I Offered Myself for Their Peace, and the Lycan King Was Waiting novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The King Under the Moon

She wakes in Stormhold beside a Lycan King who calls her mate; her white wolf rises; he says her father signed her over three days after her birth.

I woke up warm, and I knew at once that I should not be.

Dead girls do not wake up under a heavy wool blanket.

The ceiling above me was black stone, carved in long curving ridges.

A fire burned in a wall hearth. The air smelled of salt and woodsmoke.

My hair was wet. I was wearing a man's shirt that came down to my knees.

I sat up too fast and the room tipped.

"Slowly," said a voice by the fire.

A man sat on the hearth stone with his elbows on his knees.

He was huge. His dark hair hung wet to his collar, and the firelight cut across a bare chest still beaded with seawater.

He had been the hand in the water.

I knew it before he said a word. My fingers still remembered the grip.

"Where is this?" I said.

"Stormhold. My home. I am Lucan MacDuff." His voice was low and level. "You have been asleep for three hours."

"The rite," I said. "I gave myself to the Goddess. I was supposed to drown."

"You were."

He stood up, and the room got smaller.

"Then why am I breathing?"

"Because I was in the water first," he said.

That made no sense, so I looked at his eyes instead.

They were storm grey, and they were fixed on my face with an attention I had never once had from anyone.

Something in my chest turned over.

It was not my heart. It was lower and older, and it lifted its head and listened.

My wolf.

She had been silent since I was sixteen. Now she was on her feet inside me, pacing, and she was not afraid.

Mine, she said.

It was the first word I had ever heard her say, and it was not about me.

"No," I said out loud.

"Keira." He said my name very carefully. "Breathe."

"Stay away from me."

I got out of the bed and my knees nearly went. I caught the bedpost and my nails split the wood.

I looked down. They were claws.

The bones in my hands were moving.

"Let it come," he said. "It will hurt less."

"I don't want it."

"It is not asking you."

The fire flared. My spine bent, and I went down on my hands in a tearing white blur of pain.

Then the pain was gone, and I was on four feet on a cold stone floor, and my fur was white.

I snarled at him.

I had shifted once in my whole life, and the pack had made it into a joke. Now my wolf stood with her lips drawn back and her ears flat, and the man who had stolen me from the sea did not step away.

He went down on one knee.

Then he did something I did not understand. He let his own shape go.

The air shook. A wolf stood where the man had been, taller than me by a full head, long-legged and thick through the chest.

His fur was silver-white, a shade lighter than mine.

He lowered his head until his muzzle touched the floor in front of my paws.

My wolf stopped snarling.

She stepped forward and breathed him in, and her whole body went loose.

Mate.

I tried to pull her back, and she would not come.

It took me a long time to shift back. When I did, I was shaking on the stone with the shirt hanging off one shoulder, and he was a man again with a blanket already in his hands.

He did not touch me. He held it out.

I took it and wrapped it around me.

"Say it plainly," I said. My teeth were chattering. "Whatever you want to say. I came here to die, not to be owned."

"I know what you came here to do."

His jaw tightened.

"Your pack has been giving girls to that rock for two hundred years and telling itself they drowned," he said. "None of them did. The Lycan kings have always taken them out of the water."

"Then you are a collector."

"I am a king who has never once wanted what the sea gave him."

He took a breath.

"Until tonight."

I stared at him.

Nobody had ever said a sentence to me that meant that.

I did not know where to put it, so I put it down.

"What do you want from me?" I asked.

"Nothing you have not already given. You walked into the water of your own will. That was the only condition."

"Whose condition?"

He crossed to a heavy table by the window and picked up a single sheet of yellowed paper.

It was folded in three. A red wax seal had cracked across the middle.

He laid it on the bed beside me.

"Your father's," he said. "He signed you over to me three days after you were born."

I looked down.

At the bottom of the page, in black ink gone brown with age, was the hand I knew from every faded pack ledger I had been made to dust.

Henry Lamont.

← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →

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