Humiliated & Rejected Me for an Omega Joke's on Him Now I'm Mated to the Lycan Prince novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Prince's Mark

Seven years later in Lyon, the Lycan Prince walks into the embassy hall and his mark answers hers in front of forty people; the bond has thirty days before it starts to hurt.

Seven years later, I was interpreting for the Lycan delegation when its prince walked into the embassy hall and my wrist caught fire.

I was twenty-seven, and I had a desk with my name on it in the Lycan embassy in Lyon.

I translated between the Lycan court, which spoke French, and the American packs, which spoke money.

That morning there were forty people in the hall, and I had a clipboard and a headache.

The Prince was due at nine.

He came in at ten past, with a man in a grey coat at his shoulder.

He was the tallest person in the room, with black hair, amber eyes and a scar that cut through his left eyebrow.

The whole hall went quiet and bowed, and I bowed too, a half second late.

My wrist had been quiet for seven years.

Now the silver crescent on it lit up so bright that I saw it through my sleeve.

I pressed my hand over it.

It didn't help.

Across the hall, the Prince stopped walking.

He looked at nobody. He looked at his own left hand, where a matching crescent was glowing the same silver.

Then he looked up and found me through forty people.

I knew he'd found me because the mark pulled once, hard.

"Excuse me," the Prince said in French, and the room parted for him.

He walked the length of the hall.

Nobody dared to breathe near him. He stopped an arm's length from my clipboard.

"Your name," he said.

"Linnea Lindstrom, Your Highness. Interpreter."

His eyes went to my wrist.

"Lindstrom," he said, his expression sharpening. "Show me."

"I don't think that's appropriate."

"Please."

It was the please that did it.

I turned my wrist over and held it up.

He held out his own, and the two crescents lit the space between us until the people around us squinted.

Someone gasped. The man in the grey coat said a word I won't write down.

The Prince didn't move.

"Seven years," he said, so quietly that only I heard it. "I have felt this for seven years."

"It's a mark," I said. "I've had it since the night I was rejected."

"It's a mate mark."

"I know what it is."

I had known what it was in the airport. I had spent seven years not thinking about it.

Dane had rejected me, and the Moon, which does not waste anything, had given me a second mark.

I had never once looked at it and wondered whose it was.

"I'm Soren Draycott," the Prince said. "This is Emmett Rook, my Beta."

"Hello," said the man in the grey coat, with a crooked grin that looked nervous. "She's tall."

"You're staring," I said to the Prince.

"I know," Soren said. "I can't stop."

My director, a thin man who had been trying to catch my eye for a full minute, finally got my sleeve.

"Linnea. The Prince and the delegation need the east room."

"Of course."

I started to walk, because that was what a translator did.

Soren walked next to me, because that was what a mate did.

I stopped. "No."

"No?"

"No, Your Highness. I'm not doing this in front of forty people."

He glanced once at the hall, and at the phones that had come out.

"Emmett," Soren said. "Clear the east room."

"Is that a euphemism?"

"Emmett."

"Clearing."

It took six minutes.

I spent them standing in the corridor with my back against the wall and my hand clamped over my wrist.

Soren stood three feet away and did not touch me.

That was the thing I noticed, even then. He didn't touch me.

When Emmett opened the door, the room was empty, with two chairs and a tray of coffee nobody had asked for.

I sat. The Prince stayed standing.

"I came to Lyon for the treaty talks," Soren said. "I didn't know it was you. I knew a name, a family, and a direction. That is all."

"That's more than I knew."

"Then let me say it plainly. The mark is real. The Moon gave it to both of us. If we ignore it, it won't go away."

"I've ignored it for seven years."

"It was quiet because we were far apart and neither of us was pulling." He turned his wrist. "It isn't quiet now."

He was right. My whole arm was humming.

"What happens if I walk out of this room?" I asked.

Soren looked at the floor for a moment.

"The bond is awake. It has thirty days before it starts to hurt us. After that, it hurts you worse than it hurts me."

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