THE UNSCENTED LUNA

The Iron Scent

​Chapter 12: The Iron Scent

​The heavy, metallic scent of ozone and crushed iron didn't just breach the room; it shattered the quiet peace of the dawn.

​I sat upright on the silk sheets, the velvet blankets slipping down my bare shoulders as the bedroom doors already damaged from Kael's explosive entrance the morning before creaked open. The weak, gray morning light spilled into the room, illuminating a towering figure standing in the threshold.

​Darius Kane.

​The War Commander stood frozen, his massive hands clenched into white-knuckled fists at his sides. He wasn't looking at me. His nostrils were flaring violently, his chest heaving under his silver-runed leather vest as he scented the air. The room was thick, suffocatingly saturated with Kael’s dominant royal signature pine, burnt cedar, and the unmistakable, heavy musk of an alpha who had just completely claimed his territory.

​Darius’s gray eyes went pitch black. A low, chest-rattling growl ripped from his throat, a sound so primal and broken it made the glass windowpanes vibrate.

​"He touched you," Darius rasped, his voice dropping into a dangerous, volatile register that stripped away every ounce of his military discipline. He took a heavy, thunderous step into the room, his gaze finally snapping to the empty space beside me on the mattress where Kael had been lying only an hour before. "The King took what my wolf was clawing to protect."

​"Darius, stop," I said, my voice steady despite the sudden spike of heat flaring in my chest. I pulled the plum-colored silk sheets tightly against my collarbone, but the absolute vacuum around my skin did nothing to hide the fact that Kael's energy was practically branded into my soul.

​"I can't stop!" Darius roared softly, closing the distance in a sudden, terrifying blur of motion. He dropped to his knees right at the edge of the bed, his massive hands slamming into the mattress on either side of my knees. The sheer, suffocating pressure of his broken alpha aura rolled over me, his wolf actively tearing itself apart from the inside out because it could smell the rival monarch's claim on the only female it recognized as a law.

​"He thinks because he wears the gold crest, he can possess the void," Darius whispered, his chiseled jaw trembling as he leaned in close, his nose brushing against the sensitive skin of my bare ankle protruding from the sheets. He inhaled sharply, his chest heaving with a desperate, self-loathing satisfaction as his wolf fought to overwrite Kael’s lingering heat with his own scent of ozone and iron.

​"Let him try to hold you, Lyra," Darius growled against my skin, his gray eyes burning with an absolute, terrifying submission as he looked up at me through his tangled dark hair. "I command the vanguard. The warriors answer to my steel, not his crown. If you tell me to rip the gold armor off his chest for what he did to you tonight..."

​He bared his elongated canines, a fierce, protective madness taking over his face. "...I will hand you his head before the sun sets."

​"Oh, the big dog is barking treason before breakfast. How delightful."

​Soren’s velvety purr drifted from the high arched terrace windows. The assassin slid effortlessly through the drapes, his mismatched blue and green eyes gleaming with pure, wicked ecstasy as he looked from the growling Commander to the ruined sheets. He didn't carry an alpha's territorial rage, but his pale fingers were twitching against the hilt of his silver dagger, his dark rogue magic pulsing through the room like a cold draft.

​"You're too late, Kane," Soren chuckled, dropping to his haunches near the head of the bed, completely ignoring the lethal glare Darius leveled at him. "The King already tasted the starlight. But don't worry..." He reached out, a single cool finger tracing the line of my collarbone, sending a sharp jolt of static electricity through my veins that warred with Kael's lingering warmth. "...the dark always reclaims what belongs to it."

​The air in the room fractured into a three-way tug of war. Kael’s heavy, possessive brand; Darius’s frantic, broken warrior hunger; and Soren’s lingering, chaotic shadows were swirling into a vortex around my bed.

​The Primordial Void inside my chest hummed, the golden light beginning to prickle beneath my fingernails as I looked at the two men waiting for my next command. They thought the King had settled the score, but they were about to find out that a vacuum can never be filled.