Chapter 161: Barnaby.

Chapter 162

“Alaric! Look at me!” Selena’s face contorted with rage as she realized the moment had been snatched away. “I’m right here! Mark me!”

“Shut up,” Alaric growled, the voice not entirely his own. It was deeper, more guttural, vibrating with a frequency that made the glass in the window panes rattle.

The “logic” he had been clinging to—the politics, the pack’s expectations, his father’s stern face—shattered like glass.

None of it mattered. The throne, the lineage, the pride of the Blood-Moon pack… it was all ash compared to the scent drifting through that open window.

Selena reached for him again, her nails scratching against his skin as she tried to pull his face back to her neck. “Bite me! Alaric, I am your Luna! I am—”

He didn’t even look at her. With a strength that was bordering on feral, Alaric shoved past her.

His body collided with the window, the wood and glass exploding outward under the force of an Alpha’s frantic desperation.

He didn’t feel the shards of glass cutting into his skin; he didn’t feel the impact as he hit the forest floor in a rolling, chaotic tumble.

Before he had even stopped moving, he was shifting. The sound of snapping bones and tearing fabric filled the night air as his human form gave way to a massive wolf.

He didn’t wait to find his footing. He simply ran. He was a streak of shadow against the dark pines, his paws thundering against the earth as he chased the ghost of that lillies-and-honey scent.

Inside the cabin, the silence that followed his departure was deafening. Selena sat frozen on the edge of the bed, her naked skin goose-fleshed from the sudden rush of cold night air pouring through the shattered window.

Her dark hair was a mess, her chest heaving, and her eyes wide with a mixture of shock and utter humiliation. He had left her. He had seen her offered up, completely vulnerable and willing, and he had literally jumped through a window to get away from her.

“Alaric?” she whispered into the empty, cold room. He had chosen the darkness of the woods over the light of her ivory skin.

The shock rapidly curdled into a scorching, poisonous rage. Selena stood up, her small hands curling into white-knuckled fists.

She didn’t care about the cold. She didn’t care that she was standing naked in a ruined sanctuary.

“ALARIC!” she screamed at the top of her lungs, the sound tearing through the quiet woods. “YOU COWARD! COME BACK HERE!”

But there was no answer. Only the distant, fading sound of heavy paws hitting the dirt and the rustle of the wind through the trees.

She screamed again, a raw, ugly sound of thwarted ambition and wounded pride. She began to tear at the dark furs on the bed, ripping them away and throwing them against the wall in a blind fury.

Her mother had promised her this. The pack had promised her this. She was Selena Rohan, and she was supposed to be untouchable.

Now, she was just a girl standing in a broken cabin, smelling of a perfume that suddenly felt like a funeral shroud.

“I will kill her,” Selena hissed into the dark, her voice trembling with a lethal promise. She didn’t know who Alaric was running toward, but she knew one thing: if she couldn’t have the crown, she would make sure whoever took it from her paid in blood.

Meanwhile, miles away, the charcoal wolf didn’t slow down. He didn’t hear her screams. His world had narrowed down to a single, pulsing point of light on the horizon.

He was running toward the border, toward the sweet scent of honey and lilies—toward whatever was out there.

____

The Eastern Border was a place where the air always tasted of old magic and damp earth. Here, the White Oak trees stood like giants, their silver-grey bark scarred by centuries of weather and the occasional stray spell.

This was the site of Clara’s old cabin—a place of power long before her mother’s disaster. Clara stood in a small clearing, the leather-bound weight of her spellbook resting in the crook of her arm.

Beside her was her hound pet, looming in the mist. It let out a vibrating huff, its nostrils flaring as it tasted the wind.

Marcus stood a few paces back, his arms folded across his chest, his shadow lengthening as the sun began its slow descent behind the treeline.

He was a man of few words, a silent, loyal being who had long ago learned that in the world of the creatures, listening was more valuable than speaking.

He watched Clara with an unreadable expression. Even now, after everything he had witnessed in Lucian’s service, he found it difficult to wrap his mind around the reality of her existence.

Witches were supposed to be extinct—whispers of a dying age, burned out of history. Yet here she was, standing in the center of an ancient grove, her white eyes tracking invisible currents in the air.

Marcus shifted his weight, his gaze flickering to the massive, shadow-fleshed hound at her side.

He had seen many horrors, but the creature Clara called her ’child’ was something else entirely.

It was a beast woven from nightmare, a silent guardian that seemed to share her very pulse. He still couldn’t quite fathom how his life had shifted so drastically.

