Chapter 2 Lucian
— · —
Lucian
I stood in the shadow of the building across from the inn and watched her window. Pathetic, lovesick, and utterly foolish, yet I didn’t move.
Five hundred years. Centuries of royal training, of suppressing every instinct that didn’t serve the crown. I’d survived political feuds, outlasted enemies, maintained perfect composure through hundreds of tedious diplomatic functions.
And here I was.
Standing in the dark at three in the morning, staring at a window in a cheap inn, because a human woman was sleeping twenty feet away and I physically could not make myself leave.
My wolf paced beneath my skin, restless and hungry. He wanted to be closer. Wanted to press his nose to her neck and breathe her in until her scent lived in his lungs.
I wanted that too. More than I should.
Even from here, I could almost taste her.
That maddening sweetness underneath the smoke damage.
The memory of how she’d looked at me during the storm, rain streaking the window behind her, her pulse jumping beneath my thumb as I tilted her chin up.
The way her breath had caught right before I kissed her.
My body tightened at the memory. I’d spent hundreds of years polishing my control, and one human woman had me half-hard in a dark alley because I couldn’t stop replaying the way she’d melted into me.
And now she looked at me with no recognition at all, and my heart kept fucking breaking at the thought of her not remembering us. Why? Why the fuck had we been erased from her memories? And fucking how?
“You’re staring.”
Percival materialized at my shoulder, his voice pitched low enough not to carry. His hair was loose tonight, waves catching the dim streetlight, but shadows darkened the skin beneath his hazel eyes. None of us had slept.
I doubted any of us would sleep well until she was safe, which was going to be a problem given that I was a king who needed to function and I was currently operating on zero rest and an unhealthy amount of obsessive fixation.
“That’s creepy, Your Majesty.”
“Your irrelevant input is noted.”
He leaned against the wall beside me, arms crossed, and studied her window with an expression that held none of his usual lightness. Percy’s default setting was chaos and charm. Seeing him quiet felt wrong.
“She flinched,” Percy said. “When Solomon reached for her face to check her pupils. Did you see?”
“I caught the end of it.”
“It’s that piece of shit who did that to her. Conditioned her to expect a hit every time a man reaches for her face.”
“Yes.”
He was quiet for a moment. His jaw worked, hazel eyes going gold at the edges before he blinked it back. “I want to find him, Lucian.”
“You’ll have your chance.”
“I want it now.”
So did I.
I could picture it clearly. Hudson pinned beneath my claws, his ribs cracking one by one under my weight. The sound he’d make when I tore into his throat. The way his eyes would go wide when he realized what was killing him wasn’t human.
I wanted to hear him scream the way she must have for the things he did to her. I crave to break every bone in his hands so he could never touch another woman again. And I will surely make it last for hours.
My wolf snarled beneath my skin, demanding blood.
I shoved it down.
“You’ll have it when the time is right. Not before.”
The words came out measured. I’d learned to leash the part of me that wanted to solve every problem with violence.
Percy exhaled through his nose, a controlled breath that said he was swallowing a dozen arguments, and nodded.
He was many things. Reckless, loud, incapable of taking anything seriously for more than thirty consecutive seconds. But when it mattered, he listened. When it truly mattered, the chaos disappeared, and what remained underneath was a soldier who would follow me into any war I chose.
Solomon appeared from the shadows without a sound. His pale eyes tracked to Mira’s window and held there. For one unguarded second, hunger crossed his blank expression. Then grief, right behind it, before the mask slid back into place.
“The fire, as we know, was arson,” he said with no preamble. Solomon didn’t waste words on pleasantries. “I found accelerant throughout the stockroom and the door locked from outside. The doctor already mentioned, but her tea was laced with a compound I’ve never seen before.”
“You’re sure?”
“I double checked the site.” He pulled out a phone and showed me the screen. A photo of a modified door bolt, the kind you couldn’t buy at a hardware store. “This wasn’t impulsive. He’s been preparing.”
“How long?”
“His car was spotted near her shop three times in the past week. His face is on the hardware store’s camera buying kerosene four days ago.
” Solomon’s jaw tightened. “He watched her routines, learned her schedule. Waited until she’d be alone and vulnerable.
