Chapter 38 Lucian
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Lucian
The council chamber smelled of old stone.
I had occupied the seat at the head of this table for centuries. The obsidian chair was carved from the same volcanic rock as the palace walls, and on most days it felt less of a throne than a sentence.
Today was not most days.
“The mark is unmistakable,” Iver declared. “The same symbol carved into the Hall of Memory beside the names of every wolf they slaughtered during the Burning Years.”
He let the words settle. “The question is not whether the Order survived. It did. The question is what we do about it.”
Seven councilors sat between us. Four of them were looking at Iver. Three were looking at me. The ratio had shifted. Last week it was five to two in my favor.
Solomon stood at my right flank. He hadn’t spoken once in the last three sessions, but his presence carried its own weight. His pale eyes tracked Iver’s movements with the same precision he applied to everything.
“We’re not disputing the threat,” I answered. “We’re disputing the approach.”
“This isn’t a light matter.” Iver turned to the chamber. “The dart was engineered for lycan biology and a formula erased memories of the bond. This is not a relic from centuries ago. This is an active, organized threat with modern capabilities. Humans have advanced.”
“We don’t know how many of them there are,” I said. “It’s one confirmed member.”
“One was enough back then, someone who noticed a scar healing too fast. A rumor that turned into an extermination.” Iver’s voice dropped. “We lost thousands, Your Majesty. Do you want to wait until we have a body count to justify action?”
The chamber went quiet.
My hands were under the table. They’d been under the table for every session since the rejection, because the tremors had started and hadn’t stopped. My fingers shook against the armrests, and my jaw ached from holding my wolf still.
“And then there is the matter of your mate.” Iver adjusted his robes. “The daughter of this confirmed hunter.”
“My ravens to the council contained no mention of her connection to Thiago Maxwell.” The accusation underneath my tone was not subtle. “I reported the Order’s survival and the confirmed mark. Nothing more. Were you spying on me?”
Iver didn’t flinch. “The council’s ravens are bred to observe, Your Majesty. They don’t just carry messages. Veyndral has bred these birds for centuries to serve as the kingdom’s eyes and ears, and that function does not pause because the sender prefers discretion.”
They had been watching.
Every raven I’d sent had been recording. Not just my words, but the ambient sounds of conversations within earshot, the fragments of a life I’d been trying to protect from exactly this kind of scrutiny.
I really should’ve roasted that fucking bird.
“The council is aware,” Iver continued, “That Percival has gone rogue in pursuit of the human. Even with the bond muted, it still affects you three.”
Solomon’s jaw tightened beside me.
“The council’s recommendation is to classify Mira Maxwell as a destabilizing influence and authorize the Long Watch to deal with her before we lose more of our own.”
“The council’s recommendation is noted.” I kept my voice level. “And denied.”
Iver opened his mouth. But it wasn’t Iver who spoke next.
Councilor Draven leaned forward. Younger than Iver, his arms rested on the table and his eyes found mine.
“Then use her.”
The chamber shifted.
Draven’s voice had the tone of a man discussing strategy rather than a person. “We bring her to Veyndral, and let the Order know that any move against our kind results in consequences for one of their own. Her father tracked her across the human realm for a reason. She is leverage.”
My fingers stopped trembling.
“Or,” Draven continued, “if the bond is truly muted and she’s no longer of use to the crown, we eliminate the variable entirely. A dead mate carries no political leverage for either side.”
The word eliminate snapped the last of my control.
I was across the table before the councilors on either side could react. My hand closed around the front of Draven’s collar and I hauled him out of his seat, dragged him across the stone surface, and pinned him against the chamber wall.
The shift came halfway. My claws extended, piercing through the fabric of his collar and pressing into the skin beneath. Deep enough to bleed. A single bead of red ran down the claw and dripped onto the council floor.
Every councilor was on their feet. Chairs scraped, voices erupted.
“Your Majesty!”
“Stand down!”
“Guards!”
Solomon moved toward the council with a growl.
Councilor Haldren surged forward to intervene but Solomon caught him by the front of his robes and hurled him sideways. Haldren hit the council table, skidded across the obsidian surface, and crashed off the far edge into his own chair.
Solomon turned back to the remaining six, rolled his shoulders once, and settled into position between them and me. Claws out. Expression empty. Waiting.
An understanding passed between Solomon and me without a word spoken. He would hold them. I would handle this.
Draven stared at me. His pulse hammered against my palm, and the claw that had pierced the fabric sat a quarter inch from the artery in his neck. His feet dangled but he didn’t struggle. He was military. He knew what a killing hold felt.
“Say it again.” My voice came out low. “Say her name and the word eliminate in the same sentence. I need you to say it one more time and see who gets eliminated first.”
Draven’s jaw worked. The blood from the claw’s puncture traced a line down his throat and soaked into his collar.
“You’re already compromised.” He said it to the room watching their king hold a councilor by the throat with claws drawn. “All of this. For a human.”
I held him there. Let the silence stretch until every person in that chamber understood what lived beneath the composure I’d worn for two hundred years. The wolf pressed against the back of my skull, gold bleeding into my vision.
“Mira Maxwell is my mate. Ours.” Each word landed with a verdict. “She is not a bargaining chip, and she is not a threat to be neutralized.”
“Any member of this council who suggests otherwise will deal with me personally. Not as your king.” My claw pressed a fraction deeper. Draven’s breath stalled. “As her alpha.”
I released him. He dropped, caught himself against the wall, and pressed his hand to his neck where the puncture wept red.
Solomon hadn’t moved. His claws retracted slowly and the councilor beside him exhaled for what seemed the first time in a full minute.
I straightened my jacket. My gaze moved from Iver to the rest of the council, letting each face register what had just happened.
“Session adjourned.”
Nobody argued.
The chamber doors closed behind us. Solomon fell into step at my left, and we walked the corridor in silence. The guards stationed every thirty feet didn’t look at us.
“Draven will use that against you,” Solomon said.
“Let him.”
I reached my empty quarters and closed the door. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I let my hands rest on my knees and watched the tremors return.
It had only been days in Veyndral since the rejection.
But time moved differently across the portal, stretched and warped, and every day I spent in this palace could be a week she spent believing we’d abandoned her.
The two highest-ranked lycans in the kingdom couldn’t vanish without consequence. The council would seize control and authorize killing her. And as much as the crown is a burden to me, Solomon’s duty a chain to him, we have lives of our pack on our shoulders.
Every council session, intelligence review, and border correspondence was just for one purpose: to keep the machinery of Veyndral pointed away from her.
The wolf inside me had stopped howling. Now it just paced. Restless, wordless, a caged animal inside me.
We made our choice.
I couldn’t undo what we’d done. But I could make sure they would not touch her.
Even if I hoped in hell we could make the same choice as Percival.
I’d been there when he packed. His quarters were sparse to begin with, a soldier’s room with a soldier’s belongings, so the packing took minutes. He didn’t ask for permission. Just shoved his things into a bag.
“I’m going back for her.”
“I see that.”
“You could order me to stay.”
“I could.”
He’d looked at me then. Perhaps expecting me to command him.
But one of us needed to go back. One of us needed to be close enough that the bond didn’t kill her slowly from the inside, and Percival had always been the one to move first and think second.
I let him walk out. That was my permission. The absence of a no.
Percival was in the human realm now.
Solomon was here, and he was worse.
He’d retreated into his father’s study and hadn’t come out except for meals he barely touched and council sessions where he sat in silence.
His intelligence networks were still active, reports coming in and data moving on autopilot.
But the man behind the operation had gone somewhere I couldn’t follow.
I’d lost two more people. One to the human realm and one to a grief he wouldn’t name.
***
The knock came at midnight.
Solomon stood in the corridor holding a scroll. His face was unreadable, but his hands weren’t. They gripped the parchment with a tension that told me everything his expression refused to.
