Fated to the Lycan king

Chapter 1

Rhea's POV

The pull started somewhere around the regional border.

I noticed it the way you notice a sound you can't place. Not alarming. Just present. A low pressure in my chest that didn't belong to anything I could point at. I turned toward the window so Lucas wouldn't see whatever was happening on my face. I didn't have a name for it yet and I wasn't going to perform confusion I couldn't explain.

"You are being dramatic," I said, laughing. "It is just a town."

"You said magical." Lucas pushed his sunglasses into his curls. "Those were your exact words."

"It will be."

"You get us lost every time," Yara said from behind us, not looking up from her sketchbook.

"That was once."

"Three times."

I turned back to the window and let them argue.

The pull didn't go anywhere.

Then the ocean appeared alongside the road and my breath caught. I had grown up landlocked. Nothing had prepared me for how immediate it was, how it seemed to take up not just the view but something else entirely that I had no word for. My chest tightened in a way that had nothing to do with the pressure that had been building since the border.

This was different. This was the feeling of something recognizing something.

Which made no sense. I had never seen the ocean before in my life.

I pressed my palm flat against the glass.

"You okay?" Lucas was watching me.

"Yeah." I smiled. "Just looking."

The sign came into view. WELCOME TO VALERIA.

Something moved through my sternum. Not pain. Not fear. Something with no name that disappeared before I could hold it.

Lucas nudged me. "Already in love with the place."

I laughed and let him think that was all it was.

Valeria hit me all at once when the bus doors opened. Heat and noise and the sharp crack of firecrackers close enough that I flinched hard into Lucas. Music from three directions. The smell of woodsmoke and fried dough and something underneath both that was sharper and older.

The square was packed and loud and beautiful. Red and silver banners strung between buildings, lanterns overhead, light catching the smoke and turning it gold.

Then I saw the statue.

A man carved from dark timber, bound from throat to ankle in heavy chains, crown of thorns pressed into his head. THE LYCAN KING. BOUND AND SLEEPING. THE SEAL HOLDS.

The face was too specific for a symbolic carving. Too carefully made. And the mouth carried a faint smile that had no business being on the face of someone in chains. Not cruel. Just like he knew something the rest of the square hadn't figured out yet.

I stared at it longer than I meant to.

I looked away.

A merchant stepped into my path and held out a silver bracelet.

"For protection," he said.

I took it without thinking.

It burned my palm instantly. No warmth first. No warning. Heat that was immediate and specific like touching something that had been waiting to react to me in particular.

I dropped it.

The merchant went completely still. He looked at my face the way someone checks a photograph against a face in a crowd. Careful. Taking his time.

"It reacts to certain energies," he said slowly.

"Guess I'm energetic." I stepped back.

He didn't smile.

My heart was going too fast as Lucas pulled me away. I told him I was fine. He half believed me. Yara called us toward food and the moment moved on.

I didn't look back.

We picked up a town guide somewhere in the middle of the afternoon. Yara had booked her and forgotten to mention it. Chloe was her name. Cheerful. Practiced.

She walked us through the old streets and told us about Valeria the way locals tell you about a place they have stopped finding remarkable. The witch council. The supernatural factions on neutral ground. The ley lines the town was built on.

"So it really is a witches village," Lucas said.

"It really is," Chloe said.

"Wild." He looked at Yara. "You brought us to a witches village."

"You are welcome," Yara said.

Chloe told us about the festival. About the Lycan King imprisoned eighty three years ago. A coalition of factions who feared his power bound him beneath Valeria's coastal waters. The annual festival maintained the seal.

"This town is so superstitious," Yara said. Not unkindly.

"It's not called the witches village for no reason," Chloe said.

Yara looked up from her sketchbook. "Fair."

I said nothing. I was watching the spaces between the buildings where the ocean appeared in flashes and trying to understand why Chloe's recitation of local history was making the pull in my chest do something it hadn't done since the border.

I kept walking.

She took us to the ocean.

The pull became something else the moment I felt it getting close. Not pressure anymore. Something tighter. A specific insistence low in my chest like a thread being pulled taut.

We came around the last street and the water opened up in front of us and I stopped walking without deciding to.

It moved in slow spirals along the surface. Deliberate. Like it was going somewhere specific.

"Rhea."

I blinked. Yara was looking at me.

"It is a nice view," I said.

She didn't look convinced.

The reenactment began at sunset.

Actors in white moving in slow circles around the statue, chanting low. A man in silver face paint kneeling in chains at the center, head bowed, drums building until they were inside my chest and not just around it.

Silver dust poured over the kneeling man. The drums stopped.

The crowd erupted.

My throat tightened. Hundreds of people cheering and something in me pulled hard in the wrong direction. I watched a man kneeling in chains while everyone around me celebrated and the feeling in my chest was the complete opposite of what the crowd was feeling.

I looked away before it ended.

That night I couldn't sleep.

The pull in my chest was still there. Quieter than it had been at the ocean but not gone. Present the way a sound is present when you have stopped consciously hearing it but would notice immediately if it stopped.

