Rejected by the Alpha, Claimed by the Lycan King

Chapter 6: After the Blood

The Lycan was gone.

Where the beast had stood eight feet of black fur and silver eyes and ancient fury there was now a man, kneeling in the moss with his head bowed, breathing hard. The shift back was slower than the shift out. I watched the bones rearrange themselves under his skin, watched the fur sink back into pale flesh, watched the silver of his eyes settle into the man-shape they had been before.

Kael lifted his head.

He was naked.

Of course he was naked. He had stripped before shifting. I had been so caught up in the violence and the death and the speech I had given Damon that I had forgotten what came next. The Lycan King was kneeling in front of me with no clothes on, his body lit by the grey morning light that filtered through the trees, and I did not know where to look.

So I looked at his face.

He was watching me. There was something careful in his expression, something almost shy, which was a strange thing to see on a man who had killed two wolves with his hands less than ten minutes ago.

"Are you afraid of me?" he asked quietly.

The question caught me off guard.

I thought about it.

I thought about Roric's body lying broken in the moss. I thought about the grey wolf's spine cracking against the tree. I thought about Damon on his knees, sobbing. I thought about the silver eyes that had turned black and the air that had rippled around Kael's body and the trees that had bent toward him like grass toward fire.

He had killed two men in front of me. He had threatened to kill a third. He was an ancient creature whose power I could not measure. He was kneeling naked in the moss in front of me and asking me, very quietly, if I was afraid of him.

"No," I said.

It surprised me, hearing the word come out of my mouth. But it was the truth.

I was a lot of things in that moment. Exhausted. Confused. Empty. But I was not afraid of him. My wolf, who had flattened herself in submission when the Lycan had stepped forward, was now sitting up inside me, tail wrapped around her paws, watching Kael with something that looked a lot like trust.

The Moon Goddess does not lie about mate bonds. Whatever else was happening between Kael and me, my wolf knew him.

Kael let out a breath I do not think he had realised he was holding.

"Good," he said.

He stood up.

I made a small sound and looked at the ground, my face burning. Kael laughed. It was a soft sound quiet, surprised, like he had not laughed in a long time and had forgotten what it felt like.

"Forgive me," he said, walking past me to where his clothes had fallen. "Five hundred years of solitude makes a man forget human modesty. Give me a moment."

I kept staring at the ground. I heard the rustle of fabric, the sound of him pulling on his trousers, then his shirt, then the long black coat. When he stepped back into my view, fully dressed, he looked almost like a normal man again.

Almost.

He still had the silver eyes. He still had that scar across his forehead. He still walked like someone who had not been entirely human in a very long time.

"Come," he said. He held out his hand. "We need to leave the Blackwood before more wolves come. Damon will tell his pack what happened. Some of them will be smart enough to stay away. Others will not."

I took his hand.

His fingers closed around mine, warm and steady. The bond hummed between us not blinding hot like before, but steady now, like a banked fire. I felt it settle into my chest, into the empty place where Damon's bond had been ripped out.

It did not replace what Damon had stolen.

It filled the space with something new.

We walked.

For a long time, neither of us spoke. The forest grew thicker as we moved north, the trees darker and older, the air colder. I felt my body protesting. I had not slept. I had not eaten. I had run a long way before Kael found me. My legs were trembling under me, and I knew that soon I was going to fall.

Kael noticed.

He stopped walking.

"You need to rest," he said.

"I'm fine."

"You are not fine. You are about to collapse. Sit down, Aria."

His voice was not unkind, but it was not a request either. I sat down on a fallen log, my legs giving way under me with embarrassing speed. Kael crouched in front of me. He pulled a small leather pouch from inside his coat, opened it, and held out a strip of dried meat.

"Eat."

I took it. I ate. The meat was salty and tough and the best thing I had ever tasted in my life.

He watched me eat with an expression I could not read.

"Your pack will mourn you," he said quietly. "Did you know that?"

I almost choked on the meat.

"Mourn me?"

"Some of them, yes. Not all. But some." He looked away, into the trees. "I have lived long enough to know how packs work, Aria. There will be wolves in Blackmoon Pack who loved you. Wolves who watched you grow up. Wolves who did not approve of what Damon did last night. They will speak of you in whispers for a year or two. Then they will forget."

I swallowed.

I had not let myself think about this. About the wolves I had grown up with. About my best friend Mira, who was three months pregnant with her first pup. About old Healer Hess, who had patched up my scraped knees when I was small. About my dead mother's grave in the orchard behind our house.

I had walked away from all of them this morning. I had walked away from them and I was never going back.

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.

Kael's silver eyes returned to mine.

"Because I want you to grieve," he said. "I want you to grieve all of it. Your mate. Your sister. Your father. Your pack. The girl you used to be. I want you to grieve them now, while we are still in the forest, before we reach my kingdom. Because once we cross into my territory, Aria, you will not be that girl anymore. You will be someone else. And you cannot become someone else until you have buried who you were."

I stared at him.

In all my eighteen years, no one had ever spoken to me like this. Not my father. Not Damon. Not even my mother before she died. They had told me what to do and where to stand and who to love. They had never told me to grieve.

The tears came before I could stop them.

I pressed my hand over my mouth and tried to hold them back, the way I had been taught to hold them back, the way wolves are taught to hide weakness because the pack will eat you for it. But Kael did not look away. He did not tell me to stop. He just stayed where he was, crouched in front of me on the forest floor, his silver eyes steady, waiting.

So I cried.

I cried like I had not cried in the clearing last night, like I had not cried in my bedroom at dawn. I cried with the full weight of what I had lost, all of it at once, and I did not try to hide it from him.

When I was done, when my breathing had evened out and my hands had stopped shaking, Kael reached up.

He brushed a tear from my cheek with his thumb.

It was the gentlest thing anyone had done to me in a long time.

"There," he said softly. "Now we can go home."

He stood up and held out his hand again.

I took it.

We walked north.

Behind us, somewhere far back in the Blackwood, I heard the distant cry of a wolf.

But this one was not a hunter.

This one was a mourner.