Chapter 34 The Crave
34\. The Crave
Dravenmoor had forgotten what sleep meant. The castle didn’t rest it waited. It breathed through the stone and shadows, humming with war tension, like the walls themselves were anxious for the next scream.
I hadn’t slept either.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him Lucian Drevane, cursed king, Alpha, leader, half monster, half-regret and the way his veins had glowed when he touched my blood. The way he said, “Don’t bleed for me please,” like it wasn’t already too late.
I tried to distract myself with alchemy, with books, with muttering sarcastic commentary to the universe that kept throwing me into scenes that looked suspiciously like romance tropes with a body count. Didn’t work.
Because every time I turned a corner in this cursed palace, I felt him. His aura. His pull. His crave.
The healers said the curse was worsening. That his energy was unstable. That his reflection moved before he did and sometimes the mirrors cracked when he passed.
But no one dared say the truth: the curse wasn’t feeding on fear anymore. It was feeding on me.
It was near midnight when I felt it again that pulse.
Like a heartbeat outside my body.
I jolted awake, drenched in sweat. The air shimmered faintly, the faint scent of iron and ozone drifting from the corridor. Shadows coiled under the door. The candles flickered.
And then the latch turned. He was there.
Lucian.
Barefoot. Shirtless. The silver veins crawling beneath his skin like living lightning. His eyes weren’t just glowing they were burning, molten and wild. Every line of him was tension and hunger barely contained.
“Lucian,” I breathed, sitting up. “You shouldn’t be—”
“I can’t—” he started, voice rough, like he’d swallowed fire. “—stay away.”
I swallowed. “W-What?”
He stepped closer, every movement slow, deliberate. The floorboards creaked beneath his weight. The air grew heavier, until it was hard to tell whether I was breathing or drowning.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I whispered, though my voice wasn’t exactly convincing. “You’re… unstable.”
“Say it,” he murmured. “Say monster. It fits.”
“W-What are you talking about?”
That earned me a ghost of a smile thin, dangerous, fleeting.
Then he was beside my bed.
I didn’t move. Didn’t dare. Every instinct screamed to run, but something deeper something traitorous told me to stay.
His hand came up, stopping inches from my face, fingers trembling as if the act of not touching me was killing him.
“Every time you breathe near me,” he said, low and hoarse, “it feels like the curse claws closer to the surface. Like it wants you.”
Is this a cursed takeover again? Shit I don't even know.
“Well,” I said softly, “i-it’s got competition.”
He laughed a sound that wasn’t quite sane, but heartbreakingly human. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Then educate me, Your Majesty.”
He exhaled sharply, a sound halfway between pain and desire. His hand hovered for a moment longer and then, finally, it touched.
My jaw. My throat. My pulse.
The warmth of his skin burned through me. His fingers traced down, slow, reverent, until they rested just below my chin. His thumb brushed the side of my neck.
“Do you know what happens,” he murmured, “when the curse stops resisting me?”
“Judging by your veins? Nothing good.”
“Wrong.” His breath ghosted against my lips. “It stops fighting because it’s feeding.”
And then his other hand came up wrapping around my throat and pulled me over.
Not tight. Not cruel. Just claiming.
The air stilled.
“Lucian,” I whispered.
His eyes glowed brighter, his voice a whisper layered with something not entirely him. “Mine.”
The word slid down my spine like molten silver.
Every instinct in me flared fear, desire, anger, all tangled. My hands went to his wrist, not to fight, but to feel the heat pulsing through him. His heart was racing too fast, too broken. The curse’s light flared in his veins, painting his skin in fractured silver.
“Lucian,” I said again, barely audible. “This is not you.”
“Maybe it is,” he rasped. “Maybe you’re the only thing it recognizes.”
The curse was bleeding through his voice now layered, echoing, almost pleading.
His face was close enough that I could see the cracks of silver running beneath his eyes, like lightning under glass. He looked both divine and doomed.
“Let me go,” I whispered, not sure which one of us I was begging.
He didn’t.
Instead, he leaned closer, forehead pressing against mine. The touch was desperate like gravity itself was pulling him toward me. His hand trembled against my throat, his breathing uneven.
“Every time I close my eyes,” he said, “I see you. I smell you. It’s driving me insane.”
“J-Join the fan club ha ha,” I said weakly. “I-It’s getting crowded.”
That almost broke him I saw it in the flicker of his jaw, in the faint twitch of his lips. The alpha part of him is fighting to the surface. The king is at war with the beast.
“Lucian,” I whispered, “this isn’t how you prove you care.”
His grip slackened not gone, just trembling.
The silence between us was deafening.
“Then how?” he asked, voice breaking.
My pulse thundered. My fingers rose against my better judgment to his chest, where the curse mark pulsed like a second heart. The warmth was feverish beneath my touch.
“You prove it without chains,” I said softly.
He froze.
The words hung between us, fragile as glass. His breathing hitched, and for one terrifying, beautiful second, I thought he’d kiss me.
Instead, he pulled back.
Slowly. Painfully.
The glow in his veins flickered, then dimmed, as if retreating. The air between us cooled. The spell broke.
Lucian took a step back, eyes wide, horrified not by me, but by himself.
“I could’ve hurt you,” he said, voice raw.
“You didn’t.”
“I wanted to.”
I swallowed the ache in my throat. “No. The curse did. You wanted to stop it.”
His gaze darted away to the wall, to the floor, anywhere but me. “You don’t understand what it’s like,” he said. “To crave something that destroys you the closer you get.”
“I do,” I said quietly. “I’m living it.”
He looked at me then, really looked and for a heartbeat, all that anger, all that divine fury, cracked open into something achingly human.
Longing.
“I should leave,” he said finally.
“Probably.”
“Tell me to.”
“Would you listen?”
He smiled, faintly. “No.”
He turned for the door. His reflection in the window flickered moving a heartbeat slower than he did. I caught a glimpse of the monster beneath the skin: silver veins crawling, claws half-formed, eyes too bright.
Then it was gone. He was just Lucian again. The Tyrant Alpha who was trying to be king, and failing spectacularly at both.
Before he left, he paused his hand on the doorframe. “If I touch you again,” he said, not looking back, “it won’t be gentle.”
I forced a shaky breath. “Then make it real.”
His shoulders stiffened. For a moment, I thought he’d turn around.
He didn’t.
The door closed.
And I was left there pulse racing, throat still tingling, caught somewhere between fear and the kind of hunger that makes gods fall.
I touched the mark on my neck where his hand had been. The skin still buzzed faintly, like the curse had left a whisper behind.
It said one word.
Mine.
By morning, the rumors had started that the Tyrant Alpha King had stopped sleeping, that the moonlight refused to touch him, that his beast had started walking ahead of him in mirrors.
But they didn’t know the truth.
He wasn’t losing to the curse.
He was losing to me.