REBORN FOR THE LYCAN KING

Chapter 2

The Blood on My Wedding Dress

Pov: Diana

Before I could react, Ivy drove the dagger into my stomach.

Pain exploded through me as my blood soaked her hands. I gasped, my knees giving out beneath me, and I crumpled to the cold floor. I pressed both hands to the wound, but the blood wouldn't stop. It kept coming, spreading in a dark bloom across the white lace I had waited my whole life to wear, staining the hem, the bodice, the delicate beadwork the seamstresses had sewn on by hand.

No one moved to help me. Not even Jax, the man I'd loved my entire life. He just stood there and watched me die, his face empty of anything resembling grief, as though I were a stranger bleeding out on someone else's floor.

Around us, people began to scream, stumbling backward, covering their mouths, saving themselves. Not one of them came near. The elders who had just called me a fool now refused to even look at me. The servants who had smiled at me that morning turned their faces away. I searched the crowd for one person, just one, who might step forward, and found nothing but backs turned toward the exits.

So this was how it would end—not as a Luna, not as a bride. Just a fool, bleeding out on marble while the man she loved watched in silence and did nothing to stop it.

I tried to speak, to beg someone, anyone, but the words dissolved before they reached my throat. My hands had gone slick and cold with my own blood, and no matter how hard I pressed against the wound, I could feel the life slipping out from beneath my fingers, faster than I could hold it in.

My vision blurred, the ceiling dissolving into darkness at the edges. I could hear my own heartbeat slowing, stretching out longer and longer between each beat, like a clock running down. Somewhere above me, Ivy was still talking, still spinning her lies to whoever remained close enough to listen, but the words had become nothing more than noise. Then, from somewhere far away, I heard it.

Boom.

The massive front doors exploded inward and every candle in the hall guttered out at once. A crushing wave of pressure rolled through the room—an Alpha's aura, so heavy that every wolf dropped to their knees, gasping like the air itself had turned to stone. Jax collapsed. Ivy released the dagger and folded to the floor, trembling. Even the elders bowed their heads, pressing their palms flat against the marble.

I fought to keep my eyes open as a tall figure stepped through the shattered doorway, dark-haired, dressed head to toe in black, his eyes burning gold like twin flames in the dark. He didn't spare Jax a glance. He didn't look at anyone but me, lying in a spreading pool of my own blood, my wedding dress ruined beyond saving.

Zach Hamilton. The Alpha King. Even half-conscious, some part of me registered the shock rippling through the hall at the sight of him—the way grown warriors, men who had never bowed to anyone in their lives, dropped to their knees the instant he crossed the threshold, as though his presence alone had rewritten every rule they had ever known.

I had met him only a handful of times, always at the edges of pack gatherings, always watching from a distance with those unreadable golden eyes. I had never understood why he lingered so close to my family's territory when he had an entire kingdom of his own to rule. I had assumed, foolishly, that it had nothing to do with me at all.

He crossed the hall toward me, each step slow and deliberate, as though the world had narrowed down to nothing but the distance between us. The wolves who hadn't already collapsed scrambled out of his path, pressing themselves flat against the walls, none of them brave enough to so much as look at him directly, let alone speak.

“Who... who could this be?” I whispered, fighting to hold on to consciousness, to life, to anything at all. My fingers twitched weakly against the cold stone, searching for something solid to hold onto.

He knelt beside me. Up close, his eyes weren't cold the way I'd always assumed from a distance—they were burning, wrecked, full of something I had no name for. I had heard stories about the Alpha King my whole life, stories that painted him as ruthless and untouchable, and none of them had prepared me for the way he looked at me like I was the only thing left standing in a burning world.

“Stay with me,” he said, his voice rough in a way I had never heard from him before. “Diana. Stay with me.”

I wanted to ask him how he knew my name, why he sounded like the ground was falling out from under him, why his hands shook as they hovered over my wound like he was afraid to touch me and afraid not to. I wanted to ask him why, of everyone in that hall, he was the only one who had come running. But my throat wouldn't work anymore. The room had gone soft and distant, like I was already halfway somewhere else, watching myself from a great height.

Somewhere behind him I heard Ivy's voice rise in a panicked shriek, and the scrape of chairs as people scrambled away from the doors he had torn open, but none of it mattered anymore. The only thing left in the world was the warmth of his hand pressed over the wound in my stomach and the sound of my own name breaking apart in his mouth.

The last thing I saw before the darkness swallowed me whole was his face, twisted with a grief too large for the few minutes he had known I was dying, as though he had been dreading this exact moment for far longer than that.

Then everything went black.