Bound by moon and blood

Chapter 3; Blood on both sides

The news reached Lycanor at dawn.

Kael stood in the training yard with blood still drying on his knuckles from the morning drills. Young warriors sparred around him in the snow, their breath rising in white clouds. Rowan approached with a tight face and a folded report in his hand.

“Another attack,” Rowan said without greeting. “Southern border. Seven of ours dead. Throats torn. Bodies drained and left in the open snow.”

Kael took the report. His hands were steady, but something dangerous moved behind his amber eyes as he read. The names hit him one after another. Two of them he knew personally. One had trained under him as a boy. Another had only just been given his first command.

The paper crumpled in his fist.

“Vampires,” he said, voice low and rough.

“Yes.”

Kael turned and drove his fist into the wooden post beside him. The crack echoed across the yard. Several young warriors stopped sparring and stared. Blood ran down Kael’s knuckles, fresh over the old scars, but he did not seem to feel it.

“How many patrols did we have in that area?” he demanded.

“Two full units. They were overrun before they could call for help.”

Kael’s breathing had gone sharp. The cold air burned his lungs, but the real fire sat in his chest. Seven more. Seven more bodies to bring home. Seven more families who would look at their king and silently ask why he had not protected them.

He had failed again.

“They do this because they think we will eventually tire,” Kael snarled. “They think if they keep spilling enough of our blood, we will crawl to the Council and beg for peace like beaten dogs.”

Rowan watched him carefully. “The meeting is in four days.”

“I know.”

“You could refuse to go.”

Kael let out a harsh, humorless laugh that held no humor at all. “And give the other kingdoms a reason to call us the problem? No. I will go. I will sit at their pretty table. And I will look the Vampire King in the eye so he understands that Lycanor does not kneel… and we do not forgive.”

He turned and strode toward the fortress, snow crunching hard under his boots. Servants scattered out of his way. The anger felt clean. Useful. It was easier than the guilt that always waited underneath, whispering that he was never enough, that his father would have stopped this, that every fresh death was another stone on his back.

Inside the great hall he stopped at the base of the stairs and pressed both fists against the stone wall. His shoulders shook once with the force of holding everything in.

“I will make them pay,” he muttered through clenched teeth. “Every last one of them. I swear it.”

In Vespera, different news arrived.

Lucien sat in his private study when Cassian entered with a report. The moment Lucien saw his friend’s expression, he already knew it would be bad. He took the paper and read in silence. Six vampires dead near the western border. Bodies mauled. Deep claw marks. One name made his fingers tighten until the parchment nearly tore.

Rian.

The young guard who had only last week asked Lucien for advice about proposing to his mate. Lucien had smiled and told him to be brave.

Now Rian was gone.

Lucien set the paper down very carefully, as if any sudden movement might shatter something inside him.

“Lycans,” Cassian said quietly.

“Yes.”

Silence filled the study. Outside the tall windows, the red sky hung heavy and unchanging. Lucien stared at it without seeing it. The grief came first, sharp and familiar. Then the anger followed, slower but heavier, settling into his bones like old poison.

He had spent years trying to believe that peace was still possible. He had argued with his nobles, held back his armies, and searched for any sign that the other side might one day grow weary of killing. But mornings like this made the hope feel thin and fragile, like something already half-dead.

His mother’s face rose in his mind without permission.

She had believed the races could share Eryndor without drowning it in blood. A pack of Lycan raiders had proven her wrong in the most brutal way. They left her body in the palace gardens for him to find. His father, her fated mate, had lasted only three months before the bond-grief drove him into the sun. Since then Lucien had lost friends good people who laughed with him in the halls and then never came home from border duty.

Each loss had carved another quiet line of resentment into him, even as he kept speaking of peace in public.

He hated that the resentment existed.

He hated that part of him already wanted to hate Kael Thornridge without ever having met him.

Cassian spoke again, voice careful. “The court is whispering. They say the Lycan King will come to the Council ready for war, not talks.”

Lucien’s crimson eyes flashed. “Then I will be ready for both.”

“And if he is everything the reports claim? Brutal. Unyielding. Hungry for vampire blood?”

Lucien turned to the window. His reflection looked pale and tired, but something harder had settled behind his gaze.

“Then I will look at him,” he said, his voice low and tight, “and I will decide whether hope is still worth carrying… or whether I have been a fool for holding onto it this long.”

He walked back to the desk and rested both hands flat on the wood. For a moment his head dropped forward. The weight of the crown felt heavier than usual.

Six more dead.

Six more names.

Six more reasons for his people to demand blood in return.

“Double the night patrols,” Lucien ordered, and his voice no longer sounded gentle. “No one crosses into our land without my knowledge. If the Lycans want a war of bodies, they will find that Vespera does not break easily. And prepare the formal guard for the journey to Seraphis. We leave in four days.”

Cassian bowed. “As you command.”

When he was alone, Lucien sat down heavily and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. The grief and anger tangled together until he could not separate them.

He still wanted peace.

In the larger part of his heart, he still believed endless killing would only produce more orphans and more graves.

But in a small, quiet corner of his mind, something darker stirred and refused to be silenced.

A Lycan king was coming to the Council.

A man raised on stories of vampire cruelty, just as Lucien had been raised on stories of Lycan savagery.

Lucien lowered his hands and stared at the far wall.

“I hope you are not the monster they say you are, Kael Thornridge,” he whispered, the words rough. “Because if you are… I am no longer certain I will be able to stop myself from becoming one too.”

That same morning, far to the north, Kael stood at his window and stared south with pure, burning hatred.

In the south, Lucien stood at his own window and stared north with grief that was slowly turning into something sharper.

Both kings held lists of their own dead.

Both kings blamed the other side completely.

Both kings prepared for the Council with heavier hearts and hotter anger than they had carried the day before.

In four days, they would stand in the same hall.

Neither of them would be ready for what came next.