REBORN FOR THE LYCAN KING

Chapter 3

The Alpha King Went Mad

Pov: Zach

“Who touched my mate?”

My roar tore through the grand hall, and the stone floor trembled beneath my feet. When my eyes found her, my heart stopped. Diana lay in a spreading pool of blood, her white lace dress soaked through, her body still. I had waited three years for the right moment to claim her. I would not lose her in the same breath I finally reached her.

Black fury swallowed me whole. My wolf surged forward and my claws tore through my own palms as I unleashed the full weight of my Alpha aura into the room. Stone pillars cracked. Windows shattered into glittering rain, raining shards down onto the wolves cowering beneath them. Four hundred wolves—warriors, elders, alphas from packs across the region—dropped to the ground at once, faces pressed to the cold stone, gasping for breath they couldn't find. No one could stand against me. They had seen me angry before. They had never seen me like this, and I doubted any of them would forget it.

I walked forward, my eyes locked on the man kneeling closest to her.

Jax.

He looked up at me from the floor, his face drained of color. His eyes flicked to Diana, then back to me, and I watched understanding dawn on him—too late. He finally realized what she was to me, and what that meant for him.

I crossed the distance in a single stride, seized him by the throat, and hauled him off the ground with one hand. He choked, legs kicking uselessly at the air, his hands scrabbling uselessly at my wrist. Without hesitation, I gripped his other arm and twisted until bone broke through skin. His scream tore through the hall, high and raw.

“You dare touch what is mine?” I growled, and threw him across the room. He struck a stone pillar hard enough to c***k it further and slid to the floor, unconscious.

“Kill him!” Ivy shrieked from where she cowered, jabbing a shaking finger toward me. “There are dozens of you—attack!”

She thought numbers would save her. She had no idea what she was asking her guards to walk into. Twelve elite guards forced themselves upright against the crushing weight of my aura and came at me with swords drawn, faces pale with terror even as they obeyed her order. I didn't bother drawing a weapon. I moved through them like a shadow—tearing out one throat with my bare claws, driving my fist through the chest of the next, smashing the last two skulls together until they gave way beneath my hands. Blood sprayed the walls in dark arcs. Within half a minute, all twelve lay dead on the floor, and the hall had gone utterly silent except for the ragged breathing of everyone still alive.

The few wolves still conscious wept where they knelt, eyes squeezed shut, waiting for death to find them too. I ignored them entirely. The rage in me guttered out as quickly as it had come, replaced by something colder—an emptiness I hadn't felt in centuries, not since the last time I had watched someone I loved slip away from me.

I dropped to my knees at Diana's side, my coat soaking through with her blood almost instantly. I pressed both hands over the wound in her stomach, trying to hold the life inside her, my hands shaking harder than they had in the middle of battle moments earlier. Her pulse fluttered beneath my fingers, faint and fading, like a moth beating its wings against glass.

Tears I hadn't shed in decades slipped down my face and landed on her pale skin. I—the most feared wolf alive, the one whose name alone made entire packs kneel—was breaking apart like a child in front of everyone who remained.

Then, impossibly, her eyes fluttered open.

She looked up and saw my tears, and I understood exactly what she was thinking. She hated me. That was why she'd spent years running from me, calling me a tyrant, a monster, never once asking why I stayed so close to her pack when I had a kingdom of my own waiting for me.

I bent down until my lips nearly brushed her ear. “If only you had chosen me,” I whispered, my voice breaking on every word. “I would have given you the world, Diana. I would have kept you safe from all of them, from the very first day I saw you.”

I had watched her for three years from the edges of pack gatherings, telling myself there would be time, that I could wait until she was ready, that forcing the matter would only push her further into Jax's arms. I had been wrong about almost everything, and now I was running out of time to fix any of it.

Her eyes widened as she looked from my tears to my blood-soaked hands, and I watched the truth finally land somewhere behind her eyes. I had never wanted her land. I had never wanted her inheritance. From the very beginning, all I had ever wanted was her.

She lifted a trembling, bloodied hand and brushed a tear from my cheek, her touch so light I barely felt it.

“I'm sorry,” she breathed, barely a whisper, and there was so much I wanted to tell her in return.

Then her hand fell back to the stone, her eyes slid shut, and her chest went still beneath my palms.

I called her name. I called it again, louder, until it wasn't a word anymore but something closer to a howl, something that made the few surviving wolves in the hall press themselves flatter against the walls. I shook her gently, as though she might simply wake up if I was patient enough, careful enough, as though three years of watching her from a distance had earned me even that small mercy.

It hadn't. Nothing about that night gave anyone mercy, least of all me.

Darkness took her from me, and my entire world ended with her, right there on the cold floor of a hall soaked in the blood of the people who had failed her, and I understood, in that moment, that I would burn every pack in this kingdom to the ground before I let it happen again.