My Mate Bet Me Away, So the Lycan King Collected novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Prize

Orla stares down the King's Court as her own photo plays on a screen, Lucan shuts it off, and Brock arrives at the gate with twenty wolves.

I stepped out of the SUV into two hundred raised phones.

Nobody said a word.

I stood straight, with my chin up and my bag over my shoulder, and let them look.

Lucan came around the hood and stopped half a step behind my left shoulder.

He did not touch me.

He had promised not to, and he kept it.

"This way," Tobias said, and led us through the gate.

The Court parted for him without being asked.

Wolves in leather and wolves in office clothes stepped aside, and every one of them lowered their eyes to the King and lifted them again to me.

"That's her," somebody whispered.

"She's smaller than the photo."

"She's prettier than the photo."

"Don't be stupid. Nobody's prettier than that photo."

A few of them laughed.

I kept walking.

The hold sat at the end of the drive, a long house of grey stone and dark glass built into the mountain.

The great hall inside had a vaulted ceiling and a fireplace big enough to roast a deer.

Along the far wall hung a screen the size of a barn door.

It was lit, and my face was on it.

My ugliest photo, enlarged until you could count my freckles.

My mouth hung open, and the caption ran underneath in red letters: OUR LUNA.

Someone had put it on a loop.

A dark-haired she-wolf in a silver dress stood beneath it with a glass of wine, laughing with three friends.

"The Silver Creek girl," she said, loud enough for me. "Look at that. We got the discount version."

Her friends laughed.

Lucan went still behind me.

I felt it before I saw it, a wave of heat down my back and a low sound in his chest that the whole hall heard.

The laughing stopped.

"Don't," I said, quietly, without turning around.

"Orla."

"That's a term, isn't it? You don't touch me unless I say so. Don't speak for me either."

He breathed out slowly.

"Go on," he said.

I crossed the floor alone.

My boots rang on the stone, and every wolf in the room followed me with their eyes.

I stopped under the screen and looked up at my own open mouth.

Then I looked at the she-wolf.

"You're right," I said. "It's an ugly photo."

She smirked.

"I was asleep on a pack bus after a long night shift," I said. "Somebody took it without asking, and somebody sat on it for years."

The smirk wavered.

"Somebody close enough to me to be on that bus." I turned to the room. "They gave it to my mate, and my mate gave it to you."

Nobody moved.

"So here's my face." I stepped back, into the light from the screen, so it fell across my cheeks. "Look as long as you want. I flew across half the country to be here, and I'm not hiding it."

The she-wolf set her glass down.

"Nobody said you had to hide," she said.

"You said discount."

"I was joking."

"So was he," I said, and I pointed at the screen. "That's why I'm standing here."

The room did not breathe.

Then somebody at the back started clapping.

It was slow and dry, and it was Tobias.

"Well said," he said. "Can someone turn that thing off?"

Lucan had already crossed the room.

He took the remote from a startled guard, pressed one button, and the screen went black.

My face vanished from the wall.

In the sudden dark, I realized my knees were shaking.

I did not let them show.

He stopped beside me, close enough that I could feel the heat of him, and spoke so only I could hear.

"That was a good first hand," he said.

"I wasn't playing."

"No," he said. "That's why it was good."

Something warm moved low in my stomach, and I hated it.

I looked at his hands.

They were big, scarred across the knuckles, and he held them rigidly at his sides to keep them away from me.

I noticed that I had noticed.

"The she-wolf," I said. "Who is she?"

"Nobody."

"She's somebody to you."

"She was invited to dinner once." He glanced at Tobias. "Escort her out."

"Gladly," Tobias said.

The she-wolf and her friends left in a hurry.

I watched the double doors swing shut behind them.

Then they swung open again.

A guard hurried across the floor with his phone held out in front of him.

"Sire," he said. "The gate. It's Silver Creek."

Lucan took the phone and looked at the screen.

I saw it over his arm.

A camera feed from the front gate, and twenty wolves in the rain.

Brock stood at the front of them with his shirt open at the collar and his jaw set.

He was looking straight into the lens.

"Tell the Lycan King," he said, and the audio came tinny out of the little speaker, "that I'm here for my mate."

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