YOU WERE MINE FIRST

The Beast Cage

CHAPTER 3: The Beast Cage

I got in his bed.

Not because he ordered me.

My legs just gave out.

The black sheets were cold for half a second, then scorching hot. Like the mattress itself was alive underneath. They smelled like him. Snow that has never been touched, old iron, pine after a storm, and something wild that made my throat go dry.

Rhazien didn't get in.

He stood by the fireplace, his back to me, huge hands braced on the black marble. His wet black shirt clung to every scar on his back. Water dripped from his long hair. He was breathing too slow, too controlled.

Like he was counting so he wouldn't break something.

The air was thick enough to choke on.

"You should sleep, little debt," he said, his voice hoarse, still not looking at me.

"I can't," I whispered. My voice was raw from crying. "Not when you're standing there like you want to kill me."

That made him laugh. One dark sound.

"I do want to kill," he admitted. "Not you. Never you, Elara. If I ever hurt you I will cut my own hands off and lay them at your feet."

He finally turned his head. Just enough for me to see his scarred profile in the firelight. His gold eye was brighter than the flames.

"My Lycan does not understand your human things like debt and rejection," he said. "He is old. He understands one thing. Someone hurt what is his. Someone made you kneel on the floor in a torn dress while they laughed. So he wants blood to wash it clean. And I am trying very hard not to give it to him tonight, because if I leave this room smelling your pain in my sheets, I will not come back until Blood Stone is ash."

I pulled his huge shirt tighter around me. My pale legs looked ridiculous against his black sheets.

"Then don't go," I said before I could stop myself. "Stay. Please."

He went absolutely still. Even his breathing stopped.

Slowly, he pushed off the mantle and turned all the way around. His eyes dropped. To my legs. To where his shirt rode up my thighs. To my throat where his hand had been.

His jaw locked. Claws flexed, then hid again.

"Elara," he warned, his voice so low I felt it vibrate through the mattress. "Do not look at me like that when you are wearing nothing but my scent."

"I wasn't—" My face burned. "I wasn't looking like anything—"

"You were," he said, stalking closer. Each step silent. "You were looking at me like you want me to fix the ache that worthless boy left in your chest. I cannot fix it the way my beast wants to."

He was right. The rejection wound was still pulsing, a cold hollow hole behind my ribs where Jaxon ripped the bond. But under it now, a heavy heat was building low in my stomach. A throb that matched the white eye opening in my mind.

"My chest hurts," I whispered, pressing his shirt to my heart. "Like I'm going to die."

"I know." He was at the bed now, standing over me, his shadow swallowing me whole. "It's bond sickness. It will hurt for three days. Cold and shaking and feeling like you are dying. Unless..."

"Unless what?"

"Unless it is replaced by another."

My fingers dug into the furs. "Another bond? With... you?"

He didn't answer. He reached down, one black claw extended, and gently pushed the collar of his shirt aside. Just an inch. Exposing my neck. My shoulder. The untouched place where a mate mark should have been tonight.

That spot tingled violently under his near-touch.

"No," I choked, jerking back. "You said you wouldn't— you promised—"

"And I won't," he growled, his claw hovering a breath above my skin, never touching. "I am not going to mark you, little debt. Not tonight. Not while you are broken and sick from another male's rejection. If I marked you tonight, you would hate me forever when you woke up. You would think I am like him."

His voice cracked, raw and wrecked underneath the growl.

"I have had one mate try to kill me after being forced to be mine," he whispered, his eyes finally meeting mine, pain in them so old it had roots. "Her family gave her to settle a debt, just like yours. I was twenty. I thought if I was gentle enough it wouldn't matter. She put wolfsbane in my wine on our wedding night and tried to cut my throat while I slept."

He pulled his hand back like touching me burned him.

"What did you mean another bond then?" I asked, quieter.

He moved. To my shock, he walked to the other side of the huge bed and lay down.

On top of the covers. Fully clothed, boots still on, dripping mud onto his own priceless furs, his huge arms crossed over his chest like a corpse.

Trying to make himself small. Seven feet of monster trying to make himself small.

"A Lycan King's scent can ease bond sickness," he muttered to the ceiling, his voice gruff and awkward. "His heat. His purr vibrates at a frequency that knits a torn soul back together. It will not bond us. It will not mark you. It will just quiet the pain. Make you sleep. If you allow it."

