Defying the Lycan King

A week later...

"Jessica. Have you been well?"

Kai stood on the shore with his hands in his pockets and spoke to the water as though it might answer him.

He had been coming here since the day he got back. Not once or twice, but again and again, whenever there was a gap in his diary and sometimes when there wasn’t. Even after he had finally stood in front of the council and accepted the mantle he had spent three years running from, he had come straight here afterwards. To tell her. Because who else was he going to tell?

Everyone kept saying the same thing to him, in the same careful voice, as though they had all agreed on the wording beforehand. Move on, Kai. Accept it. She died in that accident. They said it kindly. They said it firmly. His mother had said it with tears in her eyes.

But they never found a body.

And how was a man supposed to accept a thing like that? How was he supposed to wake up one morning and simply decide that he would never see her again, that the whole rest of his life would happen without her in it?

He looked at his phone screensaver, where the both of them were smiling at the camera. It was a ridiculous photo. Chocolate smeared across both their faces, Jessica mid-laugh with her eyes shut.

He blinked twice, hard, until the sting behind his eyes retreated.

"Jessica!" he shouted at the sea. "Can you hear me?"

Some distance back along the shoreline, Dennis, his Beta, stood with a handful of gammas, watching their Alpha shout at open water. Nobody said anything. They had all dropped their heads and found something interesting to look at on the ground.

Kai squinted at the horizon and started talking again, easily, the way you talk to someone who is standing right beside you.

"They’ve made me Alpha of Crescent Moon, Jess. Can you believe that?" He laughed under his breath and shook his head. "I never once thought it would happen. Did you?"

He waited.

The wind came in off the water and the waves went on doing what waves do, and that was the whole of his answer.

"I wish you were here," he said, quieter now. "You should have been my Luna."

He stood there a long moment. Then something in his chest gave way.

"Jessica!" His voice cracked open and tore across the water. "Where are you?!"

His legs went from under him and he dropped to his knees on the wet sand and wept, shoulders shaking, making almost no sound at all.

Not one of his men moved. They knew better. They had seen this before, more times than any of them would ever admit out loud, and the Moon Goddess help whoever was stupid enough to approach him in the middle of it.

They simply turned their faces away and let their Alpha grieve.

***

A few minutes later Kai was in the back of the car heading towards Aethelwulf, sunglasses on, hiding eyes that were still red raw.

He had been seeing Alicia for the past week.

She was, to be entirely fair to her, a good woman. Beauty and brains, exactly as his mother had advertised. She was well-mannered and genuinely funny, and she had thrown herself into this arrangement with both hands, showing up, making an effort, being deliberate about every part of it.

She would make a flawless Luna for Crescent Moon.

The problem was not Alicia. The problem was that nobody on this earth was ever going to be right for him. Not in this lifetime.

Tomorrow he was going to give the pack exactly what it wanted. The engagement was already in motion, the arrangements halfway made, and Alicia was so visibly happy about it that he found it difficult to look at her sometimes.

He had made himself certain promises. He would be a decent husband. He would never humiliate her, never make her feel small, never give the pack a single reason to whisper about how he treated his wife. He had told her all of that plainly.

He had also told her the rest of it. That his heart was not on offer. That it never would be. And she had said she was fine with that, and she had smiled when she said it.

That was the part he could not sit comfortably with. Because underneath everything, Kai did not want to do this to any woman alive. Alicia deserved a man who came home to her, not one who came home from a beach with sand on his knees.

He had prayed about it, which was not something he did often. He had asked the Moon Goddess for anything at all. An interruption. A delay. Some small act of divine inconvenience. Anything to stop tomorrow from arriving, even though the entire shifter community and half the human one had already married him off to Alicia in their heads.

His phone buzzed against his leg and pulled him out of it. It was a text from Alicia.

Don’t forget to come to the shopping centre. We need to pick the rings together. I’ll be waiting.

Heart emoji. Winking face.

Kai looked at it for a moment, then put the phone away and let out a long breath through his nose.

"Take me to the shopping centre," he told the driver.

The place was heaving when they arrived, the way it always was on a weekday afternoon. Alicia had asked him to meet her at the jewellery counter, so Kai cut through the crowd with Dennis at his shoulder, half his mind still on the shoreline.

"Alpha." Dennis leaned in and dropped his voice. "It’s about the rogues. They attacked again last night."

Kai stopped walking and turned to face him properly, his brows drawing together. "What is going on with these attacks? We haven’t had rogue trouble in decades. Decades, Dennis."

"That’s true, Alpha." Dennis swallowed. "But this lot are coordinated. Organised. Our men brought a few of them in alive last night, and every single one of them had the same tattoo on the neck. Identical. It looks less like rogues and more like an organisation."

"What did they say?"

Dennis shrugged. "Nothing. They won’t talk. And believe me, we tried."

Kai nodded slowly and let his gaze drift past Dennis’s shoulder, across the aisle, in the idle way a man does when he is thinking about something else entirely.

There was a girl standing at a rail of corporate blouses.

Not just any girl.

A girl with ginger curls.

Her back was to him. He could see nothing of her face at all. And yet every nerve in his body came alive at once, snapping to attention like a current had gone through him. Something pulled hard behind his ribs. It was not the bond, not exactly, because the bond had gone quiet three years ago and had never once stirred since. This was something else. Something stupider and far more dangerous.

His heart began to slam. Dennis’s voice went distant and muffled, like a radio in another room.

The girl turned slightly to look at a price tag, and for half a second he caught her profile through the curtain of her hair.

That was Jessica.

That was his Jessica.

"Alpha." Dennis was frowning at him. "Alpha? Can you hear me?"

But Kai was already moving. He shoved past his beta hard enough to send him stumbling and broke into a run, straight across the aisle towards the girl who was already walking away from the rail.

"JESSICA!"

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