Too Irresistible For The Lycan King

Wren’s POV The candle by my window burned low, but I didn’t move to light another one. A year, I have been his wife for one full year, and tonight was the first night he had ever knocked on my door. “Come in,” I said, and my voice shook. Alpha Corvin stepped inside, and he filled the doorway the way he filled every room. He was tall, silent, his eyes were dark and hard to read. I stood up too fast and almost knocked over my chair. “You don’t have to stand,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you.” “I know.” He shut the door behind him and the click of it made my whole body go still. We stand there, two strangers who share a last name and nothing else. For a year I had watched him from across long dinner tables and I had learned the sound of his footsteps outside my room. Footsteps that always kept walking past my door, never stopping, until tonight. “Wren.” My name in his mouth sounded strange, it was like he has never said it before. Maybe he hasn’t, not really, not like this. “Why are you here, Alpha?” He flinched a little at the title. “Call me Corvin, please.” “You never asked me to before.” “I’m asking now.” He took one step closer, and then stopped himself, like he was not sure he had the right to come any closer than that. “Can we talk, Wren?” “About the summit? The other Alphas coming?” Something shifted in his face, and that tiny movement told me everything before he even opened his mouth. Of course, pack law, the debt my father left behind isn’t paid unless our marriage was real in every way. And if it was real before the other packs arrived, the debt was void, his enemies would call it an insult and war would follow. I was not his wife, I was ink on an old treaty, I had always known this, so why did it still hurt to hear it confirmed? “I won’t lie to you,” Corvin said quietly. “That’s part of the reason I came tonight.” “Part of the reason,” I repeated and my chest tightened. “What’s the rest?” He did not answer right away but instead he crossed the room slowly. It was like he was giving me every chance to tell him to stop, and reached out to brush one loose strand of hair from my face. His hand was careful, careful in a way I didn’t know his hands could be. I have seen those hands break an enemy’s wrist without blinking. Tonight they shook a little when they touched me. “I didn’t want to force this on you,” he said. “I know what the law demands. But I wanted to ask you myself, not send a guard, not send a letter. Me.” My throat tightened. In one year, nobody in this pack has ever asked me anything, they have only ever told me. Sit here. Smile there. Sign this. “Ask, then,” I whispered. His eyes moved over my face slowly, like he was trying to memorize something he was afraid he would lose. “Can I stay tonight, Wren? Not because the law says I have to. Because I want to.” I should say no, I should remind him a year of silence doesn’t disappear because he finally learned to say please. But my feet are already carrying me toward him, my fingers already curled into the front of his shirt. “Say it again,” I breathed. “Tell me you want to stay.” “I want to stay.” His voice dropped lower, rougher. “I have wanted to knock on this door for months, Wren. I didn’t know how.” “Then stop talking,” I said, “and show me.” He kissed me like a man finally allowed to breathe after holding his breath too long. It was slow, deliberate, and his hand slid to the back of my neck like he was afraid I would change my mind. I didn’t, I pulled him closer, and I felt something in him give way, some wall he had kept standing between us since the day I arrived. “Tell me if you want me to stop,” he murmured against my mouth. “Don’t you dare stop.” He then picks me up like I weigh nothing, and I laughed against his lips. It was a real laugh, it was the kind I haven’t let myself feel in this house in a long time. The candle guttered out somewhere between one heartbeat and the next, and after that there was only his voice in my ear. It was low and unsteady, saying my name over and over like it was something precious he only just discovered. And my own voice answering him in the dark, and the two of us finally, finally becoming something more than a debt on a piece of paper. Later, tangled in the sheets with my head on his chest, I traced a lazy line down his arm. “Corvin?” “Hm?” His fingers were drawing slow circles on my back, unhurried, like he had nowhere else to be. “Was any of that real? Or only the debt?” He went quiet for so long I thought he might have drifted off. Then his arm tightened around me, and pulled me in like he meant it. “Ask me again tomorrow,” he said softly. “I might have a better answer by then.” It was not the answer I wanted, but it was more honesty than he had given me in a year, and tonight it felt like enough. I then closed my eyes against his chest, and his heartbeat slow and steady under my ear. And for the first time since I came to this pack, I let myself hope and I fell asleep smiling. When I woke, the bed beside me was cold and empty. I sat up fast, my heart already sinking, searching the room, but he was gone, like he was never there at all. Only the dent in the second pillow told me last night wasn’t something I dreamed up out of loneliness. Before I could even climb out of bed, someone knocked hard on my door. “Luna Wren.” A guard’s voice, it was stiff, formal and wrong. “The Alpha wants to see you. Now.” My stomach dropped. “Now? Did something happen?” “He didn’t say. Only that I bring you immediately.” I stared at the empty space where Corvin slept beside me only hours ago, warm and unguarded and mine. A cold feeling spread through my chest that had nothing to do with the morning air. Something was wrong.