He was asking. The Beast King who claimed me for a debt was asking permission.

Something in my chest cracked wide open.

"Okay," I whispered.

He didn't move.

"Can you... get under the blanket at least?" I said, my mouth running when I get nervous. "You'll get cold. And you're getting the sheets wet. And you have boots on in the bed, my mother would kill me."

"Little debt, Lycans do not get cold," he said, confused. "We run at one hundred and ten degrees. We can sleep in snow."

"You're wet," I insisted, bolder because he looked so awkward. "And... I don't want you to be uncomfortable."

"Elara."

"Rhazien."

I said his real name.

His whole body jolted like I struck him. Claws shot out and tore four long holes through the thick blanket. His back arched off the bed. A low, wrecked growl tore out of his throat.

"Say it again," he ordered, his voice shredded, gold eyes burning into mine.

I should have been scared of the claws.

I wasn't.

I reached across the bed and touched his scarred forearm with just my fingertips.

"Rhazien," I whispered, softer. "Please come under the blanket. I don't want to be alone tonight."

He stared at my fingers on his arm.

Then he moved too fast to see.

One second he was far away on top of the covers, the next the heavy black blanket was over both of us and he was on his side facing me, one huge arm under my head like a pillow, the other hovering over my waist like he didn't know where to put it.

He was so hot. Like a living furnace. The icy rejection ache immediately dulled, replaced by a heavy, sleepy, safe warmth that made my eyelids droop.

"Better?" he asked, his voice deeper now, and his chest started to purr so low I felt it more than heard it.

I nodded, my face inches from his chest.

"Sleep, Elara," he murmured, his huge hand finally landing on the blanket over my waist. "You are safe. No one will take you from this bed. Not your old Alpha. Not even the Moon Goddess herself. You are mine to guard now."

For the first time since I was ten and fell off a swing, I believed a male when he said I was safe.

I closed my eyes. His purr vibrated through me, knitting the torn edges together.

I don't know how long I slept.

I woke because the bed moved. And the heat was gone.

Cold air hit my back and I whimpered in my sleep, reaching back blindly for my furnace.

My hand didn't touch skin.

It touched fur.

Thick. Coarse. Hot. Real fur that moved with breathing.

My eyes snapped open.

Moonlight poured through the huge windows, silver bright.

Beside me in the bed, taking up three quarters of it, was not a man.

It was a beast.

Ten feet long even curled, black fur tipped silver at the ears and tail, huge paws with claws long as knives tucked near his chest. His tail, thick as my waist, was curled securely around my legs.

Rhazien. In full Lycan form. He must have shifted in his sleep.

I should have screamed.

I didn't.

Because as I stared at the monster holding me like his favorite toy, something inside me finally answered. Not a flicker. A voice. Not my voice. Deeper. Female. Ancient and cold and amused.

_About time you stopped crying and actually looked, little wolf,_ she purred inside my head, stretching like she just woke from a long nap. _Took you long enough to find a male strong enough to wake me._

My wolf.

My white wolf that was never there.

"Who... who are you?" I mouthed, tears spilling hot down my cheeks.

The huge beast beside me twitched an ear in his sleep. One huge gold eye cracked open, just a slit, instantly alert, and looked right at me.

Inside my head, my wolf laughed. It sounded like ice breaking on a frozen lake in spring.

_"I am Lyra,"_ she said, her voice wrapping around my soul like white fire. _"White Queen. Last of Moon Blood. And that big scarred beast who thinks he claimed you? No. He was made for us. And now that I am awake, little Elara, those wolves who laughed at us? They are going to learn why white wolves were hunted."_

The Lycan King's beast made a low, deep rumble that shook the whole bed, pulled me closer with his massive tail until my back was flush against his hot furry belly, and buried his huge wet snout in my hair, inhaling deeply while he slept, content.

And outside the castle, far down the mountain, carried on the thin cold night air through the open window, I heard it.

Howls.

Not werewolf howls.

Deep. Ancient. Shaking snow off the peaks. Dozens. Hundreds.

Lycan war howls. The whole Black Mountain pack.

They smelled her too.

They smelled their Queen wake up for the first time in two hundred years.