I Was His Luna Until He Forgot Me

THE KING WHO IS NOT MY KING

CHAPTER TWO

THE KING WHO IS NOT MY KING

ELARA VAYNE

Nobody in the vampire court looked at me like a person.

Two guards walked me through the inner hall and brought me to a long stone table where seven vampires sat waiting. Someone had dressed me while I was unconscious, a black dress that fit too well to be coincidence, boots that were the right size. My hair was loose. Nobody had given me anything to tie it back with.

"The tribute from the Eastern capture unit," one guard said, and stepped back.

Tribute. It was the second time I'd heard that word since I woke up here.

Kael sat at the head of the table, reading something on a flat dark slate, two fingers pressed to his temple. He hadn't looked at me once. He was in black now, with new rings on his right hand. Everything else about him was exactly the same, except for whatever used to live underneath it, which was gone.

"My lord." The woman to his right had a voice like polished glass. "The hybrid presents a structural risk. Wolf and witch blood combined is historically volatile. The scholars should assess her before any placement."

"Agreed," said a man across the table, without looking up.

Kael set the slate down and finally looked at me. I searched his face for anything at all, the man who used to come check on me during thunderstorms because he knew I didn't sleep through them.

"You don't have to stay," I'd told him once, half-asleep, years ago.

"I'm not staying for the storm," he'd said. "I'm staying because you said my name in your sleep, and I wanted to be here when you woke up."

That Kael wasn't sitting at the head of this table, this was another person entirely… someone I can't really phantom…

I thought about the last ordinary conversation we'd had, two days before he left for the swamp. Nothing important. He'd been irritated about paperwork.

"If one more elder sends me a complaint about grazing rights," he'd said, "I'm declaring the entire eastern pasture a permanent ban on opinions."

"That's not how laws work."

"It is now. I'm the Alpha. I get to make at least one nonsense law a year."

"Save it for something better than grazing rights."

"Fine. I'll save it for you, then." He'd grinned at me like that settled something.

It was such a small memory. I hadn't thought about it in months. Now it felt like the last normal thing that had ever happened to us.

"Your name," he said now. Not a question. A formality.

"Elara Vayne." I kept my voice level. "You already know my name, Kael."

The room went still.

"I am King Kael Draven of the Crimson Court," he said. "You will address me by my title, or not at all."

"You made me your Luna," I said. "You found me in the Eastern Woods when I was nine years old. You gave me a home and a name nobody else bothered to keep. You have a scar on your left palm from the bonding ceremony. You kept dried flowers from my garden in your coat pocket and told everyone for four years they were medicinal herbs."

Silence.

"She's unstable," the glass-voiced woman said.

"Or an operative," another added. "Testing for reaction."

Kael stood and came around the table slowly. The court watched him the way people watch something they've learned not to startle. He stopped close enough that I had to tip my chin to hold his eyes.

Up close, the differences were impossible to miss. The warmth that used to sit just under his skin was gone entirely. He smelled of iron and night air instead of pine and woodsmoke. His eyes were deep, still red that gave nothing back.

"I do not know you," he said, quiet enough that it was just for me. "I have never known you. Whatever you believe, you're mistaken."

"You're lying."

"Be careful."

"I'm not afraid of you." Mostly true. The rest I wasn't going to think about right now.

Something flickered behind his eyes, not recognition, but close to it. Like a word in a language he'd almost finished forgetting.

"East wing," he said, stepping back. "You're housed there. You don't go past the marked corridors. You don't speak to the court without clearance. The scholars assess your status within the week."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then you're returned to your pack, and whatever they had planned proceeds without interruption." He turned back to the table. "I'm told they weren't finished."

The same two guards walked me to the east wing.

One of them, the younger one, glanced at me twice on the way down the corridor like he was working something out.

"You really knew him," he said finally. "Before. Didn't you."

"Yes."

He didn't say anything else, but he didn't look at me the way the others did either.

The room was better than I expected, a real bed, heavy blankets, a low fire. I sat on the edge of the mattress and tried to think clearly.

He was alive. I'd spent eight months believing he was dead, grieving so hard it pressed the air out of my chest every morning. And now he was thirty feet away, in the same body, breathing.

But whatever had been done to him had scraped him clean of every memory of me. Of us. Sixteen years gone.

A knock pulled me back. The guard cracked the door open.

"The king asked me to pass on two things, miss. Dinner comes at the eighth bell." He hesitated. "And he said you're not to wander after dark. He said the castle has teeth."

I almost smiled despite everything. That was Kael's exact phrasing. Not be careful, not stay safe. The castle has teeth. Too specific to be coincidence.

The guard started to close the door, then stopped.

"He also said... he said to tell you he remembers how you taste."

The door closed.

I sat very still in a vampire castle I'd never seen, in a kingdom I didn't belong to, with a man who claimed not to know me sending me a message that only made sense if he did.

Whatever they'd done to his memories, they hadn't taken everything.

I was going to find it.