Defying the Lycan King (Kira and Derek) novel Chapter 301

Chapter 301: A Girl with Ginger Curls

A week later...

"Jessica. Have you been well?"

Kai stood on the shore with his hands in his pockets and spoke to the water as though it might answer him.

He had been coming here since the day he got back. Not once or twice, but again and again, whenever there was a gap in his diary and sometimes when there wasn’t. Even after he had finally stood in front of the council and accepted the mantle he had spent three years running from, he had come straight here afterwards. To tell her. Because who else was he going to tell?

Everyone kept saying the same thing to him, in the same careful voice, as though they had all agreed on the wording beforehand. Move on, Kai. Accept it. She died in that accident. They said it kindly. They said it firmly. His mother had said it with tears in her eyes.

But they never found a body.

And how was a man supposed to accept a thing like that? How was he supposed to wake up one morning and simply decide that he would never see her again, that the whole rest of his life would happen without her in it?

He looked at his phone screensaver, where the both of them were smiling at the camera. It was a ridiculous photo. Chocolate smeared across both their faces, Jessica mid-laugh with her eyes shut.

He blinked twice, hard, until the sting behind his eyes retreated.

"Jessica!" he shouted at the sea. "Can you hear me?"

Some distance back along the shoreline, Dennis, his Beta, stood with a handful of gammas, watching their Alpha shout at open water. Nobody said anything. They had all dropped their heads and found something interesting to look at on the ground.

Kai squinted at the horizon and started talking again, easily, the way you talk to someone who is standing right beside you.

"They’ve made me Alpha of Crescent Moon, Jess. Can you believe that?" He laughed under his breath and shook his head. "I never once thought it would happen. Did you?"

He waited.

The wind came in off the water and the waves went on doing what waves do, and that was the whole of his answer.

"I wish you were here," he said, quieter now. "You should have been my Luna."

He stood there a long moment. Then something in his chest gave way.

"Jessica!" His voice cracked open and tore across the water. "Where are you?!"

His legs went from under him and he dropped to his knees on the wet sand and wept, shoulders shaking, making almost no sound at all.

Not one of his men moved. They knew better. They had seen this before, more times than any of them would ever admit out loud, and the Moon Goddess help whoever was stupid enough to approach him in the middle of it.

They simply turned their faces away and let their Alpha grieve.

***

A few minutes later Kai was in the back of the car heading towards Aethelwulf, sunglasses on, hiding eyes that were still red raw.

He had been seeing Alicia for the past week.

She was, to be entirely fair to her, a good woman. Beauty and brains, exactly as his mother had advertised. She was well-mannered and genuinely funny, and she had thrown herself into this arrangement with both hands, showing up, making an effort, being deliberate about every part of it.

She would make a flawless Luna for Crescent Moon.

The problem was not Alicia. The problem was that nobody on this earth was ever going to be right for him. Not in this lifetime.

Tomorrow he was going to give the pack exactly what it wanted. The engagement was already in motion, the arrangements halfway made, and Alicia was so visibly happy about it that he found it difficult to look at her sometimes.

Don’t forget to come to the shopping centre. We need to pick the rings together. I’ll be waiting.

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