Fated to the Lycan king

Chapter 2

I burst into Yara's room without knocking.

She screamed and launched off the bed. "What the..."

"We need to leave," I said already moving toward her wardrobe. "Right now. Tonight."

"What do you mean we need to leave right now..."

"He is real," I said. I pulled her wardrobe open and started moving clothes onto the bed. "He was on the beach. He talked to me. He said he is coming back for me and I believe him and we need to go before he does."

Yara crossed the room and grabbed both my shoulders. "Stop."

I stopped. Not because I wanted to. Because she was looking at me like that and it still worked even now.

"Three sentences," she said. "Tell me."

"I went swimming," I said. "Something pulled me under. When I came back up he was standing on the beach and he told me I was his fated mate and that wherever I run to he will find me." I pulled out of her hands and went back to the clothes. "Three sentences. Now we go."

"Who is he," she said.

"The Lycan King," I said. "The one on the statue. The one the whole festival is about. He is out and he knows my name and I am not staying in this town one more night."

The silence behind me had a particular quality.

"Yara I am not joking..."

"I know," she said quietly. "I can see that."

The door opened. Lucas stood there in yesterday's clothes squinting. "I could hear you from my room. What's happening."

"Get your things," I said. "We are leaving."

"It is midnight," he said.

"I am aware..."

Three knocks at the front door. Slow. Deliberate.

All of us went still.

I felt the blood leave my face. "I told you." Barely a whisper. "I told both of you."

Lucas moved toward the door. I grabbed his arm.

"Don't."

"Rhea..."

"Please." The word came out stripped of everything. Just the actual fear underneath. "Please don't open it."

He looked at me for a long second. Then at the door.

"I'll handle it," Yara said already moving.

"Yara..." I dropped Lucas and went after her. She was already at the doorknob and she was stronger than me and she knew it and she still stopped when she felt how hard I was shaking.

She turned around.

"Riri."

"He said he would come back," I said. My voice was breaking and I hated it. "He said it like it was already decided."

The knocking continued. Patient. Unhurried.

Lucas came up behind me and turned me around and put both hands on my face. "Look at me. I am going to open the door. If anything feels wrong I will slam it shut and we run. Okay?"

"You don't understand what he is..."

"Rhea." His eyes steady on mine. "Trust me."

Yara opened the door.

I didn't decide to scream. It came out of me before I knew it was happening tearing up from somewhere below my ribs and something came with it. Something that had been sitting in my chest since the ocean since the bracelet burned my palm since I had stood watching the seal holds plaque on a statue that turned out to be a real person's face.

It came out all at once and I had no say in any of it.

The lamp shattered. The mirror exploded outward. The door tore off its hinges and spun into the dark outside. Lucas went down hard beside me. Yara hit the wall near the entrance and slid slowly to the floor.

Silence.

I stood in the middle of it with my hands out in front of me. My ears were ringing. My legs barely working. I looked at my own palms and they looked exactly like my palms and I had no explanation for any of it.

"Lucas." My voice came out wrong. Thin. "Yara."

"Still alive." Lucas pushed himself up from the floor. Looked around the room. Looked at me. "Did you do that."

"I don't know." My hands were shaking. "I don't know what that was I swear I don't."

Yara sat up near the entrance. Pressed her hand to the back of her head. Looked at me with an expression I had never seen on her face before.

"It sure was you darling."

The voice came from outside. Calm. Almost conversational.

A woman stepped through where the door used to be. Older. Composed. Dressed like someone who had known exactly what she would find. She looked at the shattered lamp. The mirror in pieces. The door lying in the garden.

She took her time with all of it.

Then she looked at me.

"Impressive," she said softly. "Very impressive."

She took me through a portal.

I had approximately three seconds to process what the air tearing open in front of her looked like before the men on either side of me pulled me forward and the world dissolved entirely.

Sound first when it came back. Voices low and scattered.

"Is that her."

"She doesn't look like what I expected."

I blinked hard and pulled the room together piece by piece.

High ceilings. Rows of seats. People everywhere staring at me. I was standing in the middle of it soaking wet in my pyjamas at whatever hour this was and I had not slept and my friends were pinned against a wall somewhere and I had absolutely no idea what was happening to my life.

Twenty four hours ago I was eating pancakes.

"It gets easier," the woman's voice came from ahead.

She was in a silver chair at the front. Same posture. Same eyes. Like the waiting had cost her nothing.

"What gets easier," I said. My voice came out flat. I was too tired for anything else.

She didn't answer.

The man with the red beard near the middle was watching me like he had already made up his mind about something. His eyes were the color of something that had never been warm.

"Have you met him yet," someone called from the rows.

Before I could open my mouth the red bearded man leaned forward. "There is no point asking that." He looked at the woman. "I say we kill her. Simple. Clean."

I stared at him. "Did you just say kill me. I came here for a weekend. I was on a bus three days ago."

Nobody acknowledged this.

"Barnes." A woman's voice from my left cut across the room. She had the kind of face that had stopped needing to prove anything a long time ago. "Kill her and you make everything worse."

"Thank you Sapphire," the silver chair woman said. She looked at me. "Now."

"Now what," I said.

"We need to talk about why you are here."

"I know why I am here," I said. "You broke into my room threw my friends against a wall and dragged me through whatever that thing outside was. What I want to know is what you actually want from me. Because one of those men just suggested killing me and I am tired and I want to go home."

The woman Anya, I had heard someone call her looked at me with those steady blue eyes.

"What do you know about the Lycan King," she said.

"I know what he told me on the beach an hour ago," I said. "Which was not much. He said I was his fated mate. He said he was coming back for me." I looked at her. "I was packing to leave when your men showed up."

"He is coming back for you," Anya said. "Yes."

"Great," I said. "So I would like to not be here when that happens. Can we make that happen."

"No," Anya said.

"We need you here," she said. "We need you to go to him willingly. To..."

"No," I said.

"Rhea..."

"No. I am not going to him. I am not going anywhere near him. I want my friends safe. I want to go home. That is all I want from this situation."

The room was quiet.

"Your friends will not be harmed," Anya said.

"You threw them against a wall," I said.

"They are unharmed."

"That is not the same thing."

"Why me," I said. It came out quieter than I intended. "I am one person. I just want to go home."

Anya looked at me for a long moment.

"There is no one else," she said. "There is only you."

I pressed my lips together and looked at the ceiling and told myself very firmly that I was not going to cry in front of a room full of strangers who had kidnapped me.

I lasted approximately four seconds.

"Fine," I said. My voice held. Barely. "I will stay and listen. But I am not agreeing to anything and my friends leave tonight. Safe. That is not negotiable."

Anya nodded once. "Done."

"Good," I said. "Now what do you need me to..."

The doors came open.

I felt it before I saw it. Something pressing against my chest that I knew. Had been knowing since the border.

I watched it move across every face in the room before I turned around. Every elder going rigid. Others going a specific shade of still that looked like dread arriving.

Anya's face went very still.

I turned around slowly.

He stood in the open doorway. Dark hair. Dark skin. Clothes still wrong for this century. He looked exactly as he had on the beach except now he was standing in front of a room full of people and not one of them was moving.

His eyes moved across the space slowly. Taking inventory. Pausing on certain faces. Recording.

Then they found me.

And stopped.

"It seems," he said, low and unhurried and completely unbothered by the silence pressing down on every other person in the room, "that you have something that belongs to me."

The room did not breathe.

I was so tired.