Born To Kill The Alpha King

CH.2 - 21 Years later

Deimos’s P.O.V

The forest is burning white.

Not the honest fire of wood catching. Something older than that. Something that does not consume but finds, threading through stone and skin and every wall I have spent centuries building until it locates the places I sealed shut and pries them open from the inside.

I am on my knees.

The marks are carving into me and the sound coming out of my chest does not belong to a king and she is standing over me with nothing left, no pack, no mate, no time, and she is the least defeated thing I have ever seen. Her eyes find mine and they do not plead and they do not hate. They simply know. The way the ending of something always knows itself before the people inside it do.

Her mouth moves.

She is your undoing, Alpha King.

Her bleeding palm closes over mine and the world splits open and I cannot move, cannot pull back, can only kneel in her white fire while something ancient and irrevocable threads itself through me like a root finding soil.

Then the blade.

Then the silence.

Then an infant screaming at the cold night sky as though furious at everything that made it.

I come awake with my hand around Kael's throat.

He does not struggle. He never struggles. He goes still and waits, his pulse steady under my palm, eyes on the ceiling, because he learned in the first year of this that meeting my eyes during these moments ends badly for everyone.

I release him.

"Three nights," he says before I can ask. "Same time. You were quieter the first two nights."

He leaves without being asked twice.

I stand at the window.

My kingdom spreads below in the grey pre-dawn, stone towers moving from black to grey at the edges where the light is beginning its reluctant arrival. Two centuries of the same view. It has never once looked back at me, which has always suited us both.

I look at my right hand.

The marks wind from the back of my hand up my forearm in symbols my most learned scholars have spent twenty one years failing to translate. Not because the language is lost. Because it was never meant to be read. It was meant to be carried. A thing written into skin rather than parchment so that it could not be set down or burned or locked away.

It wants to be felt.

It pulses now. Low and directional, the way a compass moves when something shifts in the north. I press my thumb to the back of my hand and the sensation changes from dull insistence to something sharper. Proximity, almost. The particular awareness of a room that was empty and is no longer.

It has been doing this for three days.

I have been pretending not to notice for three days.

Twenty one years.

I have wondered, in the hours I do not speak of, what she looks like now. Whether she has her mother's eyes. That particular quality in them, not cold but burned, the look of a person who has moved so far past hoping that they have arrived somewhere that requires nothing from anyone.

Whether she stands the same way. Like the ground is hers regardless of who else is standing on it.

She would be twenty one now. No longer the infant I carried to the coven gate in the grey hours before dawn, her face red and furious, her grip around my finger so fierce and involuntary it had stopped my breathing for reasons I did not examine. I had placed her in the High Priestess's arms and given my instructions without looking at her again.

I have never satisfactorily explained to myself why I did not look at her again.

My wolf knows. My wolf has always known. He surfaced in that burning forest and said one word before I could stop him and has been pressing forward against the leash ever since, patient and certain and entirely unmoved by twenty one years of my telling him she is a child and this is containment and the prophecy demands it.

She is not a child anymore.

The mark pulses harder.

I know the coven's walls. Its wards. Its geography. I have traced that perimeter in my mind more times than I will say aloud, my wolf pressing forward and my will pressing back, the two of us at war over a girl I have never spoken to.

A girl who does not know I review the coven's safety reports every month.

A girl who does not know that three years ago, when a rival pack sent scouts within twenty miles of Selene's walls, I reduced their eastern camp to ash before the sun came up.

I tell myself that is strategy.

My wolf has a different word for it.

The mark pulses again.

Harder than the three nights before. More insistent. Less a compass now and more a pull, something on the other end of the tether waking up and stretching and becoming aware of its own weight for the first time.

She is moving.

Not physically, not yet, but something in her has shifted in the last three days, some decision forming or already formed, and whatever it is has disturbed the other end of what her mother built between us twenty one years ago.

I should send a message to the High Priestess. Remind her of my instructions. Tighten whatever has loosened.

I should not go there myself.

Going there myself would mean seeing her. It would mean my wolf finally getting close enough to what he has been straining toward for two decades and then there would be no more pretending, no more containment, no more telling myself that what I feel when the mark pulls is something I can manage from a distance.

I close my fist.

I turn from the window.

I take three steps toward the door and stop.

The mark burns straight through my palm like something answering a question I have not yet allowed myself to ask.

I stand there in the grey pre-dawn of my kingdom with my wolf howling at every wall I have and I think about a woman who stood in a burning forest with nothing left and did not fall.

I think about what her daughter might have inherited.

I think about twenty one years of distance that suddenly feels less like strategy and more like delay.

Go, my wolf says. Stop pretending you have a choice.

I press my fist against the window glass and I do not move and I do not decide and the mark burns and burns and burns.

Did her mother build a tether or a trap?

What does it say about me that part of me does not mind being caught