Cursed To Serve The Alpha King

Blood On The Marble

I didn’t sleep.

Every time I closed my eyes I felt the knife going into my shoulder again. The bed was too soft. The room was too quiet. And the Alpha King was six feet away, breathing like a man who had forgotten what rest felt like.

The mark on my wrist glowed in the dark.

95.

It had dropped while I was unconscious. The curse didn’t care that I was already bleeding.

At 2:13 a.m. Darius sat up.

I was on my feet before the pain in my shoulder could stop me. “My King?”

“Don’t call me that when we’re alone.” His voice was rough, scraped raw from years of silence. “Not here.”

He stood. Shirtless. The firelight turned the scars on his chest and back into a map of every year he had survived. He walked to the window, pulled the curtain aside, and stared at the rain like it had personally offended him.

“You’re not sleeping,” I said. Stupid. Obvious.

“I haven’t slept in a hundred years.” He said it the same way other people talked about the weather. “The curse doesn’t allow it. I close my eyes and I see the first man I killed. Then the second. Then the hundred after that. It never stops.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing.

A soft dragging sound came from the hallway. Cloth on stone.

Darius’s head tilted. Wolf hearing. His entire body went still.

“Get down.”

The door exploded open.

Two figures in black rolled in low. A third came through the balcony windows like smoke. One of them threw a glass vial. It shattered at my feet.

Black smoke rose instantly, thick and rotten, smelling like meat left in the sun for days.

“Poison,” Darius snarled.

He grabbed me, spun, and slammed me to the floor beneath him. His body covered mine completely as a crossbow bolt punched into the wall where my head had been a second earlier. Wood splintered. The smoke tried to crawl into my lungs. I choked.

The fight lasted less than twenty seconds.

I heard bone break. I heard a wet sound that could only be a blade finding a throat. When the weight finally lifted, five bodies lay on the marble. Blood spread across the white floor in dark rivers. Darius stood over them, a fresh cut open on his side, breathing hard.

He kicked one of the corpses onto its back. A silver ring glinted on the dead man’s finger.

“Rowan’s men,” he said. Flat. Certain. “Look at the mark.”

I sat up slowly. My shoulder screamed. “Who’s Rowan?”

“My Beta. My second.” He wiped blood from his hands onto his pants like it was nothing. “He wants the throne. The easiest way to get it is to kill me while you’re bound to me. You die. I go mad. The curse locks forever. He inherits everything.”

The words settled in my chest like ice.

“I didn’t ask for this,” I whispered.

“I know.” He crouched in front of me. Close. Blood still ran down his jaw. “But you have it anyway.”

He checked the bandage on my shoulder first, fingers careful, almost gentle. Then he turned my wrist over.

94.

“It’s dropping faster when you’re afraid,” he said.

“How do we stop it?”

He didn’t answer. Instead he walked to the closet, pulled out a black shirt, and threw it at me. It hit me in the face and smelled like him — cedar and steel and cold rain.

“Put it on. We’re moving.”

“Where?”

“My private wing. No one enters without me. Not even Rowan.”

I pulled the shirt over my bandages. It swallowed me whole. He offered his hand. Calloused. Blood under the nails. I took it.

His private rooms were nothing like Room 13.

A real bed. A fireplace already burning. Books stacked on the floor. Weapons on the walls. One wide window that looked over the entire sleeping kingdom. He locked three separate doors behind us — bolt, key, and chain.

“Sit,” he ordered.

I sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress gave under me like it had never known hardship. He knelt in front of me again and checked the shoulder wound a second time, cleaning and re-wrapping it with the efficiency of someone who had done this too many times.

“Why me?” I asked quietly. “Of all the thieves in the kingdom, why did the curse take me?”

His hands went still.

“Because you have wolf blood.”

I almost laughed. “I’m human.”

“Are you?” He caught my chin and made me look at him. His thumb was rough against my skin. “Your sister. The fever she has. It only attacks mixed blood. You’re half-wolf, Mira. Hidden. That’s why the curse accepted you. Pure humans burn out in a day.”

The world tilted.

“My mother said my father was human. She said he died before I was born.”

“She lied to keep you alive. Wolves kill half-breeds on sight unless they are useful.”

“Useful how?”

“To break a curse.” He let go of my chin and stood. “The witch told me a hundred years ago. Find one with wolf blood and a human heart. She can break it… or she can extend it forever.”

I stood too, even though the room spun. “So which is it?”

He stepped close. Close enough that I could smell the blood on him and the soap underneath.

“I don’t know yet.”

His eyes dropped to my mouth for half a second. Then he stepped back like the space between us was the only thing keeping us both alive.

A knock sounded at the door. Three slow beats. The code.

Darius had a knife in his hand before I finished blinking.

“Who is it?”

“Beta Rowan, my King. I heard there was another attack. Are you hurt?”

The voice was smooth. Too smooth. Like oil poured over glass.

Darius looked at me, put a finger to his lips, then opened the door only as far as the chain would allow.

Rowan stood in the hallway. Tall. Blonde. Handsome in a way that felt practiced. Perfect suit. No blood on him at all. He was smiling.

“My King. You’re bleeding.”

“It’s nothing. Secure the east wing.”

“Of course.” Rowan’s eyes slid past Darius and landed on me — sitting on the bed in the King’s shirt, shoulder bandaged, mark glowing on my wrist.

His smile widened.

“The thief. Still alive. How fortunate.”

Darius shut the door in his face and locked all three bolts again.

“He did this,” Darius said quietly.

“How do you know?”

“Because he’s the only one who benefits if we both die. And because I can smell him on the poison. Lavender and lies.”

I pulled the oversized shirt tighter around myself. “What now?”

“Now we wait. And we figure out how to break this before he does.”

He pointed at the bed.

“You take it. I’ll take the chair.”

“I thought you didn’t sleep.”

“I don’t.” He sat, leaned his head back, and closed his eyes. “But I can watch.”

I climbed into the bed. The sheets smelled like him. For the first time in years I wasn’t alone with my fear.

I was alone with a cursed king, a countdown that refused to stop, and a Beta who had already decided we both needed to die.

I looked at my wrist one last time before the fire burned low.

93.

Somewhere in the palace, Rowan was still smiling.

And I had the terrible feeling he had only just begun.