Dire Bound (The Wolves of Ruin, #1)

by Sable Sorensen

We don’t use knives during the hand-to-hand combat we do in the pits, but Igor’s been training me to throw them anyway. He said you never know when you might need to make someone shit their pants by tossing a dagger at their head.

“Indeed. And at the end of Forging?” “The Purge Trial,” Izabel says confidently. “Where the packs have a chance to cull their own numbers and remove any riders and direwolves not fit to join them.” My stomach freefalls from beneath me. The packs are going to kill their own?! No one else seems to so much as blink at this. “Followed by the Forging Ball, of course,” Izabel adds quickly. Sure, because who wouldn’t follow a brutal massacre with a fancy ball?

The king’s role is to ensure that the commoners he reigns over always have an equal balance of power with the Bonded and the direwolves. So while Siegrid is the highest in power for the Bonded, we ultimately all answer to the king.” It makes sense, in theory. But in practice? What are we meant to do when the man appointed to protect the common people’s interests starts to ignore us?

Why wait for the king’s natural death when there’s someone more fit to rule the throne? “There is,” Anassa agrees, hearing my thoughts. “Stop,” I tell her. “We are not planning a mutiny on our day off.”