All Chapters of From Cast-Off Daughter to Lycan Queen: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

“Tell me exactly what you saw.”My voice came out steadier than my hands. I kept two fingers pressed over Julian's pulse where he sat beside me at the cottage table, and I felt every beat of it, quick and hot, trying to outrun the black thread at his jaw.Clarissa sank into the chair across from me. She didn't touch her tea.“It started in the autumn court season,” she said. “Raiden thought it was an old war wound acting up. A shadow under the skin at his wrist, nothing more. By winter it reached his elbow.”“What did the healers say?”“Court fever. Strain.” Her mouth twisted. “They gave him a name for it, so he stopped asking questions. But I watched him, Raven. I watched him every night.”“And?”“And it eased when he was home.” She looked at my hand on Julian's wrist, and something moved across her face, grief and recognition braided together. “I'd sleep with my palm over his heart, and the lines would sink. By morning they'd be gone. Then he'd go back to the palace for a week, and

“Tell me what he looks like,” Julian said, pulling on his coat. “The physician.”Nathan was already at the window. “Gray hair, stooped, black bag. Six palace guards in the yard behind him. He hasn't taken his eyes off this door.”“Healer Osric.” Julian's mouth thinned. “He has served my family for twenty years. He held my hand the first time the marks came.”“Then he knows exactly what they look like,” I said.Julian turned to me. Morning light caught the clean skin at his collar, and I watched him understand what I already had.“He'll see it,” he said quietly. “The moment he touches my wrist, he'll know I haven't taken it.”

“Tell me about the lake.”Aldric said it lightly, settling back against the carriage cushions as the wheels crunched over the gravel. Julian sat across from me, pale and silent. Aldric's knee almost touched mine.“I beg your pardon?” I said.“You were there yesterday, were you not? With Clarissa?” His smile was gentle. “Forgive an old man's curiosity. Clarissa and I were friends once, a long time ago. I would like to know she is well.”The carriage rocked. The bond between Julian and me pulled tight as a bowstring.“Who told you I went to a lake?” I asked.“Why, Damon, I assume. Or one of his guards at the gate.&rdq

“Don't let go of him,” Julian said.“I won't.”My palms were slick with sweat on the King's chest, and the silver light pulsing out of them had begun to flicker. Every time it dimmed, the black lines at his throat crept up another fraction. Every time I pushed harder, something behind my eyes tore.Around us the hall had gone to war without drawing a single blade.Aldric stood at the foot of the dais with his empty hand still raised. The eastern prince had planted himself in the aisle with his arms folded, and twelve silver-clad wolves ringed the room behind him. Damon and Nathan had closed in on our flank. The royal guards stood in the middle of all of it, swords half raised, waiting for someone to tell them whom to obey.“A foreign prince does not command the guard of this crown,” Aldric said evenly.“I do not command it,” said the eastern prince. “I merely observe that your guards are looking at the one man in this room who is not shouting.” He glanced toward the dais. “That would b

 “Sit down before you fall down.”“I am perfectly steady.”“You're gray, Julian.”“A fine color. Very regal.”I pushed him onto the edge of the bed with both hands on his chest, and he went, because his legs gave out about a second after he stopped arguing. The door behind us had been locked from the outside for three hours. Two guards stood in the corridor. Neither would meet my eyes when they brought the tray.It was a good room. That was the insult of it. Tall windows, a hearth, silk curtains in the royal blue, a bed wide enough to sleep four. Aldric had put us in the prince's own suite, because a cage that looks like home is the kind