The Lycan Queen's Return

Chapter 4: The First Assassins

I waited until the palace bells rang at the midday hour.

Kael’s visit had shattered every clean escape plan I had formed in the first frantic hour after waking. His quiet questions, the way he had known about the nightmare, the final whisper that still burned in my ears,

”I won’t let you die this time,” left me, pacing the ruined chamber like a caged thing. Guards posted outside the main door. The service door he had used was now locked again from the other side. My father had meant what he said. I was not leaving the wing by any ordinary route.

So I used the opposite route.

I waited. I cleaned the blood from my hands. I bound the cuts properly with strips of the torn nightgown. I forced down the bread and water. A frightened Marta slipped through the door when no one was looking. Then, when the sun stood high and the courtyard below filled with the noise of arriving packs and formal greetings, I opened the window again.

This time I did not hesitate.

I swung out onto the ledge, pressed my body flat against the cold stone, and edged toward the ivy-covered servants’ stair. The drop to the flagstones waited three stories down. One slip and the second chance ended the same way the first life had, b****y and final.

Wind tugged at my cloak. My boots scraped. My heart slammed against the memory of silver fire.

I reached the stairs, dropped onto the narrow wooden steps, and descended as fast as silence allowed. The laundry courtyard next, empty at this hour except for two washing lines and the lingering smell of lye. Postern gate beyond. The single guard there was young, bored, and easily distracted by the coin I pressed into his palm and the lie that I was carrying a private message for the king’s hunting master.

Then the trees.

The border forest closed around me like a living thing. Tall pines, dense underbrush, the thick carpet of needles that swallowed sound. I had ridden these paths as a girl. I knew which game trails led deeper into the wild and which ones curved back toward the palace roads. I kept to the former, hood pulled low, the small traveling knife clenched in one hand, every sense stretched tight.

In the first timeline I had never run on my wedding day. I had walked into the hall in white silk and moonstones and let the vows bind me. There had been no forest escape. No flight. No reason for anyone to hunt me through the trees before the ceremony even began.

This time the timeline had already cracked.

I made it less than two miles before the first crossbow bolt hissed past my ear and buried itself in a pine trunk with a solid thunk.

I dropped flat.

A second bolt sliced the air where my head had been. Then a third. Movement flickered between the trees, dark shapes, masked faces, the soft creak of leather and the faint metallic scent of oiled steel. At least six. Maybe more. They moved with the disciplined silence of professionals, not ordinary bandits.

Assassins.

In my first life, no one had tried to kill me on my wedding morning. No masked blades had waited in the forest. The only dagger that mattered had come three years later from the hand of the man I was supposed to marry.

The timeline had changed.

I rolled hard to the left as a figure lunged from the underbrush, short sword flashing. The blade scored the cloak instead of my spine. I came up on one knee and drove the traveling knife upward. It caught the attacker under the ribs. Hot blood spilled over my hand. The man, or woman, the mask and dark clothing made it impossible to tell—staggered back with a muffled cry.

I did not wait to see if the wound was mortal. I ran.

Branches tore at my face and arms. Roots tried to trip me. Another bolt hummed past, close enough that I felt the wind of its passage. Shouts rose behind me, short and sharp, coordinating the hunt. These were not men sent by my father to drag a runaway bride home. These were killers who wanted me dead before the sun set on the day I was supposed to become Luna.

Why?

Who else remembered?

I burst into a small clearing and immediately regretted it. Open ground. No cover. Four more figures stepped from the tree line ahead, blocking the path. Crossbows have already leveled. Swords drawn. Masks of black cloth hid everything except their eyes, cold, focused, professional.

I spun, looking for another way out. The ones behind me closed in. Six in front of me now. At least four at my back. Nowhere left to run.

The tallest of the forward group raised a hand. The others halted. He spoke, his voice distorted by the mask but clear enough.

“Elara of the Eastern Packs. The order is simple. You do not reach the border. You do not live to see the moonrise.”

I tightened my grip on the b****y knife.

“Who sent you?”

No answer. Only the soft sound of boots shifting on pine needles as the circle tightened.

I did not wait for the signal to attack. I charged the nearest crossbowman on my left, the one whose stance looked the least settled. The surprise bought me half a second. I slammed into him, knocked the weapon aside, and raked the knife across his forearm.

