The Raven Queen

by Emma Jayne Mills

  “Settling in, I see?” Caspian sneered, coming to heel beside her.

  “Jealous?” she baited.

  “I’m more concerned about how my brother would feel if he knew how cosy you and Lykos are.”

  “Since when do you give a shit about Jax?”

  “He’s your mate. Is this place secure?” Caspian followed her to the far side of the ring.

  “The castle is heavily guarded, it has alarms, sensors. Are you afraid for your safety, Caspian?”

  “Secure as in, can we be heard?” He scanned the room for cameras.

  “I know what you meant, Caspian, I was taking the piss.” He frowned at her and she momentarily took pity on him. Looking over to the large patio doors that sat within the wall of windows. She nodded in their direction. “The garden.”

  “Can we?” he asked, she nodded again and led him towards the doors.

  “Talk fast, shit head, Lykos won’t leave us alone for long.” She kicked off her boots and wandered out, barefoot, onto the grass.

  “You always did love being barefoot.” Caspian smiled, wistfully.

  “Talk.”

  “Are you being for real here? Have you really agreed to this, Aurora?”

  “What do you think?” She cocked her head to one side.

  “They’re coming for you. Tomorrow night. I’m to get you to the roof at 2am, they’ll have the chopper and pick you up. We just have to keep playing his game until then.” Caspian told her, talking quickly, and looking around nervously.

  “What makes you think I want to leave?” Aurora couldn’t wait to leave. The constant knot in her stomach reminded her that despite Lykos’s gentlemanly behaviour, she was still being held captive in the castle and she wasn’t prepared to be anyone’s prisoner.

  “You just said, when I asked if you were for real...”

  “I didn’t give you an answer one way or another.”

  “Aurora, I need you to work with me on this. I know I don’t deserve your trust, but I’m trying to make things right. Jax is coming for you, we’re going to get you out of here.” His pleading was pitiful.

  “And you think I’m just going to go along with Jax, after everything he’s done?” She was going with Jax. She’d beat the crap out of him as soon as they were out of there, but she was all for him coming to get her.

  She hadn’t ruled out getting herself out of the castle, it was merely a matter of waiting for a chance to present itself. The armed guards patrolling the castle roof stopped her from snapping the silver necklace and shifting to fly out. She needed a way past them first. A gentle breeze lifted her hair and with it came Lykos’s scent wafting towards them.

  “Aurora...” Caspian was cut off by her punch to his jaw. He stumbled back, eyes wide and lifted a hand to rub where she’d hit him. Before he could react, she hit him again, his nose cracked and his nostrils filled with blood. Caspian hadn’t seen him yet, but she was covering their backs. Lykos had just entered the gym and was walking towards the garden doors. Okay, so admittedly, she was having fun too.

  Lykos leaned against the door frame, his arms crossed over his chest and alerted Caspian to his presence by asking with a smirk, “Why is he bleeding, Koraki?”

  “Because he’s an idiot.” Aurora shrugged one shoulder and delivered a kick to Caspian’s mid-section, he groaned and doubled over.

  “I wasn’t aware that idiocy caused people to start spontaneously bleeding from the nose,” Lykos responded, with unmistakeable amusement. She elbowed Caspian between the shoulder blades, sending him to his knees.

  “I think it’s a new phenomenon.” She drew back her fist to take another shot.

  “You’ve made your point, Aurora. Don’t kill our beta yet, we only just got him.”

  “Yeah, well I have a very long list of points for this dip shit.” She shoved Caspian fully to the ground, where he lay groaning and holding his broken nose. She stepped up beside him and leaned over, the warning she delivered was real and menacing. “If you even consider going against me in any way, Caspian, I will kill you. Shift and sort that out before you come inside, I don’t want blood on the floor.”

  “At the risk of repeating myself, life with you will never be dull.” Lykos casually draped an arm around her shoulder when she came to stand next to him, having put her boots back on.

