the lycan king's bride

chapter 8: failed assassination

Valeria's POV

I waited until the palace had settled into its deepest hours of quiet before slipping from my room, my bare feet silent against the cold stone floors. Sleep had refused me entirely after the attack in the garden, my mind circling the same unanswered questions over and over until I could no longer lie still beneath the covers pretending rest was possible. The failed assassination had left me with more questions than answers, and I could no longer ignore the growing certainty that something far larger than a simple plot against the king was unfolding around me.

If someone wants Alejandro dead badly enough to send an assassin into his own gardens, and someone else wants me gone before the next full moon those two things might not be separate at all.

I moved through the darkened halls with practiced care, keeping to the shadows between torch brackets, my senses stretched wide for any sign of a patrol. The palace at night felt different from the palace by day quieter, heavier, as though the stone itself held its breath once the candles were extinguished and the courtiers retired to their chambers.

I made my way toward the restricted wing of the palace, the same hallway I'd glimpsed once before but never dared explore, guarded now by only a single drowsy sentinel who'd clearly drawn the least desirable shift of the night. His head kept dipping forward before jerking upright again, caught somewhere between duty and exhaustion. A distraction a dropped coin sent skittering down a side corridor with a flick of my wrist was enough to draw him away just long enough for me to slip past unnoticed, my heart hammering despite how simple the trick had been.

The royal gallery stretched before me, silent and vast, portraits of long-dead kings and queens lining both walls beneath dim, flickering sconces that cast more shadow than light. I moved slowly down the corridor, studying faces I didn't recognize stern-jawed kings in ceremonial armor, queens with cold, appraising eyes, a scattering of children's portraits from royal lines centuries gone. I searched each face for anything that might explain the pieces I still didn't understand, though I couldn't have said exactly what I was hoping to find.

Then I saw her.

I stopped dead in the middle of the gallery, my breath catching so hard it physically hurt, like something had reached into my chest and squeezed.

The portrait was smaller than the others, tucked into a modest frame near the end of the hall, easy to walk past if you weren't looking closely. But there was no mistaking the face painted there. Dark hair, loose around her shoulders the way she used to wear it when she thought no one important was watching. Warm brown eyes that had once looked at me the exact same way, full of a warmth I'd spent twelve years trying to remember clearly and failing. A gentle, knowing smile that I'd carried in my memory for fourteen years, worn soft at the edges like an old photograph handled too many times, the details blurring more with every year that passed.

Mother.

Tears filled my eyes before I could stop them, spilling hot down my cheeks as I reached out with trembling fingers, not quite daring to touch the frame, afraid that if I did, the whole thing might dissolve like smoke and prove itself another cruel trick of memory. My hand hovered inches from the canvas, shaking.

Why would the Lycan Kingdom keep a portrait of her here, in the royal gallery, among their own kings and queens? This wasn't a trophy room, wasn't some collection of enemies defeated and put on display as a warning. Every other face in this hallway belonged to someone the kingdom had chosen to honor, to remember, to hold up as part of its own history.

Then I noticed the small brass plaque fixed beneath the frame, tarnished slightly with age but still legible in the low light, and the words engraved there stole what little breath I had left.

Isabella Montenegro. Hero of the Kingdom.

I read it three times, certain I'd misunderstood, certain the words would rearrange themselves into something that made sense with everything I'd believed for twelve long years. Hero. Not enemy. Not a threat that needed to be hunted down and murdered in her own home while her daughter hid beneath the floorboards, too afraid to breathe.

My knees felt unsteady beneath me. I pressed a hand against the wall to keep myself upright, the cold stone doing little to ground the way everything inside me had begun to spin.

Everything I believed is cracking apart in front of me, and I don't know what's supposed to fill the space where my certainty used to live.

"Tell me why you know that woman."

I spun around, my heart lurching into my throat so violently I nearly cried out. Alejandro stood at the entrance to the gallery, still dressed from whatever late meeting had kept him occupied long into the night, a single candle in his hand casting long shadows across the sharp planes of his face. His expression was darker than I'd ever seen it not angry, exactly, but sharp with a kind of urgent intensity that made the air between us feel suddenly thin, difficult to breathe.

He saw me. He saw me crying in front of my mother's portrait, in a wing of the palace I had no business entering.

"I I started, my mind racing through a dozen lies, none of them fast enough or convincing enough to explain away the tears still wet on my face, the way I'd clearly been standing here for some time, staring at that particular painting like it held the answer to every question I'd ever carried.

He crossed the gallery toward me slowly, setting the candle down on a nearby pedestal, his eyes flicking between my face and the portrait behind me, something calculating and careful moving behind his expression, like a man rearranging pieces he'd never expected to see fit together.

"You called her Mother," he said quietly, stopping close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating from him even in the cool night air. "I heard you, before you noticed me standing here."

There was no point denying it now. The truth had already slipped free before I could catch it and pull it back.

"Her name was Isabella Montenegro," I said, my voice barely above a whisper, each word costing me something I didn't fully understand yet, some final piece of the armor I'd worn for twelve years finally giving way. "She was my mother."

Something shifted behind his eyes — recognition first, sharp and sudden, followed by shock, and then something that looked disturbingly close to grief all at once, an emotion I hadn't expected to see on the face of the man I'd once believed responsible for her death.

"Isabella's daughter," he murmured, almost to himself, like the pieces of some old puzzle were suddenly rearranging themselves in his mind, twenty years of half-forgotten details clicking into a shape he clearly hadn't anticipated. He reached out and gently took my hand, his grip firm despite the visible tremor of realization moving through him. "I knew your parents, Valeria. I knew them well."

The words hit me like the crack of thunder that had sealed the mark on my shoulder sudden, impossible, upending everything I thought I understood about the world and the man standing in front of me, holding my hand like it was something precious rather than something dangerous.

"That's not possible," I whispered, though even as I said it, doubt was already unraveling every certainty I'd built my entire life around, thread by thread. "Your people murdered them. I saw the badge. I saw"

"Come with me," he said gently, cutting off my protest before it could fully form, his thumb tracing a slow, soothing line across the back of my hand, grounding me even as the floor of everything I believed seemed to tilt beneath my feet. "There's a story you need to hear. One I should have told you the moment I recognized your scent in that garden, before any of this went as far as it has."

I let him lead me from the gallery, my mother's painted eyes watching us go, her gentle smile the last thing I saw before we turned the corner into darkness. For the first time since I'd arrived at this palace with murder carved into my heart, I had no idea what truth waited for me on the other side of what he was about to say only a slow, creeping dread that whatever it was, it would change everything I thought I knew about who I was supposed to hate.