Chapter 659: Lucian Moon Said No

"Lucian, either you let go of me, or I am dragging you with me. But I am moving in the next three seconds regardless of which one you choose."

His hands released her arms. The loss of contact hit him like stepping out of sunlight into shade. The electricity vanished. The warmth vanished. His palms, which had been full of her and full of signal and full of the specific voltage that existed between a wolf and his mate, were empty.

"Lead the way."

She ran into a private room, then her hands came up. Pink magic split the air in a vertical line that expanded outward, widening into an opening that showed forest on the other side.

Lucian stopped dead.

"Since when can you make portals?"

He wasn’t bothering to hide his surprise. Making portals was not easy. Most Fae couldn’t. The list of impossible things that revolved around this woman kept growing.

"My first one," River breathed.

Lucian’s brain stalled for a full two seconds. Her first goddamn one. She was field-testing a portal on a rescue mission. Most people practiced on short