Chapter Two: The Lycan King is A Drunk.

His eyes opened slowly, bright silver-grey like the moon, catching what little moonlight filtered through the canopy above us.

Tall frame. Hard build. Scars scattered all over his body, but the most obvious being the one just above his abdomen.

For a moment, he scanned the area, searching for the Moon knows what before finally settling on me.

Unable to move my body or register what was going on, I held his gaze, refusing to look anywhere else. 

Slowly, he started to move. Unsteady at first, closing the distance between us.

I scrambled backward on my hands, my hurt leg dragging uselessly beneath me, until my spine hit the solid trunk of a tree and I had nowhere left to go.

His broad shoulders. His chest. The hard lines of his stomach. The scars scattered across his skin, each one looking like it had a story of its own.

He was... attractive.

Annoyingly so.

But as he came closer, my eyes betrayed me. Following hus eyes movement, from his head, chest, down to his shaft which i could help but notice its size. 

I swallowed. 

Whatever strange reaction my body was having, whatever this man was doing to my ability to think properly, I had far more important things to worry about than noticing how good-looking a naked stranger was.

Especially one who was probably insane.

When I looked back at him, his eyes were already on me.

Slowly, he crouched in front of me, close enough that I could see every detail of him in the moonlight. The breadth of his shoulders, the hard lines of his chest, a scar cutting pale and jagged along his right ribs, old enough to have faded silver-white but deep enough that whatever caused it hadn’t been gentle.

“Who—” My voice died somewhere in my throat the moment he rose his hand.

Two fingers grazed my cheek lightly, almost as if he was checking if I was real. His palm came to my face, rubbing off my already dried tears with surprising gentleness. His thumb rested beneath my cheekbone as his silver-grey eyes locked onto mine.

His hand lowered slightly, down my neck stopping just above the bridge of my breast, all while his gaze unwavered.

Then he leaned closer, face stopped beside my ear, and I felt his breath against my skin.

I swallowed A strange shiver raced down my spine, so sudden that I nearly forgot about the pain in my leg. For one impossible moment, the throbbing injury disappeared beneath the overwhelming awareness of him.

“So.” His voice came out low and rough, cracked from disuse, sending jolts of shivers down my spine.“You are the one the Moon Goddess has finally assigned to me.”

I stared at him. My throat had gone completely dry.

He’s insane, I thought. He has to be insane.

His eyes dropped, finally, to the blood soaking dark through the torn fabric at my calf and in that half-second of distraction, I forced back into my senses. My hand found a fallen branch in the leaves beside me. I swung it hard, catching him across the shoulder, and he staggered back with a grunt, more startled than hurt.

“Who are you?” I scrambled up against the tree, brandishing the branch between us like it would do anything at all against someone his size. “Are you insane? What do you want from me? I swear to God, if you touch me again, I will hit you so much harder than that.”

Something shifted across his face, offended first, then confused , like he couldn’t quite process that I’d struck him. Then it curdled into something colder.

“What year is this?” he said, instead of answering me at all, like my question hadn’t even registered as worth responding to.

“What?” I actually laughed, short and disbelieving. “Are you— is that a joke?”

“Answer me.”

“No. No, you answer me. What are you doing out here? Why are you—” I gestured helplessly at all of him, at the dirt and the nakedness and the sheer wrongness of the whole situation. “What the hell are you doing sleeping here?”

His jaw tightened. Whatever patience he’d been holding onto visibly snapped. “Were you not raised to know who stands before you? If you were not mine, I would kill you where you stand for striking me.”

“Yours?” The word came out somewhere between a scoff and a shriek. “Are you drunk?” I chuckled in realization. “Of course you are, why else would he be here? Like this?” Forcefully darting my eyes away from his exposed frame. “You are one of those banished drunks right, you an absolute lunatic. You can barely even stand straight.”

He looked confused for a moment before speaking again. “Do you not know I am?”

From the look face, he expected a response, however I could only arch a brow in confusion. 

He went silent for a while, as if realization was dawning on him. “Oh, I understand, I must have awakened in one of those ignorant territories. If you must know, I am a King—“

Before he could finish, a wave of unannounced laughter burst through my chest, and it came out edged with hysteria I didn’t have room for right now. “Right. Of course you are. And I’m the Moon Goddess herself, nice to meet you.” 

His brows pulled together, as if he genuinely couldn’t understand why I found that amusing.

“You—”

“You’re drunk,” I cut him off. “Or concussed. Or both. I don’t have time for this.”

He was about to speak when Kyrell's voice tore out from somewhen in the trees.

 “Nyra! Where are you?”

Kyrell. Still out there. Still looking.

Every ounce of fear I had left reorganized itself instantly around that sound instead. I didn’t care anymore who this man thought he was, king or lunatic or something in between. 

The stranger noticed immediately

“What’s wrong?”

Without another thought, I shoved off the tree, ignoring the scream of pain that shot up my leg, and ran.

By the time the trees finally broke open into the familiar stretch of road leading home, the sky had gone from black to a bruised, early gray and my legs were trembling so badly that every step felt like a punishment, but I forced myself forward anyway.

I pushed through the front door, already preparing myself for the questions I knew were coming.

Instead, I found both my parents waiting for me.

My mother's eyes swept over me from where she stood, her mouth pressed into a thin, disappointed line as she shook her head.

“Where have you been?” my father asked, slowly rising from the sofa. “We have been waiting here since midnight, Nyra.”

“I'm sorry.”

The words came out smoothly, worn from years of use.

“I lost track of time. I didn't mean to.”

“You never mean to,” my mother said, already raising her voice, that familiar disappointed tone creeping into every word. “And yet here we are again.”

“I know. I know, and I promise, after today—” I straightened, ignoring how my leg screamed at the shift in weight. “After the classification, none of this is going to matter anymore. Once I get my wolf, you won’t have anything to worry about. I won’t give you a reason to—”

“Enough.” My father's voice snapped through the room. “How many more times do you intend to put this family through the same humiliation?”

“I don’t understand, I know things would change, just give me—

“There's no point.” my mother said again, “You are never going to awaken a wolf no matter how hard you try.

I shook my head. “No. No, you don’t know that. There’s still a chance.”

 “We already know who you are.” My mother’s expression didn’t change. “We've known for a long time. “We’ve only allowed you to keep hoping because we were trying to find another solution and now that we have there’s no use hiding it.” 

The words landed somewhere behind my ribs and just sat there, too big to process all at once.

I shook my head, refusing to accept what they were saying.

She rose from her chair, smoothing down her skirt until she was composed once more.

Then she delivered the decision as calmly as though she were discussing something that had nothing to do with my life.

“You will marry Alpha Corrick of the Thornhart Pack.