Chaos erupted.

A sword flashed toward my throat. I ducked under it and drove my shoulder into the wielder’s midsection. We went down hard. Needles and dirt filled my mouth. I stabbed blindly, felt the blade sink into flesh, heard the sharp grunt of pain. Then weight crashed into my back, another attacker, heavier, trying to pin me. I rolled, used the momentum, and came up swinging. The knife caught cloth and skin. Blood sprayed warm across my cheek.

Pain exploded along my left side as a blade sliced through the riding dress and into the soft flesh beneath my ribs. Not deep enough to kill, but deep enough to burn. I staggered. A fist caught me across the temple. The world tilted. I went to one knee.

A boot drove into my stomach. Air left my lungs in a rush. Another kick landed against my shoulder and sent me sprawling onto my back. The knife flew from my hand. I tasted blood. The sky above the pines spun.

A masked figure stepped over me, short sword raised for the finishing thrust. Sunlight caught the edge of the blade. In that frozen second I saw my own death again, not the silver dagger in the throne hall, but a simpler, dirtier end on the forest floor before I had even begun to change anything.

I tried to move. My limbs would not answer fast enough.

The sword began to fall.

Then the clearing exploded with a different kind of violence.

A black shape slammed into the assassin from the side hard enough to lift the man off his feet and hurl him into a tree. The bone cracked. The sword spun away.

Alpha Kael Blackwood straightened from the takedown, already turning to meet the next attacker, storm-gray eyes flat and lethal, a long dark blade in his hand that I had never seen him carry in the first timeline.

He moved like the wolf he was.

Fast and precise without wasted motion.

The nearest crossbowman fired. Kael sidestepped; the bolt hissed past. In the same movement, he closed the distance and opened the man’s throat in one clean arc. Blood sprayed. The body dropped.

Two more rushed him together. He met them without slowing, parried one blade, used the attacker’s momentum to throw him into the second, then finished both with brutal efficiency. The fight escalated.

Bodies hit the ground.

I forced myself up onto my elbows, pain flaring white-hot along my side. Blood soaked the dark fabric of the riding dress. My vision swam, but I could not look away.

Kael fought the way the stories claimed the Blackwood Alphas fought, like the forest itself had given him teeth. He wasted no time on flourishes. Every strike ended a life or crippled a limb. When one assassin tried to flank him, Kael simply turned, held the descending sword on his own blade, and drove his forehead into the man’s masked face.

His nose gave out with a wet, sickening c***k. The assassin staggered back, hands flying to his face as blood poured between his fingers.

Kael’s follow-up cut dropped him permanently.

The remaining three tried to regroup, but they were too late. Kael was already among them. One fell with a severed hamstring, then a second cut across the chest. Another managed to score a thin line across Kael’s upper arm before Kael’s boot took his knee sideways and the dark blade finished it.

The last one turned to run. Kael threw the sword. It took the fleeing man between the shoulders and dropped him face-first into the needles.

Silence crashed down over the clearing, broken only by the wet sounds of the dying and my own ragged breathing.

Kael stood in the center of the c*****e, chest rising and falling in controlled pulls, blood spattered across the black tunic, the borrowed or stolen blade still in his hand. He scanned the trees once, making certain no further threats remained, then turned and strode straight to me.

I expected the question every rescuer asked.

Are you hurt? Can you stand? How badly are you bleeding?

He did not ask any of those.

He dropped to one knee beside me, storm-gray eyes locking onto mine with that same fierce, haunted intensity I had seen on the balcony, and demanded,

“Who knew you would be here?”

The words landed like another blow. Not concerned about the blood soaking through my dress. Not surprised that assassins had attacked on our wedding day. Only the cold, immediate question of a man who had expected the attack and wanted the name of the one who had set it in motion.

I stared up at him, pain and shock and the crushing realization that the timeline was no longer mine alone to rewrite colliding inside my skull. Before I could force an answer past my teeth, a wet, broken laugh rose from the edge of the clearing.

One of the assassins, the one whose hamstring Kael had severed, still lived. He lay on his side in a spreading pool of blood, mask half-torn, eyes already glazing. Yet he laughed, low and rattling, as if the dying itself amused him.

“The second player,” he rasped, “has already moved.”