I got up.

I didn't decide to. I was lying down and then I was standing and reaching for my clothes and I watched myself do it from a slight distance like my body had somewhere to be and had stopped asking my opinion about it.

The streets were nearly empty. I walked toward the water and with every step the tightness in my chest eased incrementally which made no sense which I noted and kept walking anyway.

At the shore I stood for a moment.

The spiral patterns on the surface. Slow and deliberate. The same ones from this afternoon.

I took my clothes off and went in.

The cold hit all at once and I gasped. Then it settled and something in my body went quiet in a way it had not been quiet since I crossed into this region. Like this was what it had been waiting for.

I swam out. Not far. Just enough to breathe.

Then I turned back toward the shore.

Something closed around my ankle.

Not seaweed. Not a current.

It pulled.

I went under before I could breathe in. Cold dark everywhere, instant and total. I kicked hard and it pulled harder, dragging me down and back. My lungs were already wrong. Already tight. I clawed at the water and it didn't matter. The surface kept getting further no matter what I did.

My body was running out of things to spend.

Then I saw light.

Below me. Getting stronger. Getting closer.

I looked down at my own hands.

It was coming from me.

I woke up face down on wet sand with saltwater in my mouth.

I lay there for a moment just breathing. My lungs felt scraped clean. My hands were still trembling against the sand.

I pushed myself up slowly and looked at my hands.

They looked exactly like my hands. No glow. No light. Whatever had come through them in the water was gone leaving nothing behind except the fact that I was alive on a beach instead of at the bottom of the ocean.

I was about to turn back toward the lodge when I heard footsteps.

From the direction of the water.

I turned around.

He was walking out of the ocean.

Not the way a person walks out of water. No gasping, no stumbling. Just moving forward steadily, soaking wet, like the ocean was simply somewhere he had been. Tall. Dark hair flattened against his face. Dark skin. He was looking at the sand in front of him and hadn't seen me yet.

I should have moved. My legs didn't.

He stopped.

His head came up.

He looked at me and one word left him. Low and rough like it came from somewhere deeper than his chest.

"Mate."

I had no idea what that meant. I took a step back anyway because something about the way that word came out of him made every instinct I had stand at attention.

He started walking toward me.

"Stay back," I said.

He kept walking.

I turned and moved fast in the other direction.

The sound that came from behind me stopped me cold. Low and rough and not a word. It went through my ears and hit the base of my spine and my feet stopped before I told them to.

I stood very still.

Then I turned around slowly.

He had stopped. Standing with his jaw tight and one hand pressed flat against his chest and his eyes closed. His breathing was audible from where I stood.

I watched him and did not move.

His eyes opened.

He looked at me.

Then he moved toward me again and this time it was different. Deliberate. Controlled. He closed the distance and stopped close enough that I had to look up at him. Close enough that I could see the water still running from his hair.

He lowered his head toward my neck slowly.

I didn't step back.

His face came close to my neck and he breathed in. Long and slow. And the warmth of that breath against my skin traveled from my neck downward through my entire body before I had time to object and I pressed my lips together and stared at a point past his shoulder and told myself I was not affected.

I was extremely affected.

"You smell like," he said, his voice dropping lower against my skin, "rain and cedar and something underneath both that I have not—" He stopped. Breathed in again. Slower. Like he was trying to keep something. "Something I have not smelled in a very long time."

I pushed him back with both hands. "What was that for."

My hands on his chest did not feel like a good idea the moment they made contact because he was solid in a way that registered somewhere below rational thought and I pulled them back immediately.

He looked at me like I had said something that required genuine consideration.

"Don't you feel it," he said.

"Feel what," I said.

"The bond," he said. "Between a lycan and his fated mate."

I stared at him. "What stupid bond are you talking about. I don't know you. I have never met you. Get away from me mister."

He looked up at the sky.

"f**k my luck moon goddess," he said. Low. Rough. Like a man handed a situation he had not budgeted for.

He looked back at me.

"You are mine," he said. "As the moon goddess has destined it to be."

"I am nobody's anything," I said.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth.

He stepped toward me and lowered his head and I realized what he was about to do half a second before he did it. His face angled toward mine, unhurried, completely certain, and my heart rate went somewhere it had never been before and I stepped back hard.

"Do not," I said.

He stopped. Looked at me. That almost smile still there.

My heart was going so loud I was certain he could hear it. From the way his eyes moved to my throat I was fairly sure he could.

"I am leaving," I said. "I am going back to my lodge and I am packing my things and I am getting out of this town."

"There is nowhere you can run to," he said. Quiet. Certain. "Remember that. Wherever you go I will find you." His eyes stayed on mine. "You belong to me now."

Then he stepped back.

I turned and ran.

Not walking fast. Actually running, back toward the lodge, the sand giving way under my feet, and the pull in my chest did not ease with a single step I took. It followed me. Steady and certain and completely unbothered by the fact that I was running away from it as fast as I could.

"I need to get out of this town," I said between breaths. "Right now. Tonight."

My heart didn't slow down for a single step of the way back.