OURS: The Hunted Prince

Chapter 11: The Madness Of waiting

We found him just to watch him slip away.

LUCIEN POV

For two weeks I didn't speak to anyone but our mate's sleeping body.

Not Draven. Not Cassius. Not the maids who left trays at the door like offerings to a corpse. Not the guards who stopped patrolling this wing because the air tasted like mourning.

Just him.

Ours.

The only sound in Draven’s room was his breathing.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Too soft. Too slow. Like his lungs forgot how to be greedy. Like breathing was a courtesy he was extending us, and he could revoke it any second.

The room smelled like antiseptic and dead air.

Machines breathed for him.

The ventilator hissed with every forced inhale, the monitor above his bed spiking and falling in a rhythm that wasn’t his own.

Tubes ran from his arms, his throat, his chest — feeding him, cleaning him, keeping the body alive while the mind stayed somewhere else.

The doctors called it a coma.

I called it a prison.

His chest rose and fell only because the machine told it to.

No dreams. No movement. Just the soft beep of a heart that hadn’t decided if it wanted to keep beating.

And somewhere in the back of my mind, I wondered if he could hear us.

If he knew none of us were letting that machine go silent.

I bathed him with hands that still shook from the branding.

Every night.

Because the first night, I saw dirt on his cheek. Blood crusted under his nails. The stench of that dungeon still clinging to his skin like a curse. And something in me — something old and territorial and feral — snapped.

No one else would touch him. Not healers. Not maids. Not even my brothers, unless I was there to watch their hands.

The water went red the first three times. I didn’t let anyone see. I buried the towels in the garden. Burned them to ash. Because if anyone knew how broken he was under these sheets, they’d think he was weak.

And he wasn’t weak.

He was surviving.

He was surviving us.

And I had three healers executed for saying he might not wake up.

The first one said it gentle. Like he was being kind. “Sometimes, my prince, the mind chooses not to return. The trauma—”

I took his tongue first. So he couldn’t say it again. Then his head.

The second one said it clinical. “Brain activity is minimal. We should consider the merciful option—”

I fed him to the hounds. While he was still breathing. Made him watch them come.

The third one didn’t even get the words out. He looked at Zane. Looked at me. And I saw the pity in his eyes.

I carved my name into his chest before I let him bleed out on the marble. L. For Lucien. For liar. For the lie that he won’t wake up.

How dare they say that?

We waited for ages for him. Three hundred years of empty beds and cold thrones and wars that meant nothing because there was no one to come home to. Three hundred years of Draven’s silence and Cassius’s blood and my talking to fill the space where a fourth heartbeat should be.

And now that we finally found him, nothing can take him away from us. Not even death.

Death had already taken too much.

We won't lose him.

NEVER.

The word wasn’t a promise. It was a threat. To the gods. To death. To our mate himself.

The palace knew something was wrong in the royal wing.

They had to.

Servants whispered of screams at midnight — mine, when I dreamed he stopped breathing. They whispered of blood in the bathing chambers — his, when I changed the bandages on his wrists. They whispered of doors that locked themselves, of cold spots in the halls where I’d stand for hours, just listening to him through the wall.

The court knew their princes had gone mad.

Let them.

Madness was better than the alternative. Madness meant we still felt. Madness meant we hadn’t surrendered. Madness meant we were still here, still waiting, still his.

But no one — no one — knew it was for the life of a werewolf.

How ironic.

The Heirs of Duskmoor. The monsters who sealed Death himself. The kings who burned the Treaty in effigy every solstice, who spat at the idea of peace with beasts, who taught our people that wolves were for hunting, not keeping.

On our knees for a wolf.

For one wolf.

We never considered the possibility of the three of us having a male mate.

It was law. It was biology. One dragon, one mate. One wolf, one mate. One soul, one tether.

Not three monsters. One sleeping boy who smelled like winter and blood and something we couldn’t name.

But here we are.

And we have still not fully realized that we have just one mate.

Because realizing it would mean admitting we could lose him.

And we don’t lose.

We’ve never lost.

DRAVEN stopped pretending to be human.

There was no point.

With no known enemy to kill and no throat to slit, he turned the palace into his hunting grounds instead.

I’d see him at night. Or I wouldn’t. Which was worse.

Shadows peeling off the walls, solidifying into something with teeth, stalking guards until they pissed themselves and quit by morning. Following maids until they dropped trays of food that no one ate. Sitting in the corners of the throne room during court, just breathing, until the nobles forgot their words and begged to be dismissed.

He needed something to bleed for this.

And the world wasn't offering.

No war. No assassin. No witch standing in front of him with a knife and a curse.

Just silence. Just the sound of our mate not waking up. Just the inhale. Exhale. Inhale.

So he hunted ghosts.

He then focused on finding the witch that tried using death magic.

If he couldn’t kill for our mate, he’d kill for vengeance.

