The Lycan King's Forbidden Craving

The veil is perfect.

I tilt my head in the mirror, watching the sheer silk cascade over my shoulders, and all I can think is that Damien's going to love it. He's going to see me walk down that aisle and his dark eyes are going to do that thing,that slow, deliberate drag that makes my skin heat from ten feet away. My wolf stirs low in my chest, restless and eager.

'Tonight,' she whispers. 'Finally.'

Six months. Six months since that first Mating Moon ceremony when I'd crossed the courtyard and caught his scent,cedar and storm-drenched earth,and my entire world had rearranged itself around a single point. He'd turned. Our eyes had met. I'd grabbed the pillar beside me to keep from walking straight into his arms in front of every Elder in the pack.

The Elders had called it a blessing. A union of bloodlines, of territories, of futures.

I just called it him.

I press my fingers to the silver comb pinned at my temple and breathe. The preparation room smells of white roses and candle wax, and the seamstress has just finished her final adjustments, and in twenty minutes I'm going to become Damien Blackwood's mate in front of everyone who matters in this pack.

My reflection smiles back at me.

Don't cry and ruin the liner, I coach myself. Don't you dare.

The door crashes open.

Seraphina doesn't knock. She never has. My younger sister stands in the doorway with her dark hair half-pinned and her jaw set like a blade, and the expression on her face dissolves my smile instantly.

"Sera,"

"Don't." She crosses the room in four strides, grabs my wrist, and pulls me toward the corridor. "I need two minutes. Just two minutes, Ava, please."

I let her drag me through the door, out of earshot of the seamstress, before I pull back. "The ceremony starts in,"

"I know when it starts." Her grip tightens. "I've been trying to get you alone for three days and you keep disappearing with him or with the Elders or with,"

"Sera." I keep my voice low, steady. "Whatever this is, it can wait until after,"

"It can't." Her eyes are wet. "I've been asking questions, Ava. About Damien. About where he came from before Elder Valerius brought him to the pack. And nobody will answer me. Nobody directly." She steps closer, her voice dropping to a whisper. "The Elders are lying to you. Something about this whole thing is wrong. I can feel it."

My wolf goes very still.

I breathe through it. "You feel it because you don't want me to leave," I say carefully. "You feel it because things are changing and change is,"

"Don't patronize me." Her voice cracks. "I'm not a child having a tantrum. I'm telling you that Elder Valerius pulled two pack records from the archive last month and they haven't been returned. Records about Garrick Blackwood. Damien's father." She searches my face. "Why would he do that?"

The name lands somewhere uncomfortable. Damien never talks about his father. Whenever I've asked, he deflects with a smile and a subject change, and I've told myself that grief looks different for different people, and I've let it go.

I've let so much go.

"Whatever those records say," I tell her, because I need to say it out loud, need to mean it, "Damien is my mate. The bond doesn't lie."

"People lie." Sera's hands find my face, tilt it toward hers. Her eyes are burning. "Promise me something. If anything,anything,feels wrong tonight, you come find me. You don't stay silent and try to fix it yourself. You come find me."

I cover her hands with mine. Squeeze.

"Nothing's going to go wrong."

She lets me go. She doesn't say anything else. But when I slip back into the preparation room, I can feel her watching me from the corridor, her gaze like a held breath against my spine.

The great hall burns gold and white.

Three hundred guests rise as Elder Valerius raises his hands, his robes catching the candlelight, and I take my first step down the aisle on legs that are absolutely not shaking. The musicians begin. The crowd blurs. And then I see Damien at the far end of the aisle,black ceremonial jacket, dark hair swept back, those eyes I have memorized in every kind of light,and my lungs unlock.

He's beautiful. He's mine. The mate bond hums through me like a second heartbeat, warm and certain and real.

'See?' my wolf murmurs. 'This is right. This is exactly right.'

I reach him. His hands find mine, steady and warm.

Elder Valerius begins the words,the old words, the ones the Moon Goddess blessed centuries ago,and Damien's thumb traces a slow circle on my knuckles and I think, I would walk through anything to get here. I would do it all again.

"Do you take this male as your fated mate," Valerius intones, "bonded by blood and breath and the grace of the Moon?"

"I do." My voice doesn't waver.

Damien's eyes stay on mine through every syllable of his own vow. His voice is low and deliberate, and when the final words fall and Valerius says you may seal your union, Damien's hand cups my jaw and his mouth covers mine and the room erupts.

I don't hear any of it.

In the far corner of my peripheral vision, I catch a glimpse of Sera's face. She's not clapping. She's watching Damien with an expression I have never seen on her before,flat, focused, cold,like something being confirmed rather than witnessed.

I tell myself it doesn't mean anything.

I tell myself that later, I'll look back on this moment as the beginning of everything beautiful.

I'm so fucking happy.

The suite is bathed in firelight when the door closes behind us, and Damien's hands are at my waist before I've taken three steps inside, and the next hour dismantles every coherent thought I have.

He is practiced and deliberate and thorough, and I give myself to it completely,to him, to the heat of the mate bond pulling us together, to the part of me that has been aching toward this since the first night I scented him. My wolf sings. My body arches against his. When I finally collapse against the sheets, breathless and flushed and entirely undone, I feel more whole than I have in my entire life.

