Defying the Lycan King (Kira and Derek) novel Chapter 214

Chapter 214: The Armour She Wore

Connor sat across from Derek, studying his King.

Derek looked terrible. His eyes were red-rimmed, ringed with dark circles, the face of a man who had not slept in days and looked like he had been engaging in a staring contest with a furnace.

Connor had already heard the whole of it from Declan before being brought in, every awful piece of what had happened in that study.

And of course, they had drilled him first, a long string of questions to test his memory, to be certain he was truly Connor and not some Umbra wearing his face, before they would let him anywhere near the King’s quarters.

"She’s a white Lycan," Derek said, his gaze fixed down on the stacks of documents littering his desk.

"I know," Connor said.

Derek exhaled slowly and fell silent. The quiet stretched on, heavy and uncomfortable.

After a while, he looked up. "Why aren’t you saying anything?" he asked. "Aren’t you going to blame me too? Go on. I don’t need your deference right now, Connor. You can speak as freely as you like. Say what you think of me."

Connor shrugged. "I have nothing to say, Your Grace. Because I wasn’t the one standing in your shoes. It’s not my place to judge a decision I didn’t have to make."

Derek said nothing for a long moment. Then, quietly, "Tell me how you lost her that night. Who took her?"

Connor drew a breath, and began to narrate it. How a certain werewolf woman had approached the queen in the hotel. How she had told Kira something that stopped her dead in her tracks.

"She told the queen," Connor said carefully, "that her mother was alive."

That caught. Derek’s eyes flew to Connor at once, sharp and sudden.

"Her mother. Alive?"

Connor nodded. "I tried to listen in on their conversation, Your Grace, but I’ll be honest, I was distracted. I kept getting this feeling that something was wrong, that the night was about to turn. I only caught snippets."

He paused, gathering them. "The woman claimed that Rolf wasn’t the queen’s father at all. That the queen was a hybrid, and that her true father had been a Lycan. And that her mother, not Rolf, was the original heir of Moonfang."

Derek stared at him, and as he did, piece after piece began to slot into place in his mind.

The reason Rolf had despised Kira so deeply, so personally, every day of her life. The reason he had scrubbed every trace of Kira’s mother from the world, erased her so thoroughly that no one in Moonfang dared speak her name.

The reason he had sent Kira to Derek in the first place, in Chloe’s stead, instead of giving up his own beloved daughter.

Derek had always known of Rolf’s hatred for his wife. But somehow, in his own blindness, his own bottomless mistrust, he had let it twist him into believing it was all a strategy to let him lose his guard.

He had let his deepest fears turn him into a monster, hurting Kira with his cruelty.

He had spiralled. He saw that now, very clearly. The terror of being another Lycan King who had been made a fool of by werewolves a second time had closed over his head like dark water, so much that he had not given her so much as a single moment to explain herself before he tore her to pieces.

And the truth, the truth he could no longer outrun, was this. Rolf’s hatred for Kira had been real and total her entire life. And Kira had always, always been loyal.

Even when she had looked him in the eye and said she was loyal only to herself, he understood it now for what it truly was. It was the armour of a girl who had been given nothing and no one to be loyal to. It was a shield, not a betrayal.

He had been so consumed by his own trauma that he had refused to see the trauma she had carried all along. He had stood there and demanded trust from her.

Trust, from a girl whom no living soul had ever once given a reason to trust. And he had demanded it without ever offering her a scrap of his own in return.

I choose to be cheerful because happiness shouldn’t depend on the time of year, or on what’s going right. It’s a choice.

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