zion would not let the infiltrators go, and he would not allow their sches to succeed. The cruelty was part warning, part psychological warfare, ant to keep the foe restless and afraid.
While Zion relied on brutal psychological warfare on the side of his border, Maxwell’s thods were a little different. He preferred tactics rooted in fear that ss with their heads. Any rogues he or his warriors captured were rounded up and interrogated one by one.
But since most of them were death warriors sent only to probe their defenses, they rarely broke easily.
When silence persisted, Maxwell made an example of them. He executed the defiant in full view of the others by smashing their skulls on the ground or slitting their throats, until the ground was littered with bodies. It was never random; it was a deliberate tactic to shatter their ntality. To rouse their natural survival instinct to survive.
Yet even so, no useful information had surfaced. Standing over the last trembling captive, Maxwell’s gaze was cold and indifferent. Four others already lay dead at his feet, blood soaking the earth.
The final rogue shook like a quail beneath his stare, while a fresh spray of crimson still stained Maxwell’s handso face.
"Ready to talk?" Maxwell asked, his voice ice-cold as he looked down at the bound prisoner. Unlike Zion, who staged brutal public executions to intimidate their enemies, Maxwell wasn’t performing for an audience.
He wasn’t here to provoke; he was here to extract information. Impatience would only reveal his need for that information, and his need would give the rogues leverage over him. So he kept his stance steady and indifferent, letting the atmosphere of calm nace do the work of breaking them from the inside.
"I really didn’t know much! Just kill , you motherfucker!" the rogue shouted, his voice cracking, as if he had scraped together every ounce of courage left in him. Maxwell, however, didn’t flinch.
His eyes caught the glint of a stud earring on the rogue’s ear, identical to the one Zion had shown them back in the Royal Palace when he first revealed his discovery about the rogues attacking his territory.
’No wonder these rogues were a little less bloodthirsty,’ Maxwell thought. ’They’re either people pretending to be rogues, which is why they can keep their sanity in check, or they’re newly turned and were captured to be used as pawns against us. Either way, it seems the Dark Witch’s Faction is behind all of this.’
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