Wolfless Omega, Claimed by Prince Lycan King novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Seat

Oona adopts her, Evander tells her about the heart and the run he never came back from, and Hesper watches her father take a Council seat she never knew he had.

I woke to somebody eating toast on the end of my bed.

She was tall, with short light brown hair and riding boots up on my blanket, and she was reading my phone.

"You have forty-one missed calls from 'Dad,'" she said. "And one text from 'Do Not Answer' that says 'You'll regret this, you frigid cow.' Is that the fiance?"

"Ex," I said. "Who are you?"

"Oona. The sister." She held out the plate. "I brought you breakfast and then I ate most of it. I'm nervous. You're famous."

I sat up.

The room was bigger than my whole apartment over the bakery. Stone walls, a fire, a window full of white mountains.

Last night came back to me in pieces.

The wolf in the snow. The guards. A woman with a lantern showing me up a back stair while the King's men argued in the yard.

"Is he all right?"

Oona's face changed.

"Come and see."

She opened my door.

The silver wolf was lying across the threshold in the hall, nose on his paws, fast asleep.

He was so big his tail reached the opposite wall.

"He's been there since two," Oona whispered. "The guards tried to move him. One of them is in the infirmary with a bitten sleeve."

The wolf's ear twitched at her voice. He didn't wake.

"He doesn't sleep," Oona said. "Not really. He howls. Every night for eight years, somewhere on this mountain, he howls until the dogs in town start."

She looked at me.

"Last night he didn't."

I didn't know what to say to that.

So I stepped over the King.

When I came back from the bathroom he was gone, and a man's voice was asking Oona whether she had any idea what boundaries were.

He was in the doorway in a gray sweater and jeans, his hair wet, looking exhausted.

"I'm sorry about last night," he said to me. "He doesn't usually come out without asking."

"He bit a guard."

"Lightly," said Oona.

Evander pointed at the door. She took the toast and went.

He stayed in the doorway. A foot outside it.

He had not forgotten the terms.

"You owe me the third one," I said.

He nodded slowly.

"I drew the heart the morning of graduation," he said. "Before the signing. I'd been trying to talk to you for two years and I always said something stupid about the library."

"You told me once to stop humming."

"I liked the humming. I panicked." He rubbed his jaw. "So I drew it. I thought I'd let you sign it, and after the graduation run I'd show you, and you'd either laugh or you wouldn't."

I remembered the steps.

The sun. The pen held out to me.

His fingers brushing mine when I gave it back, and the strange hot turn under my ribs.

"You never came to show me," I said.

"There was a rogue at the run. He had a silver blade." He touched his left side again, low, the way he had in the car. "I died for two minutes. I woke up a week later."

"I didn't know."

"Nobody was allowed to know. My father kept it out of the papers." He looked at the floor between us. "When I could stand, I went to find you. Your father met me at your pack gate."

My stomach went cold.

"What did he say?"

"That you'd left the Academy. That you were engaged to a man of your own pack. That you'd asked him to tell me never to come near you."

"I wasn't engaged," I said. "Not then."

He looked up.

"I got engaged a year later. My father arranged it." My voice came out flat. "He said nobody else would ever ask."

Evander didn't move.

But his eyes went pale gold, all at once, and the window glass behind me hummed in its frame.

"He told me you were happy," he said.

"I had a fever after graduation night. I woke up at home three days later with no wolf." I touched my collar without meaning to. "Nobody told me anything. They said I fainted in the heat."

"And my father," Evander said, "told me a Lycan Prince doesn't chase a minor pack's wolfless girl. So I stopped going to the gate."

"For eight years."

"Until he died. And by then you'd been engaged five years." His mouth twisted. "I'm not proud of the closet. I just couldn't throw it out."

We stood there with the threshold between us.

I didn't know which of us was more stupid.

"Breakfast," Oona called from down the hall. "Real breakfast. Before the Council eats all the bacon. They're animals."

The Council met in a long hall at the heart of the Court.

Oona walked me past it on the way to the dining room, talking the whole time.

"That one's the North. He smells like pipe smoke. That one's the Gulf. She once made a man cry with a fork."

The doors stood open.

Twelve carved chairs sat around a long table, and elders were drifting in to take them.

"Old wolves who think the Crown works for them," Oona said. "Evander hates every one of them. He's very polite about it."

Then two people came in through the far door.

A blonde woman in a white wool dress, diamonds in her ears.

And a broad gray-bearded man with a gold ring on his fist.

Lyla saw me through the doorway and smiled.

My father didn't look at me at all.

He walked straight down the length of the table, pulled out the eleventh carved chair and sat in it.

The elder beside him nodded to him.

I stopped walking.

"Oona. What's my father doing in that chair?"

She glanced in.

"Moreland? That's his seat."

"His seat?"

"He's had it for years," she said, and frowned at me. "You didn't know? Your father sits on the Council."

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend