CHAPTER 11
Third pov
The silent, midnight streets of the city were nothing but a blur of neon and concrete to Lucian as he moved.
He didn't need a car to move. He was a shadow cutting through the modern world.
When he reached the iron gates of his estate, he didn't wait for the facial recognition cameras to sweep over him.
He vaulted over the ten-foot barricade, landing soundlessly on the gravel drive. His mansion loomed ahead.
A masterpiece of glass, steel and elegance. It was a cold, architectural marvel that screamed of wealth and isolation, something he never wanted.
As he reached the front entrance, the motion-sensitive LED lights flickered to life, bathing his pale, blood-flecked face in a sterile white glow.
The heavy, reinforced glass doors began to slide open but it was too slow for Lucain speed as he collided with the glass at full speed.
To a human, it would have been like hitting a brick wall. To Lucian, the high-impact safety glass shattered instantly.
He stepped through the ruin of his own front door, the shards crunching beneath the designer boots he'd cursed on before wearing.
His eyes glowed with a feral, crimson light that made the security sensors go haywire.
"Sire!" Marcus appeared at the end of the hall, he held a sleek tablet in one hand, but as he saw the jagged glass falling from Lucian's shoulders and the raw fury etched into his King's features, he stopped dead.
Lucian didn't acknowledge him. He stormed inside, his presence so heavy that the smart-home's climate control system began to hiss, sensing the unnatural drop in temperature.
His hand lashed out, catching the edge of a custom-made, three-thousand-pound marble table.
In fury, Lucian flipped it. The marble slab hit the hardwood with the force of a car crash, splintering the wood.
A nearby display case exploded from the sheer pressure of his aura. "GET OUT!" Lucian's voice wasn't human.
Marcus dropped the tablet and retreated into the shadows without a word. He knew the scent of a Blood-Frenzy, but this was different.
This was seasoned with something he had never smelled on his King.
Desperation. Lucian stood in the center of the wreckage, his chest heaving. His expensive black coat was torn, his bleeding knuckles healed without a scar.
But it wasn't the physical damage that was breaking him. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. The sound was a hammer against his skull.
It was a heartbeat—quick, shallow, and terrifyingly alive. It wasn't his. It was coming from miles away, through the trees and over the hills, yet it sounded as if it were beating inside his own chest.
He threw himself into a leather armchair, his claws shredding the fine grain. "How?" he hissed. "How is she alive?"
He had lived for thousands of years. He had seen the rise and fall of empires, the birth and death of many beings. He knew the laws of his own biology better than any scientist.
When a King of the First Blood rose from a millennium of sleep, his first draught was a death sentence.
He had drained that girl. He had tasted the copper tang of her life-force until her pulse was a stuttering ghost. She should be a dried husk in the dirt.
She should be nothing but a memory of a meal. Instead, a mark appeared. The sacred, indelible seal of a bond was currently burning on the neck of a girl who lived in a wolf's den.
"An abomination," he muttered, the word a curse. "A common, fragile, mortal stray." He replayed the moment he stepped onto the pack land.
He had felt the silver in the soil, the ancient wards of the shifters that acted like a poison to his kind.
He had smelled the disgusting wolves nearby. But the girl had no wolf. He had searched for the spark, for the second soul that defined a shifter or the smell but there was only a void.
That girl was clearly human she was a dumb meal while couldn't die probably. Yet, he was bonded to her.
A sudden spike of fear sliced through his mind. It wasn't his fear. He looked at his hands.
He was a God among mortals, but he was currently bonded to a girl who tripped over roots.
"I should have killed her," Lucian rasped, his voice cutting through the silence of the room.
"If that barrier hadn't been there, I would have snapped that thin, pathetic neck before she could even gasp."
The thought of it—of the snap of her bones and the silence of that haunting heartbeat—brought a flicker of dark satisfaction. If she died, the bond would sever.
The weight in his chest would vanish. But as the thought formed, a strange, treacherous idea flickered at the edge of his consciousness.
A word he hadn't considered in centuries. A concept that belonged to the legends of the moon-worshippers, not to a sovereign of the night.
'Mate.'
Lucian let out a sharp, mocking bark of laughter that bounced off the cold steel surfaces.
"Impossible," he snarled. The very idea was an insult. The Goddess of the Moon didn't gift mates to his kind—vampires took what they wanted by force.
They didn't have souls to pair, or destinies written in the stars. And even if they did, the universe would not be so cruel as to tie him, a King of the First Blood, to a girl who didn't even have a wolf to protect her.
She was a human. A fragile, mortal creature living in a den of monsters who clearly loathed her.
To be mated to someone so weak, so utterly devoid of power, would be a death sentence for his legacy.
He was the apex predator; he could never be tied to a stray who smelled of fear and moss.
He stood up, pacing the wreckage of his place like a caged tiger. The gold-trimmed sensors on the wall beeped as they tried to recalibrate the lighting to his erratic movements.
"She is a mistake," he whispered, his jaw tightening so hard his fangs bit into his own lip.
"A biological glitch. My blood reacted to whatever curse is in her veins, and now it thinks she is something she isn't."
He stopped at the floor-to-ceiling window, looking out over the sprawling city lights.
He couldn't let anyone know. If the High Council—those preening, cowering fools who drank from livestock—found out that their King was bonded to an abomination in a backwater pack, they would use her.
They would see her as his weakness. They would hunt her just to see him bleed. A strange protectiveness surged, sending suffocating wave that made him want to punch through the reinforced glass.
"I don't want to protect her," he growled, fighting the instinct. "I want to erase her." He needed a way out.
He needed to find a method to kill her that wouldn't shatter his own soul in the process. He would find it and he would finish what he started in those woods.
He would drain the last drop of that intoxicating blood and watch the light leave those golden eyes once and for all.
But even as he plotted her death, the link thrummed with a new sensation.