“This arrived through the Ashborne relay.” He stepped inside without waiting for an invitation. “The channel’s been dormant for six years.”
“Who sent it?”
“No signature or seal. The handwriting doesn’t match anyone in our records.” He set the scroll on the desk. “It’s not Percy’s. The script is too disciplined. And the content is too detailed for someone who just returned to the human realm.”
I unrolled it.
The parchment was old but the ink was fresh. Written in our script and formal Lytopian dialect, the kind rarely used outside of official correspondence. Whoever wrote this had been educated in Veyndral.
‘To the throne of Veyndral.
The Order of the Silver Dawn operates a fortified compound in the eastern mountain range of the human realm. Within the compound’s lower levels, they maintain a device referred to internally as the Purifier. Its function: the forced reversion of lycan physiology to feral state. Irreversible.
Thirty-seven lycans are held captive in the facility’s sublevel. Your mate is inside. Security has increased following the escape of a captured wolf.
The portal remains stable. Act accordingly.’
I read it twice. Then a third time, slower, parsing every word for embedded meaning.
“Your mate is inside,” I repeated.
“Whoever wrote this knows about the bond.” Solomon’s voice was flat. “That means they have eyes on the compound, or they have intelligence sources inside it.”
“Could it be the Order itself? A trap?”
“The Order doesn’t know our script. And they wouldn’t reveal whatever that Purifier was. Especially if it was their secret weapon against us.”
“Then who?”
Solomon was quiet for a long moment. I could see him working through the possibilities, with the systematic precision that had made him the most effective intelligence operative in Veyndral.
“I don’t know,” he said.
We stood over the scroll in silence. My quarters felt smaller than they had five minutes ago, the walls drawing in around the weight of what lay on the desk between us.
A weapon that could turn our people feral. Thirty-seven prisoners. Mira, inside.
The tremor in my hands stilled.
“We’re going back.”
Solomon didn’t blink and caught on what I was thinking. “For the Purifier.”
“For the Purifier and the captive wolves. The existential threat that a weapon capable of destroying our species represents.”
He nodded once.
“Giselle is already on standby,” he said. “Best tracker we have. She can meet us at the portal by dawn.”
“Do it.”
Solomon turned to leave and stopped at the door.
“Do you think Percival was the escaped wolf?”
“I hope if he did get captured, that he escaped.”
Solomon held my gaze for another moment and left down the hall.
We met again after finalizing the details of our return.
The portal chamber sat beneath the palace’s eastern wing. The archway was new. The third stable crossing in Veyndral, and the only one that hadn’t collapsed or been destroyed yet. Nobody trusted it to stay.
Solomon stood at the entrance in tactical gear. Giselle beside him, lean, close-cropped hair. She gave me a salute.
Footsteps on the staircase. Several sets.
Annora Vael descended first. Braided in high court formal, the council’s preferred queen candidate for longer than I cared to remember.
Behind her, Councilors Iver and Haldren lingered at the top of the stairs. Haldren still moved stiffly from where Solomon had thrown him across the table.
“Your Majesty.” Annora stopped three paces from the archway. “The council sent me to ensure your expedition stays focused on the Purifier. Not on retrieving your pet.”
“The portal chamber isn’t open to visitors, Lady Vael.”
“I’m not visiting.” She produced a sealed letter. “Any deviation from the stated military objective will be treated as abdication. The council wants the Purifier destroyed and the captives recovered. The human is not part of that mission.”
“The human has a name.”
“The human has hunter blood.” The composure cracked. “Her father’s people burned ours alive. And you bonded yourself to his daughter and expect this kingdom to call her queen?”
From the staircase, Iver called down. “Bring back results, Your Majesty. Not the girl.”
My vision was red in the edges and I wanted to rip their throats off and cut out their tongues every time they kept on repeating the same orders as if I hadn’t understood them.
Instead, I took the letter, setting it on the stone ledge without opening it.
“Solomon.”
“Your Majesty.”
He moved beside me.
And we stepped through to the human realm.