Todos los capítulos de The Lycan king Forbidden Mate: Capítulo 11 - Capítulo 20

The morning after the boots appeared outside my door, I woke to the sound of someone entering my room without knocking.I sat up so fast that my head spun, pressing my back against the headboard and pulling my knees to my chest, ready for whatever new cruelty the day had brought. But the woman who stood in the doorway was not a guard, not a noble, and not anyone I had seen before in the weeks I had been trapped in this frozen castle.She was old.Her hair was silver, pulled back from her face in a braid that hung over one shoulder, and her skin was pale and lined with wrinkles that spoke of centuries rather than decades. Her eyes were grey, like mine, but sharper, brighter, and they looked at me like I was a puzzle she was trying to solve.She did not ask permission to enter. She simply walked inside, closed the door behind her, and stood at the foot of my bed with her arms crossed over her chest."You are the mate," she said.It was not a question. She already knew the answer. She ha

The cloak became part of me after that night.I wore it everywhere, even when I was alone in my room, because the weight of it was comforting and the warmth of it was steady and the smell of it reminded me that someone in this castle wanted me alive.I did not know what to do with that knowledge, but I held onto it anyway, like a drowning man holding onto a piece of driftwood in a stormy sea.The first time I walked through the halls wearing the cloak, the nobles stared.They had always stared, of course. Their golden eyes had followed me from the moment I arrived at this frozen castle, watching and waiting and whispering about the human whore who had somehow caught the king's attention. But this time was different. This time, their stares were not just curious or cruel. They were hungry.I pulled the cloak tighter around my shoulders and kept walking; my head down and my eyes on the floor, the way I had learned to walk when I was a child and my stepmother roamed the halls looking for

I woke to the smell of bread and honey, and for a moment I forgot where I was. The mattress was soft beneath me, and the blankets were warm, and the fire had been relit sometime while I was sleeping, casting orange light across the ceiling in dancing shadows. I could have been anywhere. I could have been back in my mother's cottage, waking to the smell of her cooking, believing that the world was still a place where good things could happen.Then I saw the stone walls, and the frost on the window, and the tray of food sitting on the table where no tray had been the night before.I sat up slowly, my back aching from where I had pressed against the headboard, and my legs stiff from being pulled up against my chest for so many hours. The cloak had fallen off my shoulders sometime in the night, and I pulled it back around me, feeling the warmth of the fur against my neck and the weight of the wool on my back. The boots were still on my feet, and I wiggled my toes inside them, grateful for

 The window was high in the wall, hidden behind a tapestry I had pulled aside, and from this vantage point I could see the courtyard below without being seen. The stone was cold against my palms, and the glass was frosted at the edges, but none of that mattered. Not when Leandro was down there, moving like a storm made flesh, like something ancient and deadly that had no business being so beautiful.He was training with his guards. Ten of them, maybe twelve, all in leather armor with swords strapped to their backs and the kind of grim determination that came from knowing they were about to be humiliated. They circled him like wolves circling a stag, but the stag had claws, and teeth, and three hundred years of practice. The stag had killed more men than they had ever met.One guard lunged, his wooden sword swinging toward Leandro's ribs. Leandro sidestepped like he had all the time in the world, caught the man's arm, and twisted. The crack echoed off the s

I found Elara in the library the morning after Ramiro brought Lady Seraphina to the castle.The library was quiet this morning, nothing like the day I had seen Leandro standing in the shadow of the bookshelf, watching me with those burning golden eyes. Today, the shelves stretched from floor to ceiling in peaceful silence, packed with books so old that their spines were cracked and their pages were yellowed with age. Dust motes floated in the pale light that streamed through the tall windows, and the air smelled of paper and ink and something else, something ancient and forgotten.Elara was sitting in a tall chair by the window, with an open book in her lap, but her grey eyes were not moving across the pages. She was staring out at the snow, watching the flakes fall against the grey sky, and she looked as tired as I felt. The fire in the hearth had burned down to embers, and the room was cold, even colder than my chamber, and I could see my breath hanging in the air like tiny ghosts.S