For exactly three minutes.

The warmth of his body leaves me before I can speak. I hear him cross the room. The fire crackles. When I push myself upright against the headboard, Damien is standing at the window with his back to me, shirt loose, hands hanging at his sides.

"Damien?"

He doesn't turn around.

My wolf goes quiet.

"That was," I try again. "Come back to bed."

His shoulders move. Something like a laugh, but hollowed out. "No."

The single syllable hits me like cold water. I pull the sheet up, studying the line of his back, the stillness in him that wasn't there an hour ago. "What's wrong?"

He turns.

The man who turns is not the man who held my face at the altar. The man who turns has dark eyes that are flat and purposeful, a jaw set hard, and a smile that doesn't reach anywhere near his face.

"Nothing's wrong," Damien says. "Everything's exactly as planned."

My hands curl into the sheet. "What does that mean?"

He crosses back toward the bed, slowly, the way someone moves when they're not in a hurry because they've already won. He sits on the edge of the mattress and looks at me the way you look at something you're finished with. "Did you know your father killed mine?"

The question lands wrong. Off-center, like a punch aimed at the wrong rib. "My father,"

"Corbin Thorne." He says my father's name like he's tasted it a thousand times. "Alpha of this pack. Fifteen years ago, he had Garrick Blackwood executed on charges of treason. False charges." His head tilts. "Did he tell you that? When you were growing up? Did he explain to his daughter what he did?"

My heart is hammering. "Damien,"

"I was eleven years old." The calm in his voice is the most frightening thing I've ever heard. "I watched them drag my father out of our house. I watched everything we had get stripped away. And I made a promise." He leans in, close enough that I can smell cedar and storm,that scent that my wolf called home,except now it smells like a trap. "I would take everything Corbin Thorne valued. His territory, his pack, his heir." A pause. "You."

"You didn't," My voice breaks. I push it back together. "The bond. The mate bond is real, you can't fake,"

"You can't fake a mate bond," he agrees easily. "Lucky for me, I didn't have to. You really are my fated mate, Aveline." He says my name like it's a joke. "The Moon Goddess has a sense of humor. Elder Valerius confirmed it the night of the ceremony and I thought, why waste a gift?"

The world is tilting. My wolf slams against my ribs,rage and terror braided together, animal panic clawing for the surface.

"This whole thing," My hands are shaking. "All of it,"

"Was to get me here." He stands. Straightens his shirt. "With your father's name, his territory, his bloodline's rights all signed over to a Blackwood in front of three hundred witnesses." He glances at me. "The paperwork finalizes at dawn. By the time anyone realizes what's happened, it'll be over."

I swing my legs off the bed. The sheet falls. I don't care. "I'll tell them,"

"Tell them what?" He sounds bored. "That your mate deceived you? They'll want proof. They'll want process. They'll want months of deliberation." A smile. "You won't have months."

He turns toward the door. When he comes back, his hand holds something I recognize immediately,the narrow, dark handle of a ceremonial blade, the kind used in high-ritual. Except the edge is wrong. Slick. Dark with something that isn't oil.

Wolfsbane.

The scent hits me a half second before the blade does.

The pain is catastrophic. I don't scream, not at first,the shock is too complete, a white-hot column driving through my lower abdomen, my knees buckling before I've processed the fall. The floor comes up hard. My hands find the wound instinctively, pressing, and they come away dark.

"Damien,"

"The rejection first." His voice comes from above me, unhurried. "That's how this has to go. For the records."

Tears burn down my face. My wolf is screaming,not words, just raw animal grief, the sound a creature makes when the thing it trusted most drives the knife in. The wolfsbane is spreading through my blood like ice and fire simultaneously, locking down my healing, drowning my wolf's voice.

He crouches in front of me. Grabs my chin.

"Say it," he says.

"Please," My voice is wrecked. "Damien, please,"

"Say it."

My hands are pressed to my stomach. The blood is warm. I can feel myself getting colder.

"I," The mate bond in my chest is a live wire, tearing at both ends. My wolf whimpers. "I, Aveline Thorne," Don't. ",reject you, Damien Blackwood," Don't do this,"as my mate."

The bond snaps.

The sound isn't external. It's in my bones, in my marrow, a detonation behind my sternum that steals every remaining breath. My mouth opens but nothing comes out. Damien stands. Releases my chin. His expression doesn't change.

"I, Damien Blackwood, accept your rejection, Aveline Thorne."

He pulls the blade free.

The second wave of pain is worse than the first,the wolfsbane spreading fast now, pouring through the reopened wound, locking my limbs. I can't shift. I can't heal. I can barely breathe.

The door opens. Two guards step inside.

Damien straightens his cuffs. "End her," he says, his voice carrying the easy authority of an Alpha who has never needed to raise it. "Burn her body."

He walks out without looking back.

The door closes.

I press my forehead to the cold stone floor and listen to the two guards moving toward me, and somewhere beneath the pain and the poison and the shattered ruin of everything I built my life on, one clear thought surfaces:

Sera tried to tell me.