Chapter 174

The silence that followed Lucian’s approach was more deafening than the crashing sounds echoing from the guest wing.

He moved unhurried, the temperature around him dropping until the moisture from Clara’s breath hung.

Clara clutched the tethering book to her chest, the leather biting into her palms. She had seen Lucian in many states—cold, calculating, even vulnerable in the rare moments with Isabella—but she had never seen him like this.

He stopped ten paces from her. He didn’t look at Marcus, who had straightened from the wall. Lucian’s eyes, darker than a winter midnight, were locked on the iron-reinforced door at the end of the hall.

"Clara," Lucian voice was vibrating with a lethal resonance that made the stone floor beneath their feet react.

"Explain why the stench of a cur is polluting my home."

"Lucian, wait," Clara stepped forward, her voice surprisingly steady despite the static of his aura. "He’s not in control."

Lucian finally shifted his gaze to her. "He’s not in control?" He repeated, more of a question than a statement.

His eyes moving towards the door while he took a step, his shadow stretching long toward the guest wing door.

"Lucian, if you cross that threshold, you break the stabilization spell!" Clara’s voice rose to a rare note of her composure.

She threw her arm out, the emerald light of her magic lashing out like a whip to bar his path, the Sovereign didn’t even slow down but his sharp gaze was Eno for Clara to deflect her magic out of his path beg it did any work.

To Lucian, Clara’s warnings were white noise. His mind was elsewhere. It was back in the master suite, where he had draped the girl in his pile of cloths.

Earlier, Through the bond, he had felt how her stomach turn away from the aggressive pheromones drifting through the vents and for that, there was only one sentence.

He reached the door. The iron-reinforced wood was bulging, the silver-etched runes Clara had placed there screaming and smoking as they tried to hold back the pressure from within.

Lucian reach for the handle and the atmosphere changed. Stepping into the East Wing was like submerged into a vat of stagnant, heated copper. The temperature in the hallway had been freezing, but inside this room, the air was a feverish, humid weight.

It was thick with the scent of pine needles charred by lightning and the metallic tang of sweat. It was the smell of the South—raw, unrefined, and currently, utterly feral.

Sound itself seemed distorted. The air was so saturated with Alaric’s phenomenon that the silence was deafening, broken only by a sound that wasn’t quite a growl and wasn’t quite a breath.

Lucian stepped into the center of the room and the room was a graveyard of Northern elegance, the curtains, once a deep navy, had been shredded into ribbons.

The fine silk wallpaper was gone, a fancy wardrobe had been overturned and the air hummed with Clara’s restraint spells.

In the center of the carnage, Alaric was no longer a boy. He was crouched atop the remains of the four-poster bed, the mattress torn open and the feathers swirling around him in a macabre dance. He was caught in a mid-shift agony that would have killed a lesser shifter.

His spine was arched so sharply it looked ready to snap, fur sprouting in jagged patches along his shoulder blades. His fingernails had been replaced by talons that were currently buried deep into the wood of the bedframe.

Alaric’s head snapped up. His face was a mask of primal suffering. His jaw was unhinged, strings of saliva dripping from teeth that had elongated into ivory needles.

But it was his eyes that fixed Lucian in place, two burning, molten pits of gold that had completely lost the white of the sclera.

The moment Alaric’s gaze locked onto Lucian, the room’s pressure doubled. To a wolf in a rut, a vampire of Lucian’s caliber wasn’t just a King; he was a rival Alpha standing between him and his destiny.

A vibrating roar tore itself from Alaric’s throat. Lucian stood perfectly still. He didn’t shift into a fighting stance.

He didn’t draw a weapon. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his black silk shirt stark against the carnage of the room.

His eyes were twin voids, reflecting nothing but a cold, clinical disgust. "This is pathetic," Lucian said under his voice just as Alaric lunged.

He moved with a speed that would have been a blur to human eyes—a mass of heat, fur, and rage. He cleared the distance in a single bound, his claws aimed directly for Lucian’s throat.

Lucian didn’t flinch. At the very last microsecond, his hand moved and caught Alaric by the throat mid-air.

The force of the impact cracked the stone tiles beneath Lucian’s boots but the Sovereign didn’t move an inch.

He held the mid-shift Alpha-heir at arm’s length, his fingers sinking into the heated flesh of Alaric’s neck.

Alaric thrashed, his claws frantically shredding the sleeves of Lucian’s shirt, drawing thin lines of red across the vampire’s forearms.

He was a whirlwind of mindless violence, his teeth snapping inches from Lucian’s face, his body radiating a heat so intense.

Lucian’s grip tightened, looking at the boy, this creature with the detached boredom of a god deciding whether or not to crush an insect.

The blood trickling down Lucian’s forearms from Alaric’s claws didn’t even elicit a wince; it was merely an untidy detail in a room already defined by its filth.

Then, the air behind him shifted. Clara walk through the threshold, the iron-bound book clutched to her chest like a heart she was trying to keep from stopping.

The moment she stepped into the humid, copper-thick atmosphere of the room, the dynamic shifted with the violence of a chemical explosion.

Alari underwent a physical transformation. The thrashing against Lucian’s hand ceased instantly. The feral, chaotic energy that had been directed at the Sovereign simply evaporated, replaced by a singular focus.

Alaric’s head snapped toward Clara with such force the vertebrae in his neck audibly popped. The molten gold of his eyes flared, the pupils dilating until were thin.

A sound emerged from Alaric’s chest. It wasn’t the roar of a hunter anymore. It was a high, keening whine, a sound of such desperate, agonizing recognition that it made the emerald runes on the walls flare and die.

Lucian felt the change. He felt the way the body in his hand suddenly went from a weapon to a magnetic needle, pulling with a gravitational force toward the witch standing in the doorway.

Alaric’s claws, which had been digging into Lucian’s arms, retracted, his fingers reaching out toward Clara in a trembling, clawed gesture of supplication.

"Lucian, let him go," Clara whispered, but her voice lacked its usual frost. She was pale, her white eyes wide as she took in the scene.

Clara took a step forward, her hand rising instinctively. "Alaric..."

The moment she spoke his name, Alaric’s wolf surged. His body bucked against Lucian’s grip, not to attack, but to get to her.

Lucian’s eyes narrowed, his gaze darting between the two. He could see it, the way Alaric’s heat was no longer radiating outward in a chaotic burst, but was funneling toward Clara.

The boy’s internal temperature spiked again but Lucain grip remained unyielding around the boy’s throat, hus gaze moving from the trembling hand of the wolf to the pale, shaken face of the High Witch.

"So," Lucian’s voice dropped into a dark, silk-soft register that was more terrifying than a shout. "It truly is you."

Clara didn’t answer. She couldn’t. "He wasn’t lying," Lucian continued, his eyes boring into hers. "The mate bond."

He looked back at Alaric, who was now whimpering, his golden eyes leaking tears of raw heat as he reached for the witch.

"Fix your mate, Clara," Lucian commanded, his tone shifting from observation to lethal ultimatum. "Cradle him, bury him, or bind him—I do not care which. But if he is not silent, if his scent does not stop polluting the halls Isabella walks in within the next minute, I will do it for you. And I promise you, my solution will involve a silver blade and a shallow grave."

Lucian’s fingers twitched, ready to snap the bone. "Choose. Now."

Clara’s white eyes flickered with a brief spark of her usual defiance, but it was quickly swallowed by the sheer gravity of the reasoning.

She moved cautiously, her silk robes whispering over the feathers and debris. Each step toward them felt like walking into a furnace.

As she reached the side of the Sovereign and the wolf, the air between them was thick enough to taste.

Lucian’s gaze didn’t leave her face. He waited until she was close enough to feel the heat radiating off Alaric’s skin, close enough that her shadow merged with theirs.

"Don’t let me regret this," Lucian hissed and opened his hand while stepping back.

The moment the pressure left Alaric’s throat, the boy didn’t even catch his breath. Driven by instinct he launched himself at Clara.