He buried himself in the library.

Day and night. No food. No sleep. Just books older than kingdoms, scrolls that burned your fingers to touch, maps of places that didn’t exist anymore. Ink on his hands. Dust in his hair. Shadows under his eyes that had nothing to do with his power.

Trying to escape the reality of what was happening in the castle.

That our mate was dying.

That we couldn’t stop it.

That for the first time in three centuries, the Heirs of Duskmoor were powerless.

Cassius rotted with grief.

It was the only word for it.

Rotted. Like fruit left in the sun. Like something dead that hadn’t been buried.

He didn’t sleep. Didn’t eat. Didn’t speak unless it was to snarl or to order more blood.

He bought out an entire fighting pit just to step into the ring and let himself get bloodied, night after night.

I went once.

He was in the center. Shirt off. Gold tattoos catching the torchlight, twisting like they were alive. Blood on his teeth. Blood on his knuckles. Blood on the sand, so much of it that the ground was black.

He wasn’t fighting. He was taking.

Letting men twice his size hit him. Kick him. Break him.

Because pain was the only thing louder than the sound of our mate's quiet breathing.

He'd break a man's jaw for looking at him wrong.

I saw it.

A lordling in the upper rings laughed. Not at Cassius. At a joke. At nothing. At the fact that he was still alive.

Cassius was in the stands before the sound died.

Crack.

The man’s jaw hanging wrong. Screaming through blood and bone.

Then Cassius would pay the healer's weight in gold to fix it.

Drag the healer there himself. Throw a bag of coin that could buy a village, a city, a small kingdom. Watch them work. Watch the bone knit.

Only to break it again by morning.

Because the pain had to keep coming. Because if it stopped, he’d hear the silence. He’d hear him. He’d hear the space where Zane’s voice should be.

At night he will crawl into Draven's bed and lay close to our mate.

Not touch. Never touch. Just... exist in the same air.

I’d find him there sometimes. When I came to take my watch. When my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

Cassius on the edge of the mattress. Like he didn’t deserve the middle. Like he was afraid his grief would poison the sheets, poison Zane.

He’d press his knife to our mate's throat.

The same knife he used to skin that guard. Still stained. Still sharp. The edge catching the moonlight.

And snarl, "You don't get to die before I ruin you."

His voice would shake. His hand would shake.

Only to end up shoving his face into that still-warm neck and making a sound like a dying animal.

Not grief.

Grief was too clean. Too human.

This was fury that the world would dare take what was theirs.

Fury that the gods would give us a mate just to make us watch him die.

Fury that he was so still. So quiet. So gone when he should be fighting us, biting us, hating us, living.

Fist hitting the wall hard enough to leave the stone spider-webbed.

I’d heard it from the hall.

The boom. The dust. The way the whole wing shook like the castle was coming down.

Knuckles split from punching things that wouldn't fight back.

Because nothing would.

The world wouldn’t fight us. Death wouldn’t fight us.

Only his silence did.

We finally found our mate just to watch him slip away.

Two weeks.

Fourteen days.

336 hours of listening to him not wake up.

336 hours of counting breaths and praying they didn’t stop.

And all our wealth couldn't buy a single damn breath for him.

We own kingdoms. We own armies. We own the fear of every living thing in Duskmoor.

We own gold enough to build a mountain. Gems enough to buy the sea.

And we couldn’t buy time.

Couldn’t buy consciousness. Couldn’t buy the flutter of his lashes or the sound of his voice cursing us or the way his eyes would look when he hated us.

I sat by the bed.

Again.

Always.

My shift. My penance. My vigil.

I took his hand.

Cold. Still. Fingers that should have been wrapped around my throat, or in my hair, or flipping me off, or holding a knife to my throat.

Instead, they were limp.

"Please," I whispered.

I don’t beg.

I never beg.

Kings don’t beg. Monsters don’t beg. I don’t beg.

But I was on my knees. Forehead pressed to the back of his hand. Breathing in the scent of herbs and soap and nothing. Nothing. Not him. Not yet.

"Please wake up. You can hate us. You can try to kill us. You can run. Just... wake up."

He didn’t.

Of course he didn’t.

Why would he?

He woke up in hell. With monsters. With the three creatures every bedtime story warned about. With the princes who burned his kind for sport.

His body chose death over another second of this.

And who could blame him?

I pressed my lips to his knuckles.

They tasted like soap. Like the herbs the healers used before I killed them. Like nothing.

Not like him. Not yet.

"You don’t get to die," I told him. To the room. To the gods. To death itself. To the silence.

"Not before I ruin you too."

Outside, Cassius broke something. Glass. Bone. I didn’t check.

Inside, Draven’s shadow moved on the wall. Watching. Waiting.

And I stayed.

Because we found him.

And we don’t lose.

Not even to death.

Especially not to death.

Never.