Defying the Lycan King (Kira and Derek) novel Chapter 231

Chapter 231: Mine

The entire world seemed to grind to a halt in the middle of the Wolf Council hallway. Kira’s body went rigid.

The moment her chest collided with his, the moment his scent flooded her nose—that sweet citrus she had come to love—her beast came roaring up from wherever she’d been sulking these past weeks.

The animal pressed against the inside of Kira’s skin, yearning, straining toward him, and would not stop howling one single word.

Mine. Mine. Mine.

Kira’s stomach clenched. She’d walked out of that council room feeling ten feet tall, and now her own body was betraying her in a hallway, aching toward the very man she’d sworn never to lay eyes on again.

Derek stumbled back a step, staring at her as though she were a ghost risen out of the floor.

And inside him, Leo, who had been silent and withdrawn for weeks, who had shrunk down into some cold corner of him and refused to so much as stir, suddenly surged forward with such force that Derek nearly lost himself to it.

The beast reached for her, clawing to get out, chanting with a desperate, joyful hunger.

Mine. Mine. Mine.

Derek’s breath caught in his throat.

Because he knew what white Lycans were. The rarest of their kind, the only ones with the ability to perceive bonds and links that stayed invisible to everyone else. And if Leo was reacting like this, if the bond was singing this loudly through him now that she stood before him unmasked...

His throat worked visibly as his suspicions turned into reality. She was his soulbond. She had always been his soulbond.

"Kira..." he whispered, and he sounded startled by his own voice, as though he’d forgotten how to say her name aloud.

Kira didn’t answer straight away.

She looked at him for a long, long moment, taking him in properly; the dark circles bruised beneath his eyes, the hollowness in his cheeks, the way his jaw was clenched so tight it looked painful, the whole ragged, worn-down state of him.

And she felt that awful, tangled knot of being bonded to the very person who had broken her open and left her bleeding on the floor.

Her beast wanted him. Her heart, traitor that it was, twisted at the sight of him looking so wrecked.

"You look terrible," she muttered.

Derek’s eyes moved over her, slowly. Not with hunger or with heat. He was simply drinking her in, cataloguing her, as if to be sure she was real.

And she looked different. She had always been polished, always carried herself well, but this was something else entirely. There was a sharpness to her now, in the line of her shoulders, in the set of her chin, in the cool steadiness of those eyes. She stood like a woman who knew exactly who she was. She was in another league.

"You look beautiful," he said quietly.

Kira nodded once. But she didn’t walk away.

She couldn’t. Her legs simply would not obey her. She stood rooted there in the hallway, staring up into those amber eyes that spoke a hundred things his mouth would not say. Regret. Grief. Something that looked, horribly, like longing.

Derek, for his part, was still dumbstruck. He stared at her as though he feared that if he blinked, if he so much as breathed wrong, she would vanish like smoke and leave him standing in an empty corridor, mad with grief again.

Then he caught a movement behind her.

Someone cleared their throat, and the strange spell stretched taut between them snapped clean in half.

Derek’s gaze flicked past her shoulder to see a man standing there, he was a gamma from Crystal Moon Pack. He had clocked that from his scent.

The gamma bowed his head to the King, then turned his attention to Kira, his eyes flicking over her with quiet concern.

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