  “Someone has to keep you on your toes, old man.” She looked at him and winked as they left Caspian writhing on the ground and made their way out of the gym and through the castle.

  “Exactly how old do you think I am?” Lykos quirked a playful eyebrow at her. He closed the door behind them when they got back to his rooms.

  “Ancient,” she said, with a grin and flopped down on the sofa.

  “I am younger than your parents,” he said, tapping out a message on his phone, before setting it aside and coming to perch on the arm of the sofa.

  “You talk, and act, as though you’re older than them.” She stretched her legs out in front of her.

  “Perhaps because English is not my first language. I am not familiar with much of the slang you use. How did you find the Greek?”

  “Annoying.”

  “You mentioned you have questions?”

  “Why didn’t your father know you were an alpha? Why didn’t you know? That’s something we pick up immediately from a person. He would have known when you were born.” She looked into his eyes, demanding the truth.

  He sighed and clasped his hands together, threading his fingers. “The tincture made me small and weak, as you know. My father never interacted with his children as infants, he wasn’t at my birth and he was too arrogant to look more deeply once I was old enough to be in his presence. My Mother and Grandmother were the only two present at my birth and both knew I was an alpha. They gave me the tincture in my mother’s milk and kept it from everyone, me included. I was a child with an abusive father, I believed everything my mother and grandmother told me through fear of the man I was supposed to look up to.”

  “Where did they get the tincture?”

  “My Grandmother made it. She told me a witch taught her.”

  “Really?” Aurora thought about her own grandmother and the times she had joked about her being a witch. “Why though, I know you said he rarely letting alphas live, but would he really have killed his own son?”

  “He would not have killed me himself. Alphas were pit against each other in my father’s house. He would make not only his own alpha sons, but also those of his pack members face each other in the arena. Only one alpha could walk away.”

  “He made his sons fight to the death?”

  “You ought not be surprised, Koraki, not with what you already know of him.” He reached out and rested a hand on her knee, she didn’t think to move it away. “My Grandmother convinced my Mother that my alpha status be kept from everyone, they gave me the tincture to protect me.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “There were seven alphas born to my father, myself included. My Father’s men numbered in their hundreds, not all of them were part of the pack, some were his allies, occasionally a lone wolf would prove himself worthy of joining the pack. My father would take the alphas to his arena. My brother, Ambrosius, was the strongest, he fought and killed two of our brothers as well as several born to other pack members to take his place as my Father’s successor. Had it been known I too was an alpha I would have been made to fight him.”

  “And being weaker because of the tincture, you would have lost.”

  “It is likely,” he agreed. “You have more to say, Koraki.”

  “You and I don’t share a mate bond, Lykos. I told you I would stay and allow you to convince me to be your mate, but I already did the fake mate bond thing with Caspian. I won’t do it again.”

  “You feel nothing linking us? Nothing at all.”

  She didn’t answer him.

  “Aurora?” he stressed her name, and she shook her head in answer. She refused to admit, out loud, that she felt any ki
nd of connection to him, but her silence had given him everything he needed. “You don’t want to acknowledge it yet, I understand. I will court you slowly and give you time. All the time you need.” He reached out and gently ran the tips of his fingers across her knuckles. “You have blood on your hands, let me run you a bath.”

  Lykos left her alone and she held her hands out in front of her, looking at the knuckles covered in Caspian’s blood. The sound of running water drifted through the open door to the bathroom and her thoughts drifted with it. Time was not what Aurora needed, she wanted out of this place, before her Aurora shaped hole got any bigger. She didn’t have Lykos pegged as a patient man, so even though he said he would give her all the time she needed, she was certain it wouldn’t be long before he upped his game.