Surveillance shows his vehicle parked two blocks from the hospital an hour ago. ”
The bastard is not running or hiding but instead, he was still here, methodically patient.
The realization made my blood run cold, then hot. He’d stalked her and studied her. Planned every detail of her death while she went about her life, thinking she was safe.
My claws pushed against my fingertips. I curled my hands into fists to keep them from extending.
“This man has done this before,” Solomon continued, his scarred knuckles pressing white against his crossed arms. “Or he’s studied how.”
“He’s going to be dead.” Percival’s voice turned into the version that most people never saw because the grin and the dimples were so effective at hiding it. “That’s the only plan that matters.”
“Not yet.”
I forced the words through my teeth. Every cell in my body screamed against them.
Because I wanted Hudson dead.
The truth is, I wanted to be the one who did it. I wanted to let my wolf have him, piece by piece, starting with the hands that had touched her and ending with the throat that had spoken her name.
I desire to watch the life drain from his eyes while he understood exactly what he’d done and exactly who he’d done it to. I wanted him to know, in those final moments, that she was ours.
The fantasy was so vivid I could taste blood on my tongue.
“She needs stability,” I said. “Not more violence.”
“She needs him to stop breathing.”
“Percival.”
“Fine.” He pushed off the wall. “But when the time comes, I’m not asking permission.”
“You won’t need to.”
When the time came, I would be first in line. Percy could have what was left.
Solomon’s jaw tightened, the scar on his face going white with tension, but he nodded. We both knew I was right about the timing. We both hated it.
“The compound in her tea,” Solomon said, shifting back to intel. “The way it targeted her memories was precise. Everything from the past week, gone. Everything else is intact.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know yet.” His pale eyes met mine, and the uncertainty there unsettled me. Solomon always knew. “Could be medical, experimental. Maybe human science I’m not familiar with.” He paused. “Or it could be something else entirely. I need more time to dig.”
“What do we tell her?” Percy asked. “About the week?”
The week. The word sat between the three of us, loaded with everything it contained.
I let myself remember. A punishment and a pleasure all at once.
Seven days ago, we found her by chance. We’d been in this town for a year, running the fire station as cover, monitoring this realm for information.
A boring assignment made bearable by the fact that human firefighting turned out to be the most satisfying work I’d done in centuries.
No politics, no backstabbing council members. Just fire and people who needed saving.
Then the annual Lantern Festival forced us into the town square, and her scent hit me across the crowded space with the force of a fist to the sternum.
Mate. Mine. OURS.
The bond announced itself without subtlety or warning, and definitely without any consideration for the fact that I was a king from another realm and she was a human woman who’d been invisible to us for months despite living on the opposite end of town.
Solomon went rigid beside me. His nostrils flared, his pupils blew wide.
Then Percival, who dropped his cider.
One week. Seven days of finding excuses to be near her. Seven nights of lying awake, hard and aching, thinking about the way she smiled at me when I said something that made her laugh.
She didn’t know what we were. Didn’t understand why three firefighters kept coming back to her shop every day. She thought we were odd. Friendly, but odd.
And she smiled at us anyway. That fucking smile.
My wolf paced beneath my skin, restless with wanting. Even now, standing in the dark staring at her window, my body remembered things my mind was trying not to replay.
But the memories came anyway.
Her back against her kitchen wall. My hands pinning her wrists above her head. The way her breath caught when I pressed my thigh between hers, and the sound she made when I finally kissed her.
It wasn’t soft or gentle. I didn’t have it in me when it came to her.
I’d kissed her with five centuries of emptiness behind it, and she’d kissed me back with equal desperation. Her teeth caught my bottom lip while her hips rolled against my thigh, searching for friction, and the noise that came out of her throat made my cock twitch in my pants.
“More.” She’d gasped it against my mouth. “Lucian, please.”
I’d almost taken her right there. Would have dropped to my knees, shoved her dress up, and buried my face between her thighs until she screamed my name.
Instead, I’d pulled back. Breathing hard, forehead pressed to hers.
“We should stop.” The words were a lie.
“We should.” She hadn’t moved away. Her pulse was racing under my fingers where I held her wrists. “But I don’t want to.”
