Claimed by the Beastly Lycan King

Chapter Eleven: A Power Awakens

POV: Kaelira

I wore the longest sleeves that I owned.

Nessa noticed immediately, giving my arms one long look before pressing her lips together and deciding, wisely, to say nothing about it.

The library was empty when I got there, which was exactly what I needed. Then I pulled every book I could find about Luna bloodlines from the shelves, stacked them in the corner furthest from the door, sat down on the floor with my back against the wall and pushed my sleeves up.

My hands glowed faintly against the pages, soft silver light catching the old text, making the words easier to read than they should have been in the dim morning light.

I had been reading for almost an hour when I found it, a passage describing how Lunas bloodline power activates under emotional stress, particularly fear or grief, and grows stronger the longer it goes unacknowledged, which explained a great deal about the last several days.

I was so focused on the page that I did not hear the library door open.

"Oh, how precious."

Selene's voice cut through the quiet like a blade, and I looked up to find her standing at the end of my row with two noble girls behind her, all three of them perfectly dressed at this hour, which felt like its own kind of aggression.

I pushed my sleeves down calmly, "Selene."

"Reading about Luna bloodlines?" she said, tilting her head. " How ambitious, does the King know you are down here teaching yourself how to be something you are not?"

"Does the King know you are down here?" I asked.

She smiled wider and stepped closer, her two companions spreading out slightly behind her like they had done this before. "I just find it so interesting that a girl from a nobody pack thinks a few old books will turn her into a real Luna. It is almost sweet how hard you are trying."

I kept my face even and said nothing…

But one of the girls reached out and knocked my entire stack of books off the table; they hit the floor with a crash that echoed through the whole library, and both girls laughed.

I looked at the books on the floor, then looked up at Selene's smile, and felt something in my chest simply give way.

It was not fear, not even anger exactly, but more like something that had been held under pressure for too long, finally running out of room.

My hands flared, but not gradually, not softly like they had been doing in my room, bright and sudden and completely out of my control, silver light flooding out from my palms and rolling outward from my body like a wave I had not called and could not stop.

It hit all three of them at once.

Selene's smile disappeared half a second before she left the ground, all three women flying backward into the heavy bookshelf behind them, the whole unit crashing to the floor with a noise so enormous I felt it in my teeth.

Dust exploded outward. Books were everywhere.

Then I stood in the middle of it, staring at my own hands, shaking, the silver fading slowly back into my skin, while Selene sat in the wreckage of the bookshelf, looking genuinely stunned for the first time since I had met her.

There were running footsteps in the corridor outside, then voices, then the door crashed open, and half the palace poured in.

Ronan came through last.

He took in Selene on the floor, the destroyed bookshelf, the books scattered everywhere, then his eyes moved to my hands, and he stopped. The expression on his face was not alarm, not anger; it was a long, slow exhale, like a man who had been waiting for something for a very long time and had finally stopped waiting.

"There it is," he said quietly.

He cleared the room in under a minute, and one look at the gathered staff, nobles and everyone found somewhere else to be extremely urgent. Selene was helped out last, shooting me a look over her shoulder that promised this conversation was not finished.

Then it was just us.

"You knew," I said before he could speak.

"Kaelira."

"You said there it is, which means you were waiting for it, which means you knew and you said nothing, again."

He crossed his arms, "I suspected, I was not certain."

"How long have you suspected?" I asked.

"Since the ball," he said. "Your scent that night was not just Luna blood; there was something active underneath it, something almost awake. I have never scented anything like it before."

"And you thought, what, you would just wait and see if I accidentally destroyed a room eventually?"

"I thought telling you would frighten you," he said, and the honesty in it was so plain it stopped my next sentence completely.

"You were trying to protect me from it," I said slowly.

"I was trying not to add another thing to the list of things overwhelming you."

"That is not your decision to make," I said.

"I know that now." He said.

"You should have known it before."

"Yes," he said simply, "I should have."

I stared at him, the argument ready in my mouth, and then let it go because he had not defended himself, had not deflected, had simply agreed, and I did not know what to do with a version of Ronan that just admitted he was wrong without making me fight him for it.

We sat down on opposite sides of what remained of an unbroken bench and stayed quiet for a while, not an uncomfortable quiet, just two people sitting with something that did not need more words right now.

It was almost peaceful.

Then the door burst open.

It was a royal messenger who stumbled in breathless, dropping to one knee in front of Ronan. "Your Majesty, border rogues attacked the northern caravan at dawn. General Aldric is dead, and the regiment is requesting the King's presence immediately."

The quiet in the room changed completely.

I looked at Ronan.

He was already standing, his expression shifting back into the King's face, closed, hard and unreachable. I felt the distance snap back between us as a cord pulled tight.

He looked at me once, something complicated moving behind his eyes, then looked at the messenger. "Tell them I ride within the hour," he said.

He looked at me once more before walking out, and I sat there in the ruined library thinking that the most terrifying part of Ronan leaving was not the empty palace or Selene's waiting smile, it was the realisation that somewhere between the poison and the portraits and the arguments, I had started wanting him to stay.