The King Who Prayed
1570 Words
Rowan Nightshade was in the middle of losing a chess game to his younger sister when the bond hit him, and he would later find it faintly embarrassing that his first thought, even as the sensation c***ked through his chest, was that he'd just left his queen exposed.
"Rowan?" Wren had already knocked over her king in mock defeat, grinning, the smugness of a fifteen-year-old who thinks she's finally winning fair — but the grin died fast when she saw his face. "Rowan, what's wrong?"
He didn't answer immediately. He couldn't. It felt like something had reached directly into his ribcage and rearranged the furniture, gentle and unstoppable at once, and underneath the shock of it, a warmth was spreading through him that he hadn't let himself feel in years. Hope, mostly. Something that felt embarrassingly close to relief.
She is your mate.
He'd prayed for those words for a long time. Longer than most Alphas his age even bothered to hope — he was twenty-nine, unmarked, unmated, the subject of increasingly pointed questions from his council about heirs and succession and the stability of the Eastern throne. He'd told them all the same thing, patiently, every single time: he would wait. The goddess did nothing without reason, and if she hadn't marked him yet, then his mate simply hadn't been ready to be found.
His council thought it was naivety. His mother, before she passed, had called it faith, and said it like it was the finest thing about him.
He pressed a hand to his chest, right where the sensation still throbbed faintly, like a second heartbeat learning its rhythm. "I think," he said slowly, "the goddess finally answered."
Wren's eyes went huge. "You're mated? Right now? This second?" She was already halfway out of her chair. "Who — where — Rowan, you have to go, you have to—"
"I don't know where." He said it quietly, and some of the light went out of his own excitement as the fact settled in. He knew a name existed somewhere at the edge of his awareness, half-formed, more instinct than information — Luna. He knew that much, felt it the way you know a word is on the tip of your tongue. But the where of her, the who of her beyond a single name, was still a fog he'd have to search his way through.
Then there was the second thing. The thing he was trying very hard not to think about yet, because thinking about it made the warmth in his chest curdle into something uneasy.
He hadn't imagined it. There'd been a second presence woven into the bond the moment it formed — sharp-edged, cold, unmistakably other. Another Alpha, claimed by the same mark, in the same breath, and Rowan had spent enough time in his kingdom's old libraries to know exactly what that meant and exactly how rarely — how catastrophically — it had happened before.
"Rowan." Wren's voice had gone careful, watching him piece it together in real time. "What is it. What's wrong?"
"There's someone else," he said. "Another Alpha. Marked at the same moment I was."
Wren sat back down slowly, all the excitement draining out of her fifteen-year-old face into something more like fear. "That's not — that's supposed to be impossible."
"It is impossible. Officially." He managed something that was almost a laugh, humorless and quiet. "Apparently the goddess didn't get the memo."
He stood, crossed to the garden window, and looked out over the lantern-lit grounds of his estate — the orchard his mother had planted, the low stone wall his father used to sit on with a cup of tea every evening before he died. Rowan had inherited a kingdom people genuinely liked living in, which was rarer than it should have been among the Twelve, and he'd built it that way on purpose, believing — the way his parents had raised him to believe — that strength and cruelty weren't actually the same thing, whatever the Northern Kingdom liked to preach.
He already had a guess about who the other Alpha might be. There was only one king within range who could produce a mark that sharp, that hard-edged, that immediately hostile even through a bond he had no business influencing yet.
"Kael Blackthorne," he said aloud, testing the shape of the name, and felt something settle in his stomach that wasn't quite dread and wasn't quite resolve. A little of both, maybe.
"The Blood Alpha?" Wren's voice climbed an octave. "You think it's him?"
"I don't know yet. I intend to find out." Rowan turned from the window, and something in his bearing had shifted already — softer than Kael would ever allow himself to look, but no less certain. "Wake the trackers. Quietly. If she's out there, I want to know where before he does."
"And if it is him? If he gets there first?"
Rowan considered the question honestly, the way he considered most things, weighing it instead of reaching for the easiest answer. "Then I'll still go," he said. "I've spent nine years waiting for someone the goddess thought was worth the wait. I'm not going to lose her to a man who's never waited for anything in his life."
He didn't say the rest of what he was thinking — that somewhere out there was a girl who'd just had two kingdoms' worth of danger dropped on her without any warning at all, and that whatever came next, whatever war brewed between himself and Kael Blackthorne, he intended to make sure she never regretted being found.
Outside, the lanterns burned low, and two hundred miles southwest, Luna Ashford was still sitting on the cold floor of a hall gone completely silent around her, trying to understand what she'd just done to her own life.
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