Chapter 29 29
Lucien’s POV
The smell of blood assaulted me long before I came to the pack house—Lena’s blood, mingled with fear and something else I couldn’t put my finger on. I lept from the saddle while my horse was still in motion, running before I had even reached the ground.
"Report!" I snapped at the first guard I met.
“They took her, m’lord,” he panted as blood ran from a cut across his forehead. "Came out of nowhere. Marcus got up to try to stop them, but—"
"Where is Marcus?"
"Dead, sir. Along with three others."
The words were like actual punches to my body. Marcus had served my pack loyally for ten years. He had died trying to save my mate, and I hadn’t even been here beside him.
My wolf screamed with fury at the trespass on our territory, and I followed the scent to the gardens. But what I discovered there was an immediate stopper.
The whole garden had become change. Where there had been flower beds and trim paths that morning, now all was wild and primeval. Trees had watered into impossible bulk, their branches and limbs interlaced overhead in natural cathedral. Flowers had exploded in extravagant colors not found in nature, and the ground itself looked roughed up from some kind of seismic activity.
"What happened here?" I demanded.
“We don’t know, sir,” the guard answered, nervously. “When we got here, it was already like this. But there were witnesses to the attack itself.”
He showed me where two kitchen maids were standing close to each other, white-faced.
“Speak,” ordered I, with an effort to modulate my voice. "Tell me what you saw."
“It was the princess, my lord,” said the old woman in a whisper. "She... she did this. Trembled the earth, grew the plants as though they lived.”
“It can-not be,” I sputtered, but as the words dragged on the end of my tongue I felt old tendrils of memory stir behind them; glimpses of tales from long ago. Stories of those who could force nature’s hand, whose passions could shape the world itself.
Shifters.
“There was a man with her,” the second maid said. "Someone she knew. He was fighting and then he, he just... took her. Picked her up while she struggled against him.”
"Describe him," I demanded.
"Tall, dark hair, silver eyes. He was young, but authoritative in a way that forced everyone else to defer to him.” She shuddered. “He’s looking at her the way … like, she’s something he owns.
Ash. It could only be Ash Blackthorn, Godric's Omega son, they were looking for. But, if he had taken Lena and forced her to comesing on the hearts of warriors!”
“He’s not an Omega,” I spoke out loud, the realization hitting me. “He has not revealed to us his real character.”
A True Alpha. It all fit together—how the hell he'd managed to get inside my territory, how he had such power over his raiders, even why on Earth he'd been able to kidnap Lena despite whatever gifts she has at her disposal.
I looked back toward the transformed garden, absorbed details that in my initial fury had slipped past. Plants that grew in such a way as to create windbreaks, walls of vegetation like barriers between themselves and whatever needed protecting at the center. The burn marks on the earth that whispered of brute force cut loose, unshaped by practice or control.
My mate was a shifter. That she was in fact the woman I thought mine, the mother of my child to come—she belonged to a species that for centuries I’d considered beneath me.
And someone who supposedly loved her had just abducted her for it.
I followed them for six hours, tracking the trail further into contested land where pack laws were less binding and violence was justice. My fury was cold now, beautifully focused — and my patience was that which belongs to a predator: It would accept nothing less than blood.
When at last I reached them, they had pitched camp in a clearing next to a river. Sitting on the felled log, Lena was curled by a tree slope twenty feet away, wrist-bound with silver cord gnawing angry whelps into her skin.
The fact that she was both hurt and bound had my restraint free falling.
And I struck without a sound, my Lycan body tearing from the mists of the trees in a blast that brought leaves like paper to fall from their branches. Ash’s guards didn’t even have a chance to get their weapons drawn—I cut through them like paper, painting the clearing crimson with their blood.
"Lucien!" Lena sounded hoarse with relief and terror.
But Ash was ahead of me, his own shift washing through him as he met my advance. The clash when we struck was like thunder, two immense beings of superhuman power locked in deadly embrace.
He was stronger than I thought he’d be. True Alpha strength pumped through him in ways that rendered him faster, more durable, more dangerous than anything or anyone I’d fought in centuries. His claws raked my ribs, slashing out trenches that surely would have been death to anyone else.
"She's mine!" he growled with an edgy, clipped tone through his voice changer. "She always has been!"
"She picked me," I told him, sticking my knee into his solar plexus hard enough to shatter rock.
"She chose an illusion!" He dodged my counter attack, his silver eyes burning with fanatical belief. “She picked your lie, not the real you, monster!”
We broke off, stalking each other like the predators we were. Both of us bleeding from a dozen different holes in our body and neither one ready to be the first to back down.
