Rejected by the Alpha, Claimed by the Lycan King

Chapter 8: The Sister

Her name was Vael.

I learned this the way I learned everything about the Lycans in those first hours in pieces, grudgingly, like pulling nails out of old wood.

She did not offer her name herself. It was Kael who said it, his voice carrying the particular flatness of a man who has had the same argument too many times to bother dressing it up.

"Vael." He stepped between us, subtle as a wall. "She is here. She is staying. The conversation ends there."

Vael's silver eyes did not leave my face.

"Four hundred and ninety-seven years," she said softly. "That is how long I have watched you wait, brother. I watched you sit in that hall alone. I watched you send away every she-wolf who came offering herself. I watched you turn down alliances and treaties and political matches that could have saved what is left of us." She tilted her head. "And she is what the Goddess sent you."

"Yes," Kael said.

"A werewolf."

"A Lycan-blooded mate."

Vael's lip curled. "Diluted. Generations diluted. She probably cannot even feel the bloodline in herself."

I felt heat rise in my chest. I had been quiet because Kael told me to be. But there is a point where quiet becomes something else, and I had crossed it.

"She is standing right here," I said.

Vael's eyes snapped to mine. She looked surprised, like a cat that had expected the mouse to keep running.

"Yes," she said slowly. "You are."

She stepped sideways, out from behind Kael's shoulder, circling me the way a wolf circles something it is not yet sure about. I stood still. I kept my eyes on her. I let her look.

My wolf stayed level inside me. Not submissive. Not aggressive. Just steady.

Vael completed the circle. She stopped in front of me again. And something in her expression shifted just slightly, just at the edges.

"You have Lycan blood," she said. It was not a question this time.

"So I am told."

"You do not feel it?"

"I feel something," I said. "I felt the border let me through. I felt your brother's bond hit me in the Blackwood like a lightning strike. I feel" I pressed one hand against my sternum, against the humming warmth that had lived there since Kael took my hand. "I feel this. Whatever this is."

Vael looked at my hand pressed to my chest.

Something moved behind her silver eyes.

"The bond hum," she said softly. Almost to herself. "Only a Lycan mate carries the bond hum this early." She looked at Kael. "It is real."

"I told you it was real."

"You tell me many things." But her voice had changed. The cold amusement had thinned. She sounded like someone who had been prepared to argue and found the argument suddenly difficult. "She is still untrained. She is still green as spring grass. She has no idea what she is walking into."

"Then we will teach her," Kael said.

Vael looked at me for a long moment.

Then she made a sound not a laugh, not a scoff, something between them both and she turned and walked back toward the gate.

"Come, then," she called back. "I am not standing on this hill all day for a girl who doesn't even know what she is yet."

I glanced at Kael.

The corner of his mouth was doing something that wasn't quite a smile.

"That," he said quietly, "is the warmest welcome she has given anyone in two hundred years."

The city was called Ashenveil.

I learned its name from the broad-shouldered man with the white hair, whose name was Oryn. He served as Kael's second his equivalent of a Beta, though the Lycans did not use pack titles. He walked beside me as we passed through the gate, explaining things in the low, careful voice of a man who understood that I was overwhelmed and was trying not to make it worse.

"The residential quarter is here." He gestured left, toward a row of low stone buildings, smoke rising from their chimneys. "Fourteen families. The great hall is ahead the one with the torches. The training grounds are behind the north tower, which is the one that still has a top. The south tower lost its top in the siege of "

"Oryn," Kael said, without looking at him.

"Yes, my king?"

"She has been awake for three days. Give her the history lesson tomorrow."

Oryn closed his mouth. He glanced at me with an expression of mild apology. I gave him a look that said don't worry about it and tried not to sway on my feet.

The hall was warm. That was the first thing I registered warmth, firelight, the smell of food cooking. Long stone walls hung with tapestries that had faded to soft shadows of their original colours. A fire burned in a hearth the size of a small room. Tables ran the length of the hall.

And at every table, silver eyes turned to watch me walk in.

Forty-two Lycans.

Forty-two. I knew that number now. I had been turning it over in my head since Kael said it on the hill. Forty-two last survivors of a race that had once filled cities. They stared at me with the focus of people who understood, in their bones, what it meant that Kael had found a mate.

It meant the bloodline was not finished.

It meant there might be a future.

The weight of that pressed down on me like a physical thing.

Kael stopped at the head of the hall. He looked out over his people, and the room went completely quiet.

"She is Aria," he said. "She is mine. She is Lycan-blooded, and the land has confirmed it. She will learn what that means in time." He paused. "She has had a difficult three days. She sleeps tonight. Questions tomorrow."

He looked at me.

"Come," he said quietly. "I'll show you to your rooms."

I followed him.

Behind me, very faintly, I heard it the sound of forty-two Lycans letting out a breath they had been holding for a very long time.

The room he gave me was small but clean, high up in the tower that still had its top. The bed had real linen. There was a fire already burning in a small stone hearth. A window looked north, out over the broken city and beyond it to the mountains, white-capped and distant and enormous.

Kael set a candle on the table by the bed.

He did not come any further into the room than the doorway.

"Sleep," he said. "You are safe here. Nothing will cross that threshold without your permission."

"Not even you?" I said.

The words came out before I could stop them. I do not know what made me say it. Exhaustion, maybe. Or the bond, pulling quiet and warm in my chest.

Kael looked at me for a long moment.

"Not even me," he said. "Not until you ask."

He stepped back.

He pulled the door almost shut.

And then, through the gap, very quietly so quietly I almost missed it he said, "Good night, Aria."

I sat down on the edge of the bed.

I pressed my hands flat on my knees.

Three days ago I had been standing in a white dress at the edge of a ritual clearing, trembling with hope. Now I was sitting in a room in a ruined Lycan city, five hundred miles from everything I had ever known, bound to a king who was five centuries old and had been waiting for me since before my great-great-great-grandmother was born.

I should have been terrified.

I was not terrified.

I lay down on the linen and closed my eyes.

I was asleep before the candle burned down an inch.