Todos los capítulos de Marked by the Lycan King: Capítulo 1 - Capítulo 10

I run until the hall is gone and the pack sounds are gone and there is nothing around me but the forest and the dark, and then I kept running because the forest and the dark are safer than anything that has my name on it right now.My legs know this path without me. I have walked it since I was small the trail that cuts behind the Ashcroft border and drops down to the river where nobody goes at night because the moonlight is strange here, silver and warm, and pack wolves generally find strange things uncomfortable.I have always found it the only place I could breathe.I make it to the bank before my legs gives up. I go down hard on the grass and I sit with my knees against my chest and I wait for the crying to start. It doesn’t. There is nothing in my chest right now. Just the absence of where the bond was enormous and clean and cold.He rejected me. In front of every wolf in that room. In front of the Elders and the families and the twenty-two other unmated wolves who will go home t

My aunt finds out in week three. Not because she is observant, she has never been particularly observant about anything that doesn’t affect her directly but because the laundry maid tells her.I have been careful. Sera has been more careful. But the laundry maid has eyes and an arrangement with my aunt that I was not aware of, and so at dinner on a Tuesday, my aunt says my name in the voice that has meant trouble since I was nine.I go to her. She tells me to sit. I sit. She asks me directly. I could lie. I have considered it. I am not good at lying and she is very good at identifying it, and I’m tired so tired, the kind of tired that goes bone-deep after weeks of keeping every emotion exactly where it won’t be seen so I told her the truth.She does not shout. That has always been the thing about Aunt Mira: she is most frightening when she is quiet. She sits across from me at the kitchen table with her hands folded and her face composed and says: ‘You have shamed this household.’I kn

With Rowan gone to the border and Cole occupied with the pack’s response to the Ashcroft wolves, I had the room and the quiet and the uninterrupted space to think for the first time since the ceremony.I made a list in my head the way my father had taught me, apparently, though I knew nothing about him except that he had existed and then stopped existing when I was nine. Some things you carry without knowing where you got them. The habit of making lists under pressure was one of mine.What I had: myself. The baby ten weeks, invisible still, alive. The silver thing in my skin that I did not understand but that had not hurt me yet. Sera, somewhere in Ashcroft, who had said I’m with you and had meant it. A debt to an Alpha I had known for less than twelve hours, which sat uneasily because debts always cost more than they appear.What I needed: safety for long enough to understand what I was carrying and what was happening to my body. Answers about the moonlight and the shimmer and the sil

I woke Sera at two in the morning. She was awake before I finished knocking, which told me she had not been asleep. ‘My eyes,’ I said. In the mirror. They were glowing.She sat up. She did not look surprised. She looked like someone who had been waiting for a specific thing to be confirmed and was now deciding what to do with the confirmation.‘Tell me exactly what it looked like.’I told her. Silver light, steady, not flickering. The same warmth that came with the moonlight on my skin but concentrated in my eyes. Not frightening, which was perhaps the strangest part. It had felt, looking at my own reflection, like recognition.Sera was quiet for a moment. Then: ‘I need to tell you what I found in my father’s books.’ I sat on the edge of her bed. ‘Tell me.’She had been piecing it together since the river, she said, since the morning she had watched the silver light change my eyes in the water’s reflection. The books her father kept in his study old pack records, histories from before

I was awake before dawn. I lay in the dark and listened to the pack house sleep around me and thought about what I wanted from the day. Not what was going to happen I had no control over that.Not what I was afraid of, I had examined the fear carefully over the last three days and found it smaller than expected, smaller than it had any right to be given what was coming. What I wanted. That was the useful question.I wanted to be looked at and seen clearly. Not what the Ashcroft Pack had decided I was at nine years old. Not what the Lycan King had decided I was at the ceremony. What I actually was, which I was only beginning to understand myself, which made it complicated to demand recognition of it from anyone else. But I was going to demand it anyway. I had decided that.I dressed carefully. Not to impress. To be ready. There is a difference between those two things and I understood it precisely.The Vael delegation arrived mid-morning. Six wolves, two carriages, the kind of arrival