Defying the Lycan King (Kira and Derek) novel Chapter 75

Chapter 75: The Curse of Memory

Flashback

It was only a few days after the werewolf ambush and massacre. Derek lay in his royal bedroom, his skin pale against the white sheets, and his breathing shallow. He was only a teenager.

The heavy curtains were drawn against the daylight, which he could not stand. The room felt dim and airless. The pack doctors, Adah and Lorenzo, moved around him in silence, checking the bandages on his arms and the shallow cuts that still stung across his chest.

Nana, Ruby, and Declan stood by the bedside. They all looked hollow, like ghosts wearing the faces of people he once knew. The bedroom was quiet, but it was the kind of quiet that felt heavy with death.

Ruby’s eyes were so puffy she could barely see, and her lips were bitten raw and swollen from trying to keep her cries inside.

She kept whispering the same thing over and over, staring at Derek as if he might disappear too.

"Is he going to be okay? Is he going to die too?"

Nana reached out and pulled Ruby into her side, stroking her hair. She had lost her entire family in the ambush — her mother, her father, and her elder brother Jasper. Derek watched them through half-closed eyes as Nana tried to console her, but even Nana’s hands shook.

He was unable to speak, unable to move. He had never seen Nana cry before, yet right then tears ran down her cheeks while she hugged both Ruby and Declan close. Declank had lost his whole family as well. The room felt too small for all that grief.

Since the night of that massacre, Derek hadn’t said a single word, except for the times he screamed in his sleep and bolted upright, heart hammering as if the blades were still coming.

Doctor Lorenzo straightened with a grim face. He wiped his hands on a cloth and looked at Nana. "We will have to involve herbs to help him recover," he said quietly. "His brain is caught in a loop of that night. If we don’t break the cycle soon, the trauma will drive him to madness. He might... he might kill himself just to make the visions stop."

"Do whatever you can to keep him alive," Nana sobbed. "He must leave this state quickly."

Just then, the heavy oak doors swung open. Uncle Crane walked in, followed by two sombre-looking gammas. He didn’t look at the doctors; he walked straight to the bed and bowed to Nana.

"We found them," Crane said, his voice shaking with a mixture of grief and fury. "We looked into the trail. We know who sent the assassins."

Derek’s eyes opened a little wider, and his ears perked up.

"It was Alpha Rolf Thornclaw," Crane spat. "The Moonfang Pack. That son-of-a-bitch has wanted to rule us from the very start. He’s the one who turned our home into a graveyard."

***

Present Day

Kira sat on the deck for several minutes after Derek had gone inside. Her mind kept turning over everything that had happened, round and round like the waves ahead. She decided then that she would go to Aethelwulf Centralis first thing in the morning. She needed to see Amanda and tell her everything.

Thankfully, The Central was neutral ground, right in the middle of both werewolf and Lycan territories, and it was not far from any of the packs.

Kira scrunched her nose at him. The warm man who had sat beside her on the deck with a beer in his hand had vanished. In his place was the cold King and husband she had come to know so well. His entire demeanour screamed, "Do not disturb."

Was the woman he knew back again?

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