Chapter 130 130

Chapter 130 130
Damien's POV

After I watched Amelia go back to our room, I went to my office and I pulled up everything my network had been able to gather on the old Lycan royal court. I already started the search when the prisoner first mentioned the connection. It took time to compile because most of it had been deliberately destroyed or buried. Richard had been thorough about that. He didn't just kill the people. He went after the records too.

But thorough is not the same as complete.

There were fragments. Documents that survived because they were stored in places Richard didn't think to look. Testimonies from people who were there and wrote things down and hid them. Copies of court records that had been sent to remote pack archives decades ago as routine procedure and never recalled.

My team pulled everything they could find and sent it to me and I sat in my office at three in the morning and I read through all of it.

The first part I already knew from the prisoner. The poisoning. The timeline. The way Richard moved through the court slowly and carefully so nobody noticed until it was too late. Reading the actual documented details of it was different from hearing it summarized. It was worse. It was a lot worse. Because the documents had names and dates and descriptions and it stopped being abstract very quickly.

I read through it and I kept my face neutral even though there was nobody in the room to see my face.

Then I got to the section on the court's inner circle.

The royal family had a small group of people closest to them. Not advisors exactly. More like sworn protectors. People who were trusted completely and whose entire role was to guard the family and everything connected to it.

I scrolled through the names. And then I stopped.

I read it again. Then I read it a third time because I wanted to be completely sure I was reading it correctly and I was.

My parents' names were in that list.

My father and my mother. Both of them. Listed as sworn protectors of the Lycan royal family, among the most trusted members of the inner circle, described in the records as having served the King and Queen for over a decade before the poisoning began.

I sat back in my chair.

I had known my parents were connected to the court in some way. I knew they moved in those circles. But I was very young when they died and nobody told me the details and I never had access to records like these before. I thought they were just members. Attendants maybe. People who were present but not central.

They weren't. They were the inner circle. They were the people the King and Queen trusted most.

I kept reading.

The records got more specific about the end. About what happened in the final days before the royal family was gone completely. There were accounts from survivors, people who had been on the edges of the court and managed to get out — describing what happened when it became clear the lycan wasn't going to survive.

The war with the rampant demon rogues was coming, and they were the only ones who were powerful enough to counter those demon rogues. Maybe they had too much confidence in themselves and thought they could handle it with their remaining strength. They didn't allow the world to know that they were actually all dying and too weak to fight those people.

The King and Queen had a child. They needed someone to take her.

According to three separate accounts, it was my parents who arranged it. My parents who identified Ronald as the right person. They also coordinated the transfer and made sure the child got out safely before Richard could locate her.

And then Richard found out what they had done. He killed them for it by setting them up. It seems like they found out everything it was going to do so he decided to silence them, instead of letting the world find out.

Not as part of the general poisoning. Specifically. Deliberately. Because they had helped the child escape and he needed to make sure nobody who knew where she went was still alive to tell anyone.

My parents died because they helped Amelia get out. I sat with that for a long time. She has been trying to avoid my eyes for a while now since she found out, probably because she must have guessed what happened.

I don't know exactly how long I sat. But it was long enough that the light outside the window started to change slightly. I just sat there in my office with that information and felt the weight of it settle across my shoulders.

My entire life I had known my parents were gone and I had known it was connected to the war somehow and I had never been able to find out the specifics. I had spent years angry at a shape I couldn't see clearly. Angry at whatever killed them and took them away when I was too young and left me with nothing and nobody in a pack that didn't want me there. My life was saved by someone else who raised me to become the Alpha, probably entrusted by my parents also.

Now I knew the shape.

They didn't just die because of Richard's general destruction of the court. They died because they did something specific. They made a choice to protect a child and they paid for it and that child grew up and became the person sleeping down the hall from me right now.

I didn't know what to do with that.

I wasn't angry. That surprised me. I thought finding out the specifics of why my parents died would make me angrier than I had ever been. But it didn't. Why do I have to get mad when I can meticulously plan my revenge? The one who killed everyone is still alive and blatantly serving himself to me.

They knew what they were doing. They had to. People like them didn't make moves like that without understanding the risk. They chose it anyway.

I was still sitting there when I heard the door.

Amelia leaned in the doorway. She was in the oversized shirt she slept in and her hair was a mess and she looked like she had woken up and noticed I wasn't there and come to find me. She did that sometimes. I had noticed.

"It's early," she said. "Why are you in here?"

"I was reading something."

She looked at my face. She was good at reading my face even when I was trying not to show anything. She came into the room properly and sat down in the chair across from me.

"What's wrong," she said. Not a question really. More like a statement that she already knew something was wrong and was giving me the opening to confirm it.

I turned the screen toward her. I pointed to my parents' names. I watched her read it. I watched her face as she went through it. She looked up at me.

"Your parents really died saving me," she said.

"Yes."

She stared at me. I could see her processing it.

"You didn't know," she said.

"No."

"And you found this just now. Tonight."

"Yes."

She was quiet for another moment. Then she reached across the desk and took my hand. I looked down at her hand on mine.

"Then we finish what they started," she said. "Together. Even if you don't want that. You have every right to be mad at me. I survived at the expense of you parent's lives and also cost you your childhood. Just because I was born a princess, I don't know why I got to the important more than everyone else?"

I looked at her. She look very guilty about what happened and she looked like she was going to continue apologizing for the next few months. We spent so many months together trying to navigate through things that I almost forget that hard pregnancy was too huge now.

I shook my head. "But you came back to me anyway. Don't think it's a loss if I gained you. My parents died so that I could have a partner in future and it's not even your fault. You're the biggest victim in danger so of course, you'll be protected. Don't even think you're not important."

She squeezed my hand once and then she reached over and started scrolling through the rest of the documents herself. Then she stopped scrolling.

"Damien." Her voice had changed.

I leaned over to see what she was looking at.

It was a document I hadn't reached yet. Older than the others. The heading identified it as a record belonging to the royal bloodline specifically. A prophecy that had been attached to the line for generations.

I read it. The language was old but the meaning was clear enough.

The princess of the royal blood, when fully awakened, would be unlike anything the lycan world had produced before. Her power would be capable of uniting every pack under a single rule. Peace across all territories. An end to the wars between packs that had been running for generations.

Or.

Depending entirely on who stood beside her when her power fully came in — if the wrong person was there, if she was influenced toward destruction instead of unity, she would burn everything to the ground instead.

Every pack... everything. It came down entirely to who was next to her when it happened.

I sat back slowly. Amelia was very still beside me. I looked at her and she looked at me. Neither of us said anything for a long moment.

Then she said quietly, "So it actually matters. Who I end up with. It actually determines everything."

"Yes," I said.

She looked at the screen again. "Well, that doesn't matter to me anymore, because I have you. No one else is important."