The Alpha King Marked Me. I Still Haven't Told Him I'm A Girl-Chapter 154: Extra - s (Lucien & Valka) V

Valka

Past

The branches snap behind me and I jolt, disoriented, my hands raised high in a defensive stance.

"Did I startle you?" the man says, but his blue eyes do not seem the least apologetic as they rove across my face, his cheeks reddening. "I apologize. I’m lost, I think. I never knew people lived in these parts. I’ve been walking around in circles for the last hour. Do you think you could help me?"

"If you thought for a single second," I warn, fingers tightening into a fist. "that I would fall for that shit, you are in for a reckoning. I will gut you faster than you can blink if you so much as move."

He follows my pointed stare to the shears sitting by the plants I’d been tending, and after a moment, he raises his hands to make himself appear harmless. "I have no intent on attacking you. Or whatever it is you think I am here to do. I promise. I really am lost."

It’s the oldest trick in the book. But he looks so genuinely bewildered that I straighten anyway, wiping the dirt from my fingers with the rag. "Where are you going?"

He is dressed too finely for these woods. Fine boots, deep-blue tunic stitched so neatly it’s practically smug about it, and a cloak clasped with actual gold. He scratches the back of his head. "I’m in search of the woodmaker. I hear he makes the best seats in the village."

My eyebrows rise. "That would be my father."

His smile grows, revealing perfect white teeth and I am struck by how handsome he is. In the back of my mind, silver hair and violet eyes flash, but I shove it down. It’s been years since I left his home. I developed a terrible habit of going back and running off again. But the last time, I knew it’d be best if I kept away, when I caught him staring at me with something delicate in his eyes.

And then, he laughed and I thought it the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It was then I knew it wasn’t lust or a stupid crush anymore. And it suddenly became very real, very scary, I ran away. Because there was no future for us. None that meant I stayed alive, at least.

It’s been many years ever since I made the decision not to return, for both our sakes.

I left without informing him and upon returning, I found my father unwell. I never told him when I was leaving or where I was going, and I didn’t realize being gone for that long would make his heart begin to hurt.

He’d slapped me.

He’d never hit me before. I still remember what it felt like, feeling my head reel from the sheer force of it. When he said I was never to leave home again, I understood. In the weeks I’d been gone, there was an outrageous increase in the number of huntings for Lycans. New government. If you were so much as suspected, you were burned alive or shot dead on sight.

"Ah," the stranger say with a smooth laugh. "Shall I call this fate, then?"

I roll my eyes and begin the long walk home. "Don’t push your luck, sir."

"Malachy," he says, catching up to me. I don’t miss the way he stares at me. The way his eyes keep widening and his cheeks reddening. The way he seems eager to hear what I say next. "You may call me Malachy. Or Mal."

I don’t respond.

"How long have you lived here? You seem familiar with the terrain, whereas all the trees look the same to me," he murmurs after a moment.

My shoulders tense slightly. We’ll have to move again soon. Father often carves his work and takes them to the market himself. No one ever really comes down here. "It’s not so difficult once you understand the markers. I’d take note of it, if I were you. I will not be walking you back."

"And if I get lost again?"

I shrug. "Then I imagine the beasts that roam these woods will have a great feast tonight."

He laughs again. It is a booming sound. He laughs like a soldier--without restraint, and he walks gingerly like one, his eyes scanning every corner, alert.

We round the corner just then. Father is bringing down an axe on a tree trunk, and his eyes flick upwards, taking us both in. He frowns as his gaze fixes on the man and he looks at me in silent question.

I just shrug again. It’s not like he wouldn’t have found our home himself if he had wandered for a little longer.

The male’s stance switches quickly, his chin rising and his spine stiffening. He goes from charming to hard in less than a second, and my lips part in surprise when he retrieves a seal from his waist band, showing it to my father.

"Malachy, Captain of the King’s Guard."

Father and I stiffen. Could it be... I begin considering the distance and how quickly it might take to snap his neck. But he only says, "His Majesty would like for you to fashion him a crib for his newborn who is due to arrive in a fortnight. Can you do that?"

Father looks... dazed. But he catches himself. "Of course. Lyra, get our guest a stool."

***

Father finishes the crib in a week, but Malachy didn’t stop dropping by. He became fast friends with father, and infuriatingly, I was always made to serve him, make him things, bring him things, show him around, walk him through.

Annoying as it was, he was great company. He was funny. He was kind, which is more than I can say for most men in Silvermoor. When I spoke, he didn’t try to remind me that women in our world had no place speaking. No. He seemed to like listening to me.

I learned, as the days progressed, that he was something of a scholar and a knight. It was contradictory but it made for good conversation. He didn’t speak much, but when he did, he would speak so long about things I didn’t know shit about and I knew it was going to be a problem when I soon started to forget why I ever went to Ebonheart in the first place, and found myself watching him more deeply than I had any other man apart from the King.

And one day, on our walks, he walked me back into a tree and kissed me. I expected he would do more. Try to take advantage of that tiny moment where I’d hesitated before pulling away and deepened the kiss, but he didn’t. He said with conviction that I would be his wife.

I’d thought him silly, but that night, he told my father he wanted to marry me. And father had little objection to it.

I met his father and sisters the next week, and a date was fixed.

But something didn’t feel right. It wasn’t just about the fact that I knew I had to tell him what I was, eventually. Neither was it him. He was perfect. And he made my heart race faster, made me laugh often, and I couldn’t wait till the next moment I saw him, couldn’t wait for the moment his fingers dug into my waist and his weight pressed against my chest. He made me feel like a little girl again, hiding in the woods for shy kisses. He made me forget I was old, made me forget I was a Lycan, made me forget Ilya and occasionally, Lucien.

In Malachy’s eyes, I was a flower. Pure, fragile. I decided I liked feeling that way.

But whenever I slept at night, I dreamed of Lucien. In my dreams, I am a dirty little slut, begging to be touched, fucked, railed within an inch of my life.

I felt horrible whenever I woke, because my spine was always arched, my lips trapped between my teeth, my skin flushed and my inner thighs wet with cum. I felt like I was cheating. On whom, I couldn’t tell. Malachy? Lucien? Who did I want?

I couldn’t tell anymore. But it did occur to me that I’d never thought about sex with Malachy in the way it took center stage in my mind when it came to Lucien. It felt like a destructive force that would eat me alive if I didn’t find the first horse and go back to him.

The harder I tried to banish him from my head, the more severe the repercussions became. The dreams graduated into chills that grew into fevers. Every time I kissed Malachy, my belly would cramp for the entire night and I would puke until I felt like dying. I knew it was Ilya’s work, her revulsion of anyone that wasn’t her King, but it was driving me mad. I--She--We missed him so much, it was wrecking my body.

Father didn’t know how to help me, and I wasn’t even willing to share what was happening with me.

And one day, she decided for me.

On my fixed wedding date, at first light, she dragged me across the kingdom and back to Lucien.