"You want the truth about your pretty little boy?" Ash taunted. "She's a shifter, Lucien. A mongrel abomination born to corrupt that precious bloodline of yours."
“I know what she is” I answered coolly. "And I don't care."
His face reflected a hint of astonishment for an instant. Then it curdled into something ugly and desperate.
"Liar," he spat. “You’re being dishonest, probably covering your ego. But when you get her back, when it’s just you and her in your bed, you will know what she is. You’ll sense the wild magic on her skin, and you’ll be disgusted by it.”
He lunged once more, and this time he did so in a different way. There was something shiny in his hand, blade of some sort that reflected the light and put something sour in my mouth as my senses registered its aura.
The poison had swept through me like liquid fire, searing my veins with blinding ferocity. Whatever it was that he'd used was tailored to Lycan anatomy in an effort to use my own accelerated regeneration against me.
But even as the poison seared through me I caught his wrist and twisted, the bones snapping beneath my grip. The blade soared through the air and I rode the force to slam him against a nearby tree in such a way it created a little crater.
“It’s done,” I said, walking toward the ball of limbs on the floor. "You've lost."
But Ash's laughter was bitter, triumphant. "Have I? Look at yourself, monster. How long do you have?" before that poison kills your heart?”
My strength, I could sense already it was ebbing away, my vision starting to cloud at the periphery. He’d used a contact poison, something that need only be touched to the skin in order to kill instead of inhale or feed on a wound.
“Long enough,” I got out, reaching for him once more.
But he was already rolling away, using his True Alpha speed to remove himself.
“This is not the end,” he shouted, backing away toward the forest. "She's mine, Lycan. She always has been. And when you’re dead, I’ll be sure she knows the type of monster she was stupid enough to fall in love with.”
I’d freed Lena and hauled her back to our territory by the time that poison was taking hold and making it hard even to think. With every stride, more fumes raced through my veins and I could feel my heart began to race erratically.
"How did he know?" I called as we entered the pack house, Lena helping me with as much of my weight she could support.
"What do you mean?"
"How did Ash hear about your strolls? Your routines? The specific days I would be gone?” Resting heavily against the doorframe, I fought to keep my eyes open. "Someone told him."
Before she could reply, I detected her familiar scent just outside the entrance. A person who had been here not long ago, a person who’d had access to our private conversations and daily routines.
“Elena, one of our older pack members.” A woman I had risked my life for.
"Where is she?" I asked the closest guard.
"Elena? She went out about an hour ago, sir. That she had urgent business in the eastern land.”
The eastern territory. Where she could easily vanish across pack lines before anyone knew what she’d done.
An eruption of anger and venom mixed with my blood in a cocktail of hatred that beat at every rational neuron. The last remnants of my restraint snapped when I discovered her gathering contents in her cabin and attempting to flee.
"Traitor," I hissed, my halfway shifted body filling the entranceway.
She faced me, terror and self-disgust on her face. "My lord, I can explain—"
"Can you?" I walked up to her, letting her look at the monster she had unleashed. “Now why did you betray your own Luna? Why did you help them to come and kidnap a woman who was pregnant, from her home?”
“They told me they only wanted to talk to her! Elena flattened herself against the wall on the opposite side, hands raised in a hopeless surrender. Ash said no one would get hurt!”
Marcus is dead because of what you told them. Three other good wolves were killed attempting to protect something you helped steal.”
"I didn't know!" she pleaded. "I thought...I thought they only wanted to talk. To search for some peaceful solution to the territorial conflict.”
But I’d heard enough excuses. The poison still pulsing in my system, the sight of Lena's charred wrists, the knowledge that I had come inches away from losing it all—it mixed inside me into a white-hot rage that wanted someone to bleed.
Before she could say another word, my claws are on her throat.
"Lucien, no!"
Lena’s voice sliced through the red cloud of fury, but it was too late. Elena was already slack in my arms, her traitorous heart now quiet for all time.
I dropped the body and turned to my mate, seeing the horror in her chocolate eyes as she saw what I just did.
“She turned on us,” I said, in an attempt to explain the violence she had just witnessed. "She helped them take you."
"She was terrified," Lena whispered. “She was pleading for her life.”
“She should have considered that before selling us out to our adversaries.”
The venom at that instant streamed through me with renewed force, dropping me to my knees as the world blackened at its corners.
"Lucien!" Lena was at once beside me, her busy hands seeking wounds she could aid. "What did he do to you?"
"Contact poison," I managed. "Designed specifically for Lycans."
“Let's get you to a healer. Now."