All Chapters of Marked by the Lycan King: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

The ceremonial hall floor has to be perfect by dawn. I know this because Aunt Mira has told me four times since midnight, each time louder than the last, as if volume is what I’m missing.The brush in my hand is raw from two hours of scrubbing. My knees ache from the stone. Above me, the banners of the Ashcroft Pack hang from iron rings the silver wolf on black, gleaming and proud and I’m on the ground beneath them, which feels about right.Tomorrow is the Mating Ceremony. I’ve been thinking about it for six months. Longer, if I’m honest. Every unmated wolf in the pack who has reached their twenty-first year will gather at dawn in this very hall.The Moon Goddess will do what she does. The bonds will pull. Mates will find each other.I let myself imagine it for exactly three seconds. A pull in my chest. A face I finally get to keep. Someone who chooses me because the universe decided I was worth choosing, and there is nothing my aunt or uncle or this pack can do about it because the M

Sera finds me by the river. She always finds me by the river. She says it’s because she knows that’s where I go when things are bad, and things have been visibly bad for three weeks, so she has been checking the river regularly.I believe this. She is a Beta’s daughter and she has her father’s instincts: she knows where the pack’s pressure points are, and I have always been one of them.She sits beside me without asking. She does not speak for a while, which is one of the things I love most about her that she understands silence as a form of presence. She has never needed to fill quiet with noise. She just sits with me in it, and the sitting is enough.Then: ‘Tell me.’I have been trying to decide how to say it for three days. I have rehearsed sentences. None of them work. So, I say: ‘I’m pregnant.’Sera goes very still.I watch the emotions cross her face in order: shock, confusion, rapid calculation, and then something hot and protective that I recognize as fury, though she is holdi

I ran. I can’t shift, my wolf is exhausted and my body is carrying something I will not risk so I run on human legs through the dark and the crashing behind me gets closer and I thought with the part of my brain that is still functional: so, this is how it ends. Cast out of my pack and eaten by rogues before the sun comes up. Classic.I trip on a root. I go down hard, hands out, and the ground comes up fast and I think: the baby. I twist at the last second, take it on my hip and shoulder, and land badly but not catastrophically. I scramble to get up.The rogues break from the trees. Three of them, shifted, red-eyed, the kind of wolves that have been outside pack law long enough to forget they were ever inside it. They move with the particular looseness of things that have stopped caring about consequences. I back up against a tree. My hip is screaming. My hands are bleeding. I have no wolf, no pack, no weapon, and nowhere left to run.Something then happens.I don’t understand it. The