Defying the Lycan King (Kira and Derek) novel Chapter 133

Chapter 133: Discarded

The night was dark and still, the only sounds the steady chirping of crickets and the distant howl of lycans on patrol. The crescent moon hung high in the sky, casting a thin silver light across the path that did very little to push back the shadows on either side of it.

Milo walked with his shoulders hunched and his hands shoved into his pockets, his footsteps heavy on the dirt road. He had just come from the special care centre where his son was being kept, and the visit had left him in a worse state than before he went.

They had refused to release the boy to him. Told him they needed the King’s approval first. The King’s approval to take his own son home.

His beast churned inside him, dark and restless, pushing at the edges of his control with the persistent pressure of something that had been caged too long.

Milo’s hands clenched and unclenched inside his pocket as he walked. He would not give it what it wanted. Not tonight.

He was so deep inside his own head that he missed the shift in the air around him until it was far too late. He never noticed the shadows closing in around him, nor caught the unfamiliar scent on the breeze.

He spun around, nostrils flaring. A sharp prick stung the side of his neck. His hand flew up and closed around a small dart. Before he could rip it out, the world tilted.

His legs gave out beneath him, and he hit the ground hard, face up. Through the thickening fog he watched two figures step out of the darkness and stand over him, their faces hidden under hoods.

"Now," one of them said, looking down at him without any particular urgency, "we have use for you."

The darkness closed in from the edges. Milo fought it for a second, long enough to notice the one thing that cut through even the sedative. These men did not smell like Dravengard. Their scent and aura were completely different.

***

Ruby sat in the hospital bed with one wrist cuffed to the rail, staring at nothing.

Her eyes were swollen from crying, the skin around them raw and tender. She had been weeping on and off since she regained consciousness, not the quiet, controlled kind of crying she was accustomed to allowing herself in private, but the ugly, gasping kind that left her hollowed out and exhausted and no better for it.

She kept replaying the corridor. The roar that had shaken the building. Derek’s hand around her throat. Her feet leaving the ground.

The way Leo had looked at her, through her, as though she were not someone he had known his entire life but simply a threat to be eliminated. It hurt more than what she had done.

The nurses and doctors who came in and out moved around her without meeting her eyes. Nobody had told her anything about Kira. Nobody had told her anything about Derek and she was too ashamed to ask.

She had been the most respected woman in this pack for years. She had worked for that, cultivated it, guarded it carefully. Now she lay here cuffed to a hospital bed wondering what was left of it.

The door opened without a knock.

Ruby’s eyes found Nana in the doorway and her body made the decision before her mind could. She lowered herself quickly back against the pillow and turned toward the wall, pulling her face into the slack, even expression of sleep.

"Get up," Nana said.

Not loudly or harshly, exactly. But with a quality of authority that bypassed every instinct Ruby had and went straight to the part of her that had been obeying this woman since childhood.

She sat up slowly and turned to face her.

Nana stood in the middle of the room, looking at her. Just looking.

And that was the thing that made Ruby’s chest tighten, because she had seen Nana look at a great many people over the years with warmth, with amusement, with the particular fond exasperation she reserved for Kai.

She had never seen Nana look at anyone the way she was looking at her now. Not with hatred. Something quieter than that, and considerably more final.

Disappointment.

"I’m sorry, Nana," Ruby said. Her voice came out small and younger than she intended.

"No," Nana said. "You’re not."

Ruby flinched.

Nana rarely spoke harshly to anyone. She was the kind of woman who found the gentlest possible path through every difficult conversation, who believed in patience the way other people believed in force.

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