Chapter 231: Mine
The entire world seemed to grind to a halt in the middle of the Wolf Council hallway. Kira’s body went rigid.
The moment her chest collided with his, the moment his scent flooded her nose—that sweet citrus she had come to love—her beast came roaring up from wherever she’d been sulking these past weeks.
The animal pressed against the inside of Kira’s skin, yearning, straining toward him, and would not stop howling one single word.
Mine. Mine. Mine.
Kira’s stomach clenched. She’d walked out of that council room feeling ten feet tall, and now her own body was betraying her in a hallway, aching toward the very man she’d sworn never to lay eyes on again.
Derek stumbled back a step, staring at her as though she were a ghost risen out of the floor.
And inside him, Leo, who had been silent and withdrawn for weeks, who had shrunk down into some cold corner of him and refused to so much as stir, suddenly surged forward with such force that Derek nearly lost himself to it.
The beast reached for her, clawing to get out, chanting with a desperate, joyful hunger.
Mine. Mine. Mine.
Derek’s breath caught in his throat.
Because he knew what white Lycans were. The rarest of their kind, the only ones with the ability to perceive bonds and links that stayed invisible to everyone else. And if Leo was reacting like this, if the bond was singing this loudly through him now that she stood before him unmasked...
His throat worked visibly as his suspicions turned into reality. She was his soulbond. She had always been his soulbond.
"Kira..." he whispered, and he sounded startled by his own voice, as though he’d forgotten how to say her name aloud.
Kira didn’t answer straight away.
She looked at him for a long, long moment, taking him in properly; the dark circles bruised beneath his eyes, the hollowness in his cheeks, the way his jaw was clenched so tight it looked painful, the whole ragged, worn-down state of him.
And she felt that awful, tangled knot of being bonded to the very person who had broken her open and left her bleeding on the floor.
Her beast wanted him. Her heart, traitor that it was, twisted at the sight of him looking so wrecked.
"You look terrible," she muttered.
Derek’s eyes moved over her, slowly. Not with hunger or with heat. He was simply drinking her in, cataloguing her, as if to be sure she was real.
And she looked different. She had always been polished, always carried herself well, but this was something else entirely. There was a sharpness to her now, in the line of her shoulders, in the set of her chin, in the cool steadiness of those eyes. She stood like a woman who knew exactly who she was. She was in another league.
"You look beautiful," he said quietly.
Kira nodded once. But she didn’t walk away.
She couldn’t. Her legs simply would not obey her. She stood rooted there in the hallway, staring up into those amber eyes that spoke a hundred things his mouth would not say. Regret. Grief. Something that looked, horribly, like longing.
Derek, for his part, was still dumbstruck. He stared at her as though he feared that if he blinked, if he so much as breathed wrong, she would vanish like smoke and leave him standing in an empty corridor, mad with grief again.
Then he caught a movement behind her.
Someone cleared their throat, and the strange spell stretched taut between them snapped clean in half.
Derek’s gaze flicked past her shoulder to see a man standing there, he was a gamma from Crystal Moon Pack. He had clocked that from his scent.
The gamma bowed his head to the King, then turned his attention to Kira, his eyes flicking over her with quiet concern.
"Are you alright?" he asked her.
Kira let out a breath she hadn’t realised she was holding, offering Gavin a small, grateful smile. "I’m fine, Gavin," she said. "Let’s get out of here."
She turned back to Derek and gave him a single, cool nod. "I’ll be leaving first, Your Grace."
And she moved past him.
Derek didn’t stop her. He stood rooted to the spot, his brain short-circuiting. He was still contemplating whether what had just happened was a beautiful dream or a bizarre reality.
Was he truly seeing his wife in the flesh, or had his guilt-ridden mind finally snapped, creating a brilliant figment of his imagination?
A few seconds passed, then he blinked twice, snapping out of the paralyzing spell of shock. He spun around to see Kira already walking away, the Crystal Moon gamma at her side.
His frown deepened, and fury began to curl through the confusion as his brain began to piece together what it all was. Braxton had been the one hiding his wife for an entire month, and yet the man had the gall to look him dead in the eye and lie about her whereabouts during their official communications.
But he shoved it down. Now was not the time for anger. Not when she was walking away from him again.
Derek forgot all about his meeting with the werewolf council. He forgot the apology, the elders, the whole reason he’d come, went after her, striding fast, and calling out.
"Kira. Kira, wait."
She did not stop. She did not so much as glance over her shoulder. She kept walking at her own unhurried pace, as if she couldn’t hear him at all.
Off to the side, Declan and Connor watched the entire thing unfold. Declan stood frozen, stunned into speechlessness, his mouth slightly open. Connor’s face, by contrast, remained perfectly blank, perfectly composed.
Once Derek had swept past them in pursuit, Declan finally found his voice. "What," he breathed, "in the goddess’s name just happened?"
"The queen," Connor said evenly, "just met the King."
Derek followed Kira down the corridor. And the moment she registered him right behind her, matching her step for step, she walked faster. Derek lengthened his own stride, his long legs easily eating up the distance she tried to put between them.
When they finally split out through the front doors and into the open air, Kira understood he was not going to give up. He would follow her all the way to the car if she let him.
So she stopped and turned to face him.
"What do you want, Derek?"
Derek stopped a few feet away, his chest heaving as if he had just run a marathon rather than a short hallway sprint. He looked down at her, his amber eyes burning with an intense desperation.
"I’m not letting you disappear again, Kira" he said.
Kira looked at him for a long moment, saying nothing. And there was so much in that silence, so much history, so much hurt, so much that neither of them could untangle standing here on a Wolf Council driveway.
"You have terrible timing," she said at last. Then, more evenly, "We do need to talk. I won’t pretend otherwise. But not now. Not here."
She held his gaze. "I’m sure you can work out well enough where I’ve been all this time. When I’m ready, Alpha Braxton will reach out to your office to schedule a proper meeting. Until then, please, don’t show up."
Before Derek could speak, the door of a nearby SUV swung open, and a mature, elegant woman dressed in a sharp peach coloured suit stepped out. She was, unmistakably, an older version of Kira. The same eyes. The same bones. The same quiet grace.
Derek’s breath caught, thrown completely off balance by the resemblance.
"Serene, darling?" Claire called out, eyes moving between the two of them. "Is everything alright over there?"
Kira’s whole face softened instantly. "Everything is perfectly fine, Mum," Kira said gently. "Just giving a brief greeting. I’ll be there in a second."
Mum? Derek’s mind reeled, grasping, spinning. Was her mother still alive? What in the goddess’s name is going on here?