A few months ago, his world was structured and predictable. Now, he was the primary guard for a Sovereign King who had found a mate in a girl—Isabella—who shouldn’t even exist.

A Lycan. The word still felt heavy in his mind, out of place and dangerous. If the world was a puzzle, Isabella was the piece that had been forced in, changing the entire picture.

Clara raised her hand, her voice dropping into a melodic chant that wasn’t meant for human ears.

The air in the clearing suddenly grew denser, charged with a static that made the hair on Marcus’s arms stand on end.

The sentinel hound threw its head back, its throat vibrating with a sound that wasn’t a bark, but a bone-deep roar.

The ground beneath Marcus’s boots shuddered but he didn’t flinch. He simply tightened his grip on his own biceps, his eyes scanning the perimeter.

Clara had dragged him out here hours ago, claiming she needed him, yet he had done nothing but stand and watch.

He hadn’t seen a single living soul for miles. No deer, no stray wolves, not even a rabbit. The forest had gone deathly silent in the wake of her magic.

Clara let out a sharp exhale, the glow around her fingers dissipating into the evening mist.

She closed her spellbook and turned her head. She looked at the horizon, where the bruised purples of twilight were beginning to swallow the orange glow of the sun.

She felt Marcus’s gaze on her—the silent, questioning weight of a man who didn’t demand answers but certainly deserved them.

“The sun is setting,” Clara remarked, her voice cutting through the ringing silence left by the hound’s roar.

She turned fully to face him, the silver runes on her book shimmering faintly. “You’ve been remarkably patient, Marcus. Even for you.”

Marcus offered a single, slow nod. He didn’t ask why. He didn’t ask when they were going back. He just waited.

Clara walked toward him, the hound staying where it was, looking deeper into the forest. “You must be wandering why I dragged you five miles out into the brush just to watch me talk to trees,” she said, her lips tilting into a mirthless smile.

She paused, her eyes shifting toward the North, toward the unseen boundary of the Lucain’s territory.

“Lucian and Isabella… they are at a precipice. The bond is a wildfire, Marcus. It’s beautiful, but it’s loud. It pulses through the earth like a heartbeat. If I hadn’t come here to anchor the wards at the source—to pull the scent of her awakening into these oaks—every creature within a fifty-mile radius would be at the mansion’s gates by midnight.”

Marcus looked down at her, his stance going relaxed as he let his arms drop to his sides. He took a moment to process the weight of her words.

The idea that a single bond could vibrate with enough frequency to alert the entire region was staggering. He had known Lucian was powerful, and he had heard of Isabella’s transformation, but the scale of their union was beginning to sound like an environmental catastrophe.

He looked back toward the direction of the mansion, his voice low and gravelly from hours of disuse. “So you mean… they…”

He didn’t finish the sentence, but the implication hung heavy in the damp air. He was a soldier, used to the brutal and the direct, but there was something about the concept of a Sovereign mating with a Lycan that felt like a shift in the natural order of the world.

Clara met his gaze steadily, her white eyes unblinking. “Yes. They mated. The bond is sealed in blood and spirit, Marcus. It’s no longer a possibility; it’s a reality that the earth itself is trying to announce.”

Marcus looked away, staring into the darkening shadows of the white oaks. The silence of the forest suddenly felt less like peace and more like a held breath.

Before he could formulate another thought or ask how Lucian was holding up under the strain of such a connection, a sudden sound cut through the clearing.

The sentinel hound, which had been standing like a statue near the edge of the grove, let out it’s massive, ear-splitting bark.

The sound was so sudden and so loud that both Clara and Marcus flinched, their instincts flaring.

Without a second of hesitation, the beast lunged forward, becoming a blur of shadow and muscle.

Its paws tearing into the soft earth as it chased after a small, grey rabbit that had foolishly darted across its line of sight.

“Barnaby! No!” Clara shouted, but the hound was already a hundred yards away, its tail disappearing into the thick underbrush.

She let out a frustrated hiss, clutching her spellbook to her chest as she started after it. “The simpleton… he’ll chase that thing all the way to the coast if I let him.”

Marcus was about to follow a step behind her but Clara looked back at him and said. “I will go get him, just stay and hold my spell book.” She dumps her book for him to hold and walked off.

The chase was leading her away from the safety of the oaks and closer to the, invisible line that marked a pack border.

Clara pushed through a dense thicket of ferns, her eyes scanning the dark for the glowing embers of the hound’s eyes.

She stopped at the edge of a small ravine, her breath hitching as she realized how far they had moved in just a few seconds.

The air here was different.

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