All Chapters of The Lycan king Forbidden Mate: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

The snow burned my knees through the holes in my trousers, and I had been kneeling for what felt like hours, though time moved differently when you were waiting to die, and I had been waiting to die for as long as I could remember.The chains bit into my wrists, the metal so cold that it felt like fire, colder than the snow beneath me, colder than anything I had ever felt in my twenty-three years of surviving a life that had never wanted me.I did not look up at the Lycan nobles who lined the courtyard of the ice Castle, their golden eyes glowing in the dim light of the frozen torches, their smiles showing teeth that could tear me apart in seconds. I had learned long ago not to give them my tears, because tears were weakness, and weakness was punished, and I had been punished enough for one lifetime."You were always good for nothing," my father's voice echoed in my memory, the last words he had said to me before they put me in the chains and dragged me north, across the frozen border

The room had a fire, and that was the first thing I noticed when the guard shoved me through the doorway and closed the door behind me with a click that echoed in my ears like the sound of a cage locking shut.It was a real fire, with logs burning and flames dancing and heat pouring off it in waves that made my frozen skin ache because I had not been warm in weeks, not since the guards had taken me from my father's house and put me in chains and dragged me north across the frozen border.I heard the lock click and I heard the guard's footsteps retreat down the hallway, and then I was alone in a room that looked nothing like the dungeon I had been expecting.There was a bed, a real bed with blankets and pillows and a wooden frame, and a table with food, bread and cheese and a pitcher of water and a cup, and a wardrobe against the wall that I did not open because I did not trust it, and a window set high in the wall, too high to reach and too small to climb through.But the fire was the

The nobles smiled at me whenever I walked through the halls of the Ice Castle, and that was how I knew they wanted me dead, because I had learned to read smiles a long time ago, back when I was a child who needed to know whether the person approaching him was going to hurt him or just walk past.My stepmother had smiled before she hit me, a wide bright smile that never reached her eyes, and my father had smiled before he locked me in the cellar, with a thin tight smile that said he was doing something he knew was wrong but did not care enough to stop.The guards had smiled before they put me in chains. They were cold empty smiles that said I was nothing to them, just a job, and a body to be moved from one place to another.A smile was a weapon in this world, and the nobles of the Ice Castle had the sharpest smiles I had ever seen, smiles that cut like knives and left wounds that did not bleed but still hurt just as much.They watched me from doorways and from corners and from the edge