  Having heard Caspian’s version of Jax’s plan, she knew in her gut it wouldn’t happen that way exactly. She hoped Jax and Marco would fall back on their pack training, ensuring any plan they had could be anticipated by her. They clearly wouldn’t trust Caspian after he handed her over to Lykos, meaning that although they had sent him to the castle, they wouldn’t let him in on their actual plans. The fact that he didn’t mention Melaina gave her no clues and she couldn’t ask him about her. If she had gone to them, they would have hidden her, in case he told Lykos she was there, alerting him to the fact that something was going on. So, while Aurora had no doubt they were coming, she knew whatever they were planning would be a slight variation of what Caspian had told her. Most likely, they would come earlier than he thought. She needed to be ready.

  “What the hell are you talking about, Caspian?” Jax snapped down the phone and pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers. His brother was in a panic about something. Jax couldn’t decipher his jumbled explanation. “Slow the fuck down!”

  “She’s with Lykos, like actually with him, the way she was with me. Sharing meals, sitting on his lap, sleeping in his fucking bed...” Caspian rushed to speak.

  “What?” Jax stamped down the rage building inside him until he had the full story. This was Caspian, he reminded himself.

  “Yeah, I know. I hate to tell you this, bro, but Aurora is no prisoner here. Lykos is treating her like his queen and she’s not correcting him, she’s all smiley and touchy with him. The pack already accepted her. They think she’s the best thing since sliced bread. Her feet are well and truly under their table and she’s only been here a couple of days!” Caspian stopped for breath.

  “Clever girl.” Jax smiled and looked around the room at his teammates. Caspian was on speaker and the others could all hear his ranting.

  “Clever?” Caspian was confused.

  “She’s playing him, dumbass!” Marco snapped, rubbing a hand down his face and yawning. It was late and he’d been asleep. He lay on the floor propped on his side and had refused to move when Hunter kicked him awake with the toe of his boot. Hunter and Jax had been the only ones awake when Caspian called.

  “I don’t know about that. I mean, I told her what was happening, about you guys coming in to rescue her and she beat the shit out of me,” Caspian complained.

  “Definitely playing him,” Marco confirmed, with a grin.

  “And having fun with it,” Jax agreed. Cole stifled a laugh from his seated position, back against a wall and legs outstretched, at the edge of the room.

  “It’s not funny, she hits hard. I stopped training with her for a reason. She’s stronger than I remember too,” Caspian whined.

  “Look, Cas, this is nothing to worry about. Rory had no choice but to go in there and play her own game. She had no way of knowing what we were doing on the outside. Nothing changes, we go tomorrow night as planned.” Jax hung up before Caspian could say anything else.

  “You’re certain she’s playing them?” Zane asked.

  “No doubt. Rory is nobody’s prisoner. She would’ve had him wrapped around her little finger within minutes.” Jax’s girl was smart and as much as he hated that she was playing up to this psycho’s mate fantasy, he was glad she knew how to take care of herself and get the better of him. “This is actually perfect. She’ll have had Caspian figured out in seconds. He didn’t mention Mel either, so she’ll know it’s not the actual plan.”

  “She doesn’t trust him as far as she can throw him, she’ll anticipate that we don’t either and expect us to go in early,” Marco agreed.

  “You believe she’s that good?” Hunter asked, sceptically.

  “My father always worked us harder than the others because the three of us were set to run this pack together one day. He knew early on that Jax was my sister’s mate, my Gran saw the bond when Aurora was still a baby. Jax wouldn’t leave her alone. He was only a toddler himself, but he was in love with her from the minute he laid eyes on her.” Marco gave his friend a grin before he continued. “Two alphas running things would have made us the most powerful pack in history, but also the most targeted. Dad began preparing us for that as soon we could walk. This stuff is as ingrained into her as it is us. So, yes, she is that good.”

  “Then we go in at sundown, as planned.” Zane nodded once, then turned back to where he’d been sleeping in a corner of the room.

  Chapter Eight

  Denial is a weakness,

  with acceptance comes strength.

