All Chapters of THE LYCAN KING'S STAR MAID: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

POV: KiraI smell the blood before I see him.The copper stench hits me like a fist as I crash through the last stand of ferns. My bare feet slap the wet earth of the Woods hard enough to sting. “Bridget’s voice still claws at the back of my skull” “Fetch the herbs before moonrise or sleep outside again, you useless girl.” but the smell cuts through every order she has ever screamed at me. I skid to a stop at the mouth of the old cave, heart slamming against my ribs so hard I feel it in my throat.“A body.”Big. Broken. Face-down in the dirt just inside the shadows. Blood all around him. Every survival instinct I have left after three years under Bridget’s roof screams at me to turn around, pretend the darkness swallowed whatever is lying there, and keep moving toward the bitter-root patch she demanded. I know the cost of delay in the old scars on the backs of my legs. “Bridget never forgets a late return.” Yet my legs carry me forward of their own accord. The basket slips fr

POV: StefanThe howls were closer. Closer than they had any right to be.That was the last clear thing I registered before the poison dragged me under again. Her scent still clung to the air around my face. clean, sharp, alive and cutting through the copper stink of my own blood like a blade. I barely saw her features in the dark. Only the outline of her. the quick desperate movements of her hands, the way she pressed cloth against the wound as if sheer will could force life back into me. I will never forget that scent. Not if I live another hundred years. Not if the poison finishes what it started.Then the howls broke into the clearing in a rush of sound and fury.Boots. Voices. The heavy, familiar cadence of my own warriors. Someone cursed low and vicious when they found me half-dead on the stone. Hands lifted my body with rough care. I tried to speak, to force the words about the girl past my teeth, but the poison had already locked my throat. The last thing I carried into the

POV: KiraThe messenger keeps the same steady pace all the way to the outer wall. He never looks back to check whether I am still following. He already knows I have nowhere else to go. The path behind us is closed by a signed paper and counted coin.I match it without speaking. My bundle of clothes knocks against my hip with every step. The path changes from dirt to packed gravel, then to smooth stone that feels too clean under my thin soles. Ahead the palace rises in layers of gray stone and black iron, higher than any building I have ever stood beneath. Towers catch the late light and throw it back in hard glints that hurt the eyes. The scale of it makes the cottage feel like a child’s toy left behind in the dirt.We reach the first gate just as the sun begins to drop. Two guards in dark uniforms stop us with crossed spears. The messenger produces a sealed strip of parchment. One guard reads it, glances at me once, and nods. The spears lift. We pass through.The outer courtyard i

POV: Kira The footsteps round the corner without slowing. Each one lands with the kind of certainty that does not ask permission.A man stops at the mouth of the passage. Tall. Broad-shouldered. Dressed in black that makes Veron’s clothes look ordinary. His presence fills the narrow space the way cold fills a room when a door is left open in winter. It presses against the skin. Gold eyes sweep the scene once—Veron’s hand still near my waist, my back to the stone, the cloth in my fist—and something in the air changes so completely that even I, with no lycan blood, feel the shift like a drop in temperature.Veron straightens. The easy charm slides back into place like a practiced mask that has covered worse moments than this.“Brother. Perfect timing. I was just—”“Step away from her.”The words are quiet enough to be almost gentle. They carry farther than any shout I have heard in this palace.Veron does not move immediately. His fingers flex once against the stone. Then he drops his

POV: Stefan The scent is still there when I wake, stronger than it has any right to be. It clings to the binding she tied at dusk, faint but unmistakable, threaded through the linen and the residual heat of her hands like a brand I cannot wash away. I lie still in the dark for a long moment and breathe it in the way a drowning man breathes air after too long under. Three years of searching every border report, every traveler’s account, every thin rumor of a human girl who vanished into the woods on the night I nearly died, and the trail always ended in the same silence. Now the source of that silence sleeps fewer than twenty paces from my door, under my own roof, wearing my colors. I rise before the upper-wing bell. The shoulder pulls when I move, a dull, persistent reminder that the poison never fully left the bone or the memory. I dress without calling for assistance. The less the household sees of the binding, the less they speculate about weakness. Speculation is a currency I pre