All Chapters of Bound To The Cursed Lycan : Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

125 Chapters

101: HAPPY TRAIL

XAHEN.She was far away.The bond told me that before I was fully upright. A faint pull in my chest pointing well past the borders of the immediate territory. She'd put real distance between us.Nala's doing. I was certain of it.I'd been walking for close to an hour. Base and Hale had attached themselves to my side somewhere along the way without being invited. Two actual guards flanked me, which I had arranged. I had a use for them when we arrived. Base and Hale I had no use for and they were coming anyway, which was a thing they did and a thing I had no energy to address today.Twelve hours had passed since I'd opened my eyes on the floor of Nala's cabin.The warmth had hit me before anything else did. Her smell, the weight of her pressed into my side, the bond sitting between us in a way it hadn't in longer than I was going to think about. I hadn't known anything was wrong yet. Every part of me was settled in a way I hadn't been in over a century and I hadn't known why yet and tho

102: OUT OF HIS WAY

XAHEN.Nala came down the cabin steps with one finger already raised."Xahen." Her voice had that particular edge it got when she thought she was about to prevent something. "Don't."I studied her for a moment."I've given you much leave," I said, "and just as much respect." I let that sit. "But you won't stand in my way this time."Nala looked at me without blinking. "Are you going to kill her?"Theodosa's face came back to me before I could stop it. The way she'd looked when I had my hands around her throat. The fear on her face, open and real and directed entirely at me.I pushed it away. I hated that it had come at all.I tilted my head. "And if I did?"I stepped closer to her. "She's been in your custody for some time and you've given me nothing. You've been useless to me on her account." I held her gaze. "Fault me not for taking matters into my own hands."I moved to walk past her.Nala put her hands up.I slapped them out of my way.Her hands came back up instantly, faster this

103: ALLEGED PRINCESS OF DUSKMIRE

THEODOSA.My heart was pounding so hard I thought the shape of my chest was changing with it.I had no idea what had happened outside. Hale had done something to Nala. That was all I knew. Was she even okay? I looked between Xahen and the front door.There was no one coming to save me.Xahen bent down and picked up the butter knife. He twirled it in his grip, staring at it. Then his eyes lifted to me.He looked at my wrist first, pinned above my head. Then down to my face. His eyes trailed over my freckles the way he always did, cataloguing them. Then his gaze shifted to my neck and stayed there.His eyes moved across my throat slowly, and I realized he was looking for something.I thought about this morning. Him waking up and finding me underneath him and trying to kill me in the next breath. And I wondered if that was what he was thinking about right now.He said nothing yet though. His eyes moved away. He fisted the knife and lowered it to his side before turning around. Then

104: THE WHYS

THEODOSA.I took a second to think.I could be honest about this one. I could tell him about my gift and hope he didn't connect it to anything else. He could take it at face value, move on, and not connect the dots to his wolf. Xahen titled his head with impatience.That was all he did, and somehow that was enough to push me right to the edge of everything I was trying to hold together. I needed to answer him. If I didn't answer him he was going to do something to jarr me out of my composure. And once that shattered, I wouldn't be able to lie my way through anything else tonight.I looked at the floor."I can bond with animals," I said.I moistened my lips. The weight of all his attention on me had been sitting on my skin for so long it was starting to feel like something physical. "I can talk to them," I added. "And sometimes understand them."Silence.I forced myself to look up.He was watching me. Quietly, his eyes on my face, giving me nothing back.Then he asked, so evenly it

105: FIFTY YEARS AGO

XAHEN.Pain.That was everything. That was all there was.It moved through me in waves that never finished. My flesh would begin to close and the roots would find the new skin and start again. Over and over. Patient. Relentless. My body regenerating just fast enough to give them something fresh to work with.I had no idea how long I'd been here.Then I did.That was worse.I groaned. The sound went nowhere. The soil around me swallowed it and gave nothing back. I groaned and grunted and when the roots found something deep enough, I bellowed. And when the bellowing wasn't enough I screamed. Long and raw and completely without dignity, because dignity belonged to creatures who were allowed to die when dying was warranted, and I was not one of those.I screamed her name sometimes.Not on purpose. It just came out of me the way everything came out in that place, without permission, without warning, dragged up from somewhere I didn't have control over anymore. Luna. The name tore through m

