Defying the Lycan King

Lydia trailed soft kisses down Rolf’s chest, and he groaned beneath her, one hand sliding lazily along her spine as he soaked up every bit of it. When she’d had enough, she sat up, gathering the sheets around herself, and was halfway off the bed when his fingers closed around her wrist and held her there.

She looked down at his hand, then back up at his face, one brow arching.

"What is it?" Lydia asked.

"When am I getting Tyron’s essence?" His voice came out soft, but there was an edge underneath it that hadn’t been there a moment ago. "Everything’s in place. We’ve got the girl. I’m here. The alphas are ready and waiting. There’s nothing stopping us merging the powers now."

Lydia let out a breath and sank back down onto the mattress.

"Listen to me, my love. It isn’t going to work properly, unless we bring Kira over to our side first. There’s still resistance in her."

"That girl’s always been stubborn." Rolf’s mouth twisted. "I thought you’d put something on her wrist to leash whatever she’s got."

"I did." Lydia’s brow creased slightly. "And that’s the strange part. Her mental shield is far stronger than it has any right to be, and I can’t work out why. I went into her head today. I very nearly had her, right up until she saw her own brother standing there with us, and then she pulled herself back together in seconds."

She shook her head slowly. "What bothers me most is that there’s nothing coming off her. No energy at all. Not a flicker."

"Hmm," Rolf hummed, without an ounce of genuine interest.

He wasn’t remotely bothered by any of it. Let the woman fret over shields and energy readings. All he wanted was that essence in his body, and once he had it, once he was immortal and untouchable, the Nexus girl could be dealt with however he liked. He’d never understood why Lydia insisted on going so gently with her in the first place.

"Since we’re on the subject of the twin," he said, "how far do you actually trust him?"

"I don’t." Lydia said it flatly, without hesitation. "But he’s a useful tool for now. You should have seen what his betrayal did to her, how it cracked her wide open. If she keeps having to look at his face, that heart of hers will keep breaking, and a broken heart is a far easier thing to get inside."

Rolf considered that. "Is there really no other way to merge her powers?"

Lydia sighed. "One. If she’s killed."

His eyebrows rose.

"But it’s no guarantee," she went on. "Kira is stubborn to her bones, and a stubborn spirit is worse than a stubborn girl. If she dies without ever believing us, that spirit would fight us for eternity."

"So her spirit could still do the work."

"It could. If it were coaxed." Lydia’s fingers smoothed absently over the sheet. "But that’s a very dangerous throw of the dice. We’ve waited years for this. What’s a few more days?"

Rolf made a noncommittal sound, and his hand slid up her arm again, drawing her back down towards him.

***

Out in the corridor, on the other side of the heavy door, someone stood perfectly still with their head tilted towards the gap.

They stayed there until the voices gave way to other sounds, kissing, the low murmur of the bed frame shifting. Then they straightened, turned, and walked away down the dim corridor without making a sound at all.

***

Sleep took a long time to come for Kira, and when it finally did, it wasn’t the restful kind.

She lay in the dark going back over every choice she’d made. First they had used Nana to slow her down. Now Braxton. Her own blood, standing in that throne room in a pressed shirt, calling Lydia Your Majesty.

She’d started wondering how long it would be before something in her simply snapped.

And there was the other thing, the piece she couldn’t stop chewing on. Alphas were waiting on Lydia’s command. She kept running through faces in her head, and she couldn’t guess which of them were already bought.

Maya’s words came back to her that night, the ones that had crawled all over her skin at the time and that she’d been quick to shrug off afterwards. They didn’t sound creepy anymore. They sounded like a warning.

She should never have trusted the man calling himself her brother to start with.

She was still drifting somewhere between sleep and waking when she felt someone in the room.

She had not heard anyone enter, but she could feel them clearly. Her eyes snapped open in the dark.

Before she could move or make a sound, the figure was on her, clamping a firm palm over her mouth and muffling any cry she might have made.

***

Derek came awake with a roar.

He was on his feet before his eyes had properly focused, and the panic hit him. He instantly knew that panic wasn’t his own. It was Kira’s. Their bond had come alive.

Since the night Kira vanished he’d felt nothing at all through it. No fear, no anger, no warmth, no flicker of her irritation or her laughter. Just a hollow where she should have been, and he’d been walking around with it like a hole punched through him.

Now his heart was going hard enough to break ribs.

Declan and Kai were beside him within seconds, two of them talking at once, asking what had happened. Derek didn’t answer straight away. He shoved past them and started pacing, dragging both hands back through his hair.

They’d made camp in the woods at Aethewulf Centralis, right where she’d been taken. They’d tracked every scent line in the area, gone over the ground until they’d worn paths into it, brought in every tracker Kai could get his hands on, and come up with absolutely nothing.

Whatever had walked out of these trees with his wife and his grandmother had left the world clean behind it.

Derek had enough fury sitting in his body to level half the forest, and nowhere on earth to put it. That was the part driving him out of his mind. Not the grief. The uselessness.

And now this. A flare of her terror, and then nothing again.

"What happened?" Declan asked.

"The bond." Derek’s voice came out rough. "I felt it. Just now, it came alive."

"Do you still feel it?" Declan stepped closer, urgent. "If it’s open we can use it. We can trace her through it."

"That’s the problem." He was breathing hard. "It was one flare. It’s gone again." He turned on them, eyes bright amber in the dark. "She’s in danger. That infuriating, impossible woman has gone and got herself into danger."

"Derek." Kai held up both hands. "You need to keep your head. Kira isn’t going down like that. She’s not built that way."

He didn’t sound nearly as certain as he had two days ago, and all three of them heard it.

"She walked in there on purpose," Kai pressed on anyway. "She had a reason. She’ll get whatever it is she went for, and in two days we get the signal she promised us."

Declan and another gamma nodded along beside him, mouths set in tight lines.

Derek wasn’t listening to a word of it. Inside him, Leo paced and clawed and threw himself against the walls of a cage neither of them could break.

Be all right, he thought, staring off into the black between the trees. Please. Just be all right for me.