Chapter 5: The Women Who Hate Her

I hadn’t moved from the spot where I’d backed myself against the wall.

“I don’t understand what you want from me,”

I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt, which was the only small victory I had left that night.

“I don’t want anything from you.”

Lucas hadn’t moved either, keeping the width of the room between us like he understood, without being told, that closing that distance would break whatever thin thread of composure I had left.

“You’re under my protection now. That’s what matters. No one in this palace will touch you.”

“Protection.”

I almost laughed.

“You dragged me out of a throne room in front of hundreds of people who now think I’m your whatever this is. That’s not protection. That’s a target on my back.”

Something flickered across his face, there and gone, like he hadn’t considered it from that angle. He opened his mouth to answer.

The door slammed open before he could. It was one of the guards, he whispered to him, and he left in a hurry.

Two women swept in like they owned the room, and something in the way they looked told me they weren’t strangers. The first was tall, dark-haired, dressed in deep red that looked expensive even by palace standards. The second was smaller, sharper-featured, with the kind of smile that didn’t reach anywhere near her eyes.

“So it’s true.”

The tall one said. Her gaze swept over me like I was something tracked in on someone’s boot.

“The human. Lucas actually claimed a human.”

“We heard the whole court is talking about it.”

The smaller one Mirella, I would learn tilted her head, studying me with open contempt.

“Three years. Three years we waited for him to look at any of us the way he apparently looked at you, and this is what finally gets? A slave from some starving human kingdom?”

Seraphina’s eyes hadn’t left me.

“What exactly do you think you have that the rest of us don’t?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t think there was a version of an answer that wouldn’t make this worse.

That silence seemed to be exactly the wrong choice.

Seraphina crossed the room faster than I could track, and her hand caught my hair before I even registered she’d moved, wrenching my head back hard enough that pain shot down my neck. I heard myself cry out, more from shock than the pain itself, and I grabbed at her wrist, trying to pull free, but she was werewolf-strong and I was nothing against that, nothing at all.

“Whatever spell you think you’ve put on him.”

She hissed.

“It ends now.”

Mirella grabbed my arm from the other side, nails digging in hard enough to draw blood, and between the two of them I couldn’t get any leverage, couldn’t do anything but twist and struggle and feel exactly how outmatched I was. I’d fought a beast in the arena with nothing but a broken chain and desperation. I had neither of those things left now just two women who wanted to hurt me and every physical advantage required to do it.

“Lucas”

I got out, before Seraphina’s grip on my hair yanked the rest of the word out of my throat.

He was already moving, I found out later, already crossing the room with murder in his eyes but the door opened again before he reached us, and Damon slid through it like he’d been waiting just outside for exactly this moment.

“Ladies,”

Damon said, spreading his hands with that easy, dangerous charm of his.

“As entertaining as this is, I think you’ve made your point.”

Seraphina let go of my hair as it had suddenly burned her. Mirella released my arm a beat slower, with one last vicious little twist that left four crescent marks in my skin.

“This isn’t your business, Damon,” Seraphina snapped.

“No,”

He agreed,

“But it will be a very inconvenient story for you both if my brother walks in here and finds you’ve bled his mate onto the floor.”

That word, mate hit me somewhere I didn’t have time to examine, because Seraphina and Mirella were already retreating, throwing one last look of pure hatred my way before slipping out the door they’d come through.

Which left me alone with Damon.

He looked me over, unhurried, the way you’d examine something you were deciding whether to buy.

“You’re bleeding,”

He said, almost gently, nodding toward my arm.

I pulled my sleeve down over the marks, not answering.

“You should thank me.”

He stepped closer, and every instinct in my body told me this wasn’t rescue, this was a different kind of danger wearing a friendlier face.

“They would have done far worse if I hadn’t come in when I did.”

“Thank you,”

I said, flat, because it seemed like the fastest way through this conversation.

“Lucas won’t protect you, you know.”

Damon’s voice dropped, almost confiding, like we were sharing a secret.

“Whatever the wolf thinks it wants, my brother doesn’t care about anything the way he cares about the throne. You’re a curiosity to him right now. After tonight you’ll be dead and forgotten no human survives a night with my brother.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I could offer you something better.”

He was close now, close enough that I had to fight not to step back, not to show him how much his nearness frightened me.

“Real protection. Someone who’d actually want you here, not because some ancient bond told him to, but because I chose you myself.”

“And what would that cost me?”

His smile widened, and I understood, with total clarity, exactly what price he meant before he said a single word of it.

“Give me your first time and I'll take you far away from here, somewhere my brother will never see you again, if you refuse you'll be no different from the other seven women he spent a night with and tore their bodies apart in his bed before the morning, nothing makes you special.”

“No,”

I said, before he could finish.

“You haven’t even heard”

“I said no.”

I made myself meet his eyes, even though my heart was slamming against my ribs hard enough that I was certain he could hear it.

“Whatever you’re offering, I don’t want it, I belong only to Lucas.”

Something shifted in his expression the charm draining away fast, replaced by something colder, angrier, a man unused to being refused anything. His hand closed around my wrist, harder than I expected, dragging me a step closer.

“You don’t understand how this works,”

he said, low.

“You’re new here. You don’t say no to me.”

I twisted against his grip, panic finally breaking through whatever composure I’d been holding onto all night, and I felt real fear then, sharper than anything the beast in the arena had made me feel, because this wasn’t a monster with claws and no intentions beyond hunger. This was a man who knew exactly what he wanted and had decided my refusal didn’t matter.

Somewhere across the palace, in a corridor I couldn’t see, I felt something shift not in me, but through me, like a current running down a wire I hadn’t known existed. I would understand later what that meant. In that moment, I only knew that the air in the room seemed to change a half-second before the door exploded off its hinges.

Lucas didn’t walk in.

He arrived the way a storm arrives sudden, absolute, filling every corner of the room with a fury that made Damon’s grip on my wrist go slack out of pure instinct.

And then he roared.

It wasn’t a human sound. It tore out of him raw and enormous, shaking the walls, rattling the glass in the windows, a sound that carried through stone and corridor and courtyard until every soul in that palace stopped whatever they were doing and understood, without needing to be told, that the Crown Prince of Veyron had not made a sound like that in years.