  When Lykos once again cooked breakfast- pancakes and bacon this time, Aurora began to tire of the perfect picture he was painting. Now that she had seen glimpses of the real him, she wanted to see more of it. It was the previous day’s revelations that made her stop and wonder about him, not this domesticated gentleman façade he insisted on portraying. He had slept next to her again in wolf form and she felt that he was showing her his true self then. His wolf was open and honest, unable to hide secrets. She couldn’t help but feel he wasn’t being as up front about everything as he claimed to be when he was in human form.

  She took a seat at the table, dressed in black from head to toe, with a towel wrapped around her wet hair. She’d picked through the clothes he supplied for her and found a few pieces that she could live with. Work out leggings and a black vest being her choice for the morning.

  “Do you plan on doing this every day?” She sipped the coffee he had poured for her.

  “Eat breakfast? Most would consider it normal, Koraki,” he answered, with an indulgent smile.

  “You know what I mean. This whole situation isn’t normal, Lykos. You kidnapped me and I made a deal to stay if you agreed to free one of your pack. You’re putting on a show, trying to prove that you’re not a psychopath who snatches women from their homes and locks them in towers.”

  “You aren’t locked in a tower, Aurora.”

  “You insist I wear a silver necklace to stop my shifts. That’s imprisonment, Lykos!”

  “A necklace you could remove at any time. Our relationship may not have begun in the most conventional way, but I am trying to show you how it could be. You are free to remove the necklace and leave any time you choose. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you don’t remain by choice.”

  “I remain so Melaina can be free of her abusive mate!”

  “How very noble of you.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “When you wish to move our relationship on, I am more than willing.”

  “Don’t hold your breath, old man!”

  There were several minutes of silence while Lykos moved with fluid grace around the kitchen, whisking pancake batter and frying bacon to perfection.

  “You can’t seriously expect me to believe that if we become mated, you will cook me breakfast every morning for the rest of our lives.”

  “Well, I was hoping that on occasion you might cook breakfast for me and perhaps there will be times when we eat breakfast in bed.” She didn’t miss the innuendo in his suggestion, or the heated look he gave her.

  “Cereal and toast is my limit,” she warned him.

  “Aurora, I am courting you, of course I am going to go to extra lengths to win your heart. In answer to y
our question, there may be days when time doesn’t allow, but yes, as often as I can, I will cook for you. Because I enjoy it and it is a simple way of letting you know I care about you.”

  “Just show me you, Lykos, that’s all I need,” she told him.

  “That is exactly what I am doing, of that you can be certain. Shall we eat and discuss the day ahead now, or would you prefer to continue your fruitless search for reasons not to be with me a little longer?” He poured more coffee into her cup and glancing up, he caught the smile she tried to hide from him. It warmed him to know she enjoyed this banter. “I’m growing on you, Aurora.”

  “Like a wart, a puss filled wart.” She stabbed her fork into the stack of pancakes on her plate, and he laughed the loud and obnoxious laugh that she was becoming accustomed to.

  “There is my feisty queen. I feared she was replaced with a whiny princess for a moment there,” he said, with obvious affection.

  “What do we need to discuss?” She changed the subject when he took a seat at the table with her, uncomfortable with the familiarity between them. A familiarity that had sprung up as soon as they had met. It wasn’t normal to be this comfortable with someone you’d just met, let alone someone who had kidnapped you.

  “Axel, for a start,” he replied.

  “I thought you dealt with him last night?”

  “I never updated you. To work as a team, we must keep one another informed.” He waited for her nod of agreement before she spoke again. “He was less than pleased about yesterday’s events with Mel. He had to be restrained. I had thought to jail him. However, he gave his word he will not follow and will contain his temper. Having said that, he is currently confined to his rooms with armed guards and will remain there for the time being.”

  “How does he feel about being replaced as beta?”

  “This is what concerns me more and is the reason for the guards. He blames you, claims you brought in your boyfriend to replace him and believes you both to be a danger to me. He threatened you, hence, I considered imprisonment, but my guards are good, they will not allow him to leave his quarters.” Lykos was watching her, trying to gage her reaction.