Fuck. Neither did I.
Now, standing in the cold outside her window, my body reacted to the memory with predictable stupidity. Heat pooled low in my gut. My cock stirred, half-hard from nothing but remembering.
Except that the woman in those memories didn’t remember any of it.
She didn’t remember the taste of my mouth on hers. Didn’t remember arching into me, begging for more. Or any of the moments from that week that I would carry branded into my fucking soul until the day I died.
“We don’t know why she lost her memories,” Solomon said, reading my silence. “The drug could have caused temporary retrograde amnesia. Or it could be related to the bond itself. A human mind rejecting supernatural imprinting.”
“Or it could be permanent,” Percy said. He’d stopped pacing. Just stood there staring at her window with his hands shoved in his pockets. “She might never remember.”
The thought made my chest burn.
“Then we start over.” I kept my voice even. The way a king’s voice should sound. “We tell her the truth. Slowly. When she’s ready.”
“Which truth?” Percy looked at me. “The ‘we’re supernatural wolves from another dimension’ truth, or the ‘you’re our fated mate and we’ve been obsessed with you since we saw you’ truth?”
“Both. In time.”
“She’s going to think we’re insane.”
“She already thinks we’re strange.”
“Strange and insane are different categories, Lucian.”
A flutter of wings broke the silence.
The raven landed on the fire escape above us, dark feathers glossy in the moonlight. It carried a small scroll tied to its leg, sealed with the Valdris crest. A message from Veyndral, sent through the portal.
I climbed up to retrieve it, unrolling the parchment with a growing sense of dread. My mother’s handwriting, elegant and demanding.
“When are you coming home? The council grows restless in your absence. Also, I want grandchildren. Is that too much to ask? You’ve had five hundred years to find a mate. Surely you can spare a few months to return and produce an heir.”
My parents. Again.
I stared at the words and thought about telling her I’d found my mate. That she was human, which the council would hate.
The raven cocked its head, waiting for a response.
I sent it back empty-handed.
“You ever going to reply to that?” Percy asked.
“No.”
“That’s the third one this week.”
“I’m aware.”
“They’re going to send someone through the portal if you keep ignoring them.”
“Then I’ll send them back.”
Percy raised both hands in surrender. Solomon said nothing, which was his way of saying everything.
Our kingdom had remained isolated for eight hundred years while others reconnected with the human world. When a new portal opened within our borders, the Council wanted to send expendable wolves through first.
I volunteered myself instead. A king doesn’t send others into danger he won’t face himself. The Council nearly had collective heart failure.
Solomon came because he was my right-hand man. But also because I knew he was still not over the mystery of his father disappearing through a portal to this world twenty-four years ago.
Percy came because that was what Percy did. Where I went, he followed. A loyalty forged in the kind of history that made two men brothers without sharing parents.
But for now, Veyndral and the council could wait. All of it could wait except the woman in that room who didn’t remember she was the only thing that had made me feel alive in centuries.
“You’re overthinking.” Percy’s voice cut through my spiral. “I can hear you brooding from here.”
“Shut up, Percival. Go get some rest,” I told him. “Both of you. I’ll take first watch.”
“You’ve been standing here for four hours already,” Percy said.
“Then I’ll take the next four too.”
Solomon and Percy exchanged a look. The kind that said they were going to argue, then thought better of it. Percy clapped me on the shoulder as he passed, and Solomon just nodded, that single gesture carrying more understanding than most people’s entire vocabularies.
They disappeared into the shadows, and I was alone again.
In her window, a light turned on.
I straightened, every sense alerting. Through the thin curtain, I could see her silhouette moving. She crossed to the window and stopped, and then her hand came up and pressed flat against the glass.
She couldn’t see me. I knew she couldn’t. The shadows were too deep, the street too dark. But she stood there anyway, palm against the window, staring out into the night.
My hand lifted without my permission. Mirrored the gesture. My palm pressed against nothing, against the twenty feet of distance that separated us.
Then the light went out.
Mira’s silhouette disappeared.
And I stood there in the dark, hand still raised toward a window that had gone black, alone with the ghost of a week she didn’t remember.