Lyra Kade.
The name shouldn’t have had that kind of power after four years.
It shouldn’t have been able to hollow me out in the middle of a room full of warriors, in front of a king, in front of my father, and leave me standing there with nothing but the wreckage of a past I had buried so deep I’d almost convinced myself it was dead.
Almost…or that was what I thought but as i stood there, I didn’t know what to believe because the shock that went through me all in that moment was something I didn’t want to ever experience again.
“Lyra.” Darius’s voice was low, careful, like he was talking someone off a ledge.
“Who is Kade?” I still couldn’t look at him.
I couldn’t look at anything except my father’s face, that unbearable look of satisfaction he’d been saving up all evening, waiting for exactly this moment.
He’d known.
He had known this whole time, and he’d let Darius stand there threatening him, let me stand there feeling brave, let us both believe we had the upper hand, all so he could pull the floor out from under me at the exact moment it would hurt the most.
“You knew,” I said, and my voice was steadier than I deserved.
“You’ve always known.” “Of course I knew.” He tucked his hands behind his back, comfortable, almost leisurely.
“Did you honestly think something like that could happen in my pack without my knowledge?
A bond like that?
With a rogue?” Rogue.
That word still landed like a slap.
“Lyra.” Darius moved into my peripheral vision, trying to pull my attention toward him, and I finally made myself turn.
The look on his face was worse than anger.
Anger I could have worked with, anger I could have defended against.
This was worse, it was hurt already blooming behind the fury, and the sight of it split something open inside my chest that I wasn’t sure I knew how to close again.
“Talk to me, right now!” “Not here.” I managed to hold his gaze.
“Please, Darius, not here, not in front of him.” “I’d say here is precisely the right place,” my father said pleasantly.
“Transparency is what the Council will be expecting, after all.” “Shut up.” The words came out of me with so much cold quiet behind them that even my father blinked, and I didn’t wait to see what he did next.
I turned back to Darius, and I kept my voice as level as I could manage with my pulse hammering so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
“It’s not what you think but I am asking you to let me explain it properly, without an audience.” Something moved across his face, something tight and unreadable, and then he turned to look at my father with an expression that made several warriors instinctively take a step back.
“You have exactly twenty-four hours to withdraw that petition,” he said, each word deliberate, unhurried, and twice as dangerous for it.
“Not because you’ve won anything and not because I’m afraid of your Council but because I choose to extend you the courtesy of resolution before I end every agreement you have in this kingdom by morning.” He paused.
“Take your men and get out of my pack.” My father opened his mouth, and Darius simply looked at him, and whatever my father had been about to say, he thought better of it.
He left.
The warriors filed out after him, and the great hall emptied in under a minute, and when the doors closed, the silence that followed was so absolute that I could hear the candles guttering in their brackets along the wall.
Darius didn’t speak nor did he move.
He just stood with his back to me for a long moment, hands loose at his sides, the tension in his shoulders visible even beneath his jacket.
I spoke first because waiting felt like dying.
“His name is Kade Ashmore.
He was a rogue who came through our territory four years ago.” I wrapped my arms around myself, not for warmth, just to have something to hold because I wasn’t sure if i would still be able to stand still with the shock that was running through me at that moment.
“I was nineteen.
I’d just been passed over for a rank advancement my father had promised me, and I was angry, and Kade was…” I stopped, searching for honest words that wouldn’t sound like excuses.
“He was kind to me, he saw me when no one else in that pack was bothering to.” Darius still hadn’t turned around.
“We spent three weeks together and then one night, the bond just…” I exhaled.
“It just happened, neither of us planned it.
You know how it works, you can’t always stop it.” “I know how it works,” he said quietly.
“My father found out and had him driven out of the territory.
Not killed, but close enough that the difference barely mattered and then he called the whole thing a mistake, an aberration, a foolish girl getting turned by a rogue, and I was so ashamed and so angry and so…” My voice wavered and I steadied it.
“I buried it.
I’ve spent four years burying it, I don’t even know where Kade is now.
I don’t know if he’s alive.” Darius turned then, finally, and I wished with everything I had that I’d been prepared for the look on his face.
Not anger, not even the hurt I’d already seen…
It was just something exhausted and careful and painfully honest.
“Is the bond complete?” I forced myself to hold his gaze.
“It was never formally completed, there was no ceremony and no witnesses.
It was a partial bond.
Instinctive, not…” I searched for the right word.
“Not sealed.” “But it exists.” “It exists.” He crossed the distance between us slowly, stopped close enough that I had to tilt my head back to hold his eyes, and for a moment he just looked at me the way he sometimes did, like he was reading something written underneath my skin.
I didn’t know if he could see the truth in my eyes by just standing there, but if he did, I desperately wanted him to know that I was telling the truth.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” The question was quiet, there was no accusation in it, which was somehow worse than if there had been.
I didn’t even know what to say at that moment because anything I said next would just feel like I was telling lies and I didn’t want him to see me like that.
“Because I was terrified of what you’d do.” I said it plainly because I was done calculating how much honesty was safe tonight.
“Not to me but to him and I didn’t know if what I felt for you was enough to offset…” I paused.
“I didn’t want you to think I was using you to outrun something unresolved.
Its easy at this point to accuse me because of the situation we are currently in but please Darius, i need you to believe me.” “And were you?” The question hit me somewhere unguarded, and the honest answer took a moment to surface.
Who knew how hard it was especially when you were faced with telling the truth to someone you cared about.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“I thought I’d resolved it.
I thought it was gone and then you said his name and it felt like…” I pressed my fingers against my sternum, searching for words that fit.
“It felt like uncovering a bruise I didn’t know was still there.” His expression shifted, just slightly, something unreadable moving through it before he stepped back.
“I need a night,” he said simply.
“Not to punish you, not because I’m walking away but because I need to think without my wolf making the decisions.” I nodded, because what else could I do?
What else did I deserve?
“Darius.” I stopped him before he’d taken more than two steps.
“I meant what I said to my father.
What happened with you, that night at the bar, that was my choice.
Whatever else is complicated, that part wasn’t, please believe me.” He paused, didn’t turn, and I watched the line of his back hold still for a long moment before he said, “I know.” He walked out, and the silence closed over the space where he’d been, and I stood there in the middle of the empty hall wondering whether I had just lost the one person who had made me feel like myself since everything fell apart.
My phone buzzed in my pocket even as I glanced at the screen and realized it was from an unknown number with just one message.
I heard you found a king, we need to talk before this goes any further.
— K The floor tilted beneath me, and all the air left the room at once.
Kade was alive and somehow, impossibly, he already knew about Darius.