106: LEAD THE WAY

THEODOSA.There was nothing but darkness.No light. No sound. No up, no down. Just black, thick and endless, and me floating somewhere inside it like I didn't exist at all.It was the most disorienting thing I'd ever felt.I couldn't tell if my eyes were open or closed. Or if I was even breathing. For one terrifying second, I wondered if I was dead.Then I heard something faintly. Like it was faraway.Getting closer with every passing second, like someone turning up the volume on the world.Nala.I couldn't make out the words yet, just the shape of her voice, familiar enough to anchor me to something.I blinked. Or I thought I did. But nothing changed.I tried again, and again, rapidly and uselessly, my body doing something my eyes weren't catching up to.Slowly, the voices sharpened."––Nala, calm down––"That was clear enough to land.My vision cracked open into a blur, gray and formless, and I blinked through it until shapes started bleeding into focus. A ceiling first. Massive and

107: WAIT

THEODOSA.I was trying very hard not to look down.Every time I did, my stomach dropped out from under me and I had to remind myself that Base knew what he was doing and the invisible floor under my feet was solid and I was not going to fall. The reminders were working about sixty percent of the time.I had both hands fisted in the back of Base's shirt. I was not apologizing for that.We were hovering near the treeline where Xahen's forest began, several feet off the ground, and the four of us had already circled the entire perimeter of the palace. No wolf. No blood. No destruction. No guards or maids or staff lingering anywhere outside, which meant whatever warning had gone out had been listened to, or at least listened to enough. The grounds were empty and quiet and the wolf was nowhere in the palace perimeter at all.Nala had decided we might as well check where I thought he might be.So here we were."Alright," Base said. "We're here." He glanced back at me and caught my expression

108: RESPECTFULLY

THEODOSA.The forest was quiet.Not the quiet I remembered from the other times I'd been inside it. No running. No dark. No wolf hunting me through the trees.Just this.I was sitting on a root with my back against a tree trunk and Xahen's wolf was lying in front of me with its head between its paws, watching my face. It had been doing that for a while now. I had stopped being unsettled by it somewhere around the third minute.It was so big.I knew that already but knowing it and sitting three feet from it in actual daylight were completely different things. Its head alone, resting on the ground, came up past my knee.And it was looking at me like I was the most interesting thing it had encountered in some time.I reached out and put my hand on its head.It closed its eyes.The purr started immediately. That deep chest rumble that had no business coming out of something that could end a person without particularly trying. I scratched behind its ear. It pressed into my hand. The rumble

109: WHAT COMES NEXT

XAHEN.I balanced my weight on the thick branch and stared down at my prey.The bear hadn't noticed me.It was too focused on the triple-horned deer pinned beneath it to notice much of anything. The northern sectors magic fashioned it with six limbs, four of them front-facing, all of them currently doing the work of tearing the poor thing apart.The deer was still alive. Its eyes were already going dim. The deer knew it was over even if its body hadn't caught up yet.The bear ate without looking up once, tearing into its stomach and feasting, completely oblivious to everything above it.I was ready to attack.But I didn't. Yet.My lip curled in annoyance.Not because of the bear. The bear was the least of my concerns right now.It was my shadows.A small spark of nervousness ran through my chest at the thought of them and I resented the hell out of it. I'd had Theodosa pinned to that cabin wall, my hands around her throat, and my shadows had just vanished on me. Mid-command. Like they

110: STUPIDLY INCESSANT MATE BOND

XAHEN.Every inch of me was lined with tension as I made my way through the palace hallways toward the council room.I pushed the grand doors open and all chatter around the table ceased immediately.All seven of them looked up at me at once.On any other day I wouldn't have been so peeved by it. Today my patience was especially nonexistent."Am I some sort of circus freak?" I asked. "Do I have a red nose? Paint all over my body?"Their gazes fell away from me as they mumbled amongst themselves, sensing the aggression behind the question well enough not to push it.I strode to my chair at the head of the table, pulled it out and slumped down into it."What's the status on Binny Fane?"Draven cleared his throat. "There's still been no word. Neither have we gotten even the slightest communication from the men we sent out." He glanced across the table before looking back to me. "None of our ships have returned either. Partie and Afnie haven't gotten a whiff of anything. It's almost like.

...

8 9 10 11 12 13

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP