In a matter of seconds, he’s here.
Draven.
Completely human. Completely naked. On the floor at my feet.
Chapter 3
Draven
My head is spinning.
The shift. The rage. The lycan.
It shouldn’t have happened. What the hell was that?
I remember it in bits and pieces, before the beast shoved me away and locked me inside my own mind.
I’ve never turned into a lycan before. I thought I couldn’t shift fully. I thought I was something else — something in-between. A king with wings. Magic. Power. Strength.
But not that.
I was ten when the wings came. The scales. The flame under my skin. Everyone said it was my dragon blood awakening, what I inherited from my father.
And when I didn’t shift fully at sixteen like other shifters, they said I just didn’t have a wolf, the part of me that I could have inherited from my mother. And I didn’t have a dragon,either. Just the wings, the strength and the magic. The lycan part was never even considered. Too distant in lineage to rise.
I was more than powerful enough to win all challenges and take my throne, though. The first Alpha King without a shifted form.
But if I have a lycan, why did it come forward just now? Eighteen years later than it should have? I should have shifted completely at ten. That’s when lycans come forward. Earlier than any other shifter. They’re the most impatient ones and the quickest to anger.
A deep pain settles inside me, wrapping around my heart like a vine made of thorns. It feels like someone took a blade made of fire and drove it straight through my chest — then twisted. Over and over. The bond isn’t gone. It’s still there, shredded and bleeding. Torn from the inside out. Every breath feels like inhaling acid. My magic is scattered, panicked, like it doesn’t know where to go. My soul claws at my insides, trying to reach for her end of the bond. But it finds nothing. The emptiness is maddening. Louder than pain. A silence so complete it roars.
I look down.
A bruise blooms at the center of my chest, dark and angry.
She really is my mate.
It’s the only word the lycan was screaming inside my skull before everything went black. Over and over.Mate. Mate. Mate.Until it was all I could hear.
And I rejected her.
I rejected my own mate.
She severed the bond. Cut it clean. And now there’s this gaping hole where something sacred should be.
How is that even possible? How did I not feel it before? How did I not know?
I lift my head and meet her gaze.
She watches me with wary, narrowed eyes.
She’s perched high on the bed, regal in her defiance. And me? I’m on my knees on the cold floor beneath her.
Fitting.
Before I can even open my mouth to say anything, she lifts a pillow and chucks it straight at my chest.
“Cover yourself, Your Majesty,” she says flatly. “No one wants to see your royal jewels.”
