The Lycan Queen's Return

Chapter 3: The Alpha doesn't remember Or Does He?

The voice froze every muscle in my body.

I hung half out the window, one boot already on the narrow stone ledge, cloak whipping in the morning wind, heart slamming so hard I tasted metal. For one wild second I thought the speaker was a guard, or my father, or some servant sent to drag me back. Then the words registered low, rough, unmistakably male, and the blood in my veins turned to ice.

I turned.

Alpha Kael Blackwood stood on the small stone balcony that jutted from the side of my chamber, one shoulder braced against the carved railing as if he had every right to be there. Black ceremonial tunic open at the throat. Dark hair wind-tossed. Storm-gray eyes fixed on me with an intensity that stole the air from my lungs.

He should not have been there.

The balcony connected to the guest wing only through a locked service door that no outsider was supposed to know existed. Guards patrolled the main corridors. My father had ordered this entire section sealed. Kael was supposed to be in the eastern courtyard accepting formal greetings from the council, not standing ten feet from the window I was about to climb out of.

I expected the cold arrogance I remembered. The empty mask, the polite distance that had never once cracked in three years of marriage. The same expressionless face that had watched the silver dagger sink into my heart.

Instead he looked at me like a man who had not slept in days.

“Did you have that nightmare again?”

The question was quiet. Almost gentle. It landed harder than a shout.

I froze so completely that my boot slipped on the ledge. Stone scraped my ankle. I caught the window frame with both hands and hauled myself back inside before I could fall. My pulse roared in my ears. Glass still glittered across the floor from the mirrors I had smashed. Blood from my cut knuckles had dried in dark streaks down my wrists. The riding dress and cloak marked me clearly as a woman about to run, and Kael Blackwood had just asked about a nightmare he should not know existed.

In the first timeline he had never once asked about my dreams. He had never stepped into my private chambers uninvited. He had never looked at me with anything except controlled indifference or the occasional flicker of something colder.

How did he know?

I stared at him, breath locked in my throat, every instinct screaming danger. The man in front of me was supposed to be the killer who would one day drive silver through my chest. Yet the way he stood, shoulders tight, hands loosely curled at his sides, eyes tracking the blood on my skin, felt wrong.

He pushed off the railing and took one slow step closer. Not threatening. Measuring.

“You’re bleeding.” His gaze dropped to my hands, then to the wreckage of the room.

“And you were about to climb out a third-story window in riding clothes on our wedding morning. Tell me that is not because of the dream.”

I found my voice. It came out sharp and raw.

“You have no right to be here.”

“I know.”

“Then leave.”

He did not move. The wind tugged at the open collar of his tunic, revealing the edge of the black wolf brand every Blackwood Alpha carried over the heart. In the first life I had traced that brand once, late at night, when I still hoped the marriage might become something real. He had gone still under my fingers and never let me touch him that way again.

Now he watched me the way a wolf watches a wounded thing it has not yet decided to finish.

“Elara.” My name in his mouth sounded different.

“Answer me.”

I backed away from the window until the edge of the bed hit the backs of my knees. Glass crunched under my boots. I needed distance. I needed time to think. Every plan I had formed in the last hour was collapsing under the weight of those two quiet questions.

How could he possibly know I had woken screaming from the memory of my own death?

Unless,

No, Impossible. He had not died. He had not come back. I was the only one who carried the three years of blood and betrayal. I was the only one who remembered the coronation, the dagger, the vow.

Yet he stood there asking about a nightmare as if it were a shared secret.

I forced my chin up.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw. For a fraction of a second something raw flashed through the storm-gray, frustration, fear, something that looked almost like guilt, then it vanished behind the controlled mask I remembered too well.

“You were talking in your sleep,” he said. “Last night. I was in the corridor outside. The guards heard you. They came to me because they did not dare wake the king’s daughter themselves.”

His voice dropped lower.

“You said my name. Then you said the word dagger. Then you started screaming that you would never forgive me.”

The room tilted.

Last night. I had not been here last night. I had died three years from now and woken this morning. There was no last night in this timeline for me to have spoken those words.

Unless the return had not been clean. Unless fragments of the future had leaked into the past somehow. Or unless he was lying with a precision that made my skin crawl.

I searched his face for the familiar cold arrogance and found none. Only that same haunted intensity the blurb of my second life had warned me about, the look that did not match the killer in my memories.

“You’re lying,” I whispered.

“Am I?”

He took another step. I held my ground even though every nerve screamed to run. Up close I could see the faint shadows under his eyes, the tension in the line of his throat, the way his hands flexed once at his sides as if he wanted to reach for me and did not dare.

“I came to check on you,” he said. “That is all. I expected to find a nervous bride. Instead I find broken mirrors, blood, and a woman ready to risk a broken neck rather than walk into a hall and marry me.”

His gaze flicked to the open window behind me, then back.

“So I will ask once more. Did you have that nightmare again?”

The question hung between us like a blade.

I could not answer. Any word I spoke risked revealing too much. If he somehow remembered even a fragment of the future, then everything I planned, escape, revenge, survival, had already shifted under my feet. If he did not remember and was only guessing, then speaking of daggers and death would mark me as unstable, exactly the excuse my father needed to force the ceremony.

Silence stretched. Wind rattled the open casement. Somewhere below in the courtyard a horn sounded, announcing another arriving pack.

Kael waited. He did not push. He simply watched me with that fierce, unreadable focus, as if he could pull the truth out of my silence by force of will alone.

Finally he exhaled, a short, controlled breath.

“You don’t have to tell me.” He stepped back, giving me space I had not realized I needed.

“Not yet.”

The words implied a future conversation. A continuation. As if he expected to still be in my life after today.

I hated the way hope tried to flicker in my chest. I crushed it immediately. This man would one day drive silver through my heart in front of the entire court. Whatever strange softness I saw now was either a lie or a temporary c***k. It changed nothing.

He turned toward the service door I had not even noticed standing open behind him. The same door that should have been locked. He paused with one hand on the frame, profile cut sharp against the morning light.

I thought he would leave without another word. That would have been the Kael I remembered, cold, efficient, finished with the conversation the moment it no longer served him.

Instead he

spoke again, so softly the wind almost stole the words.

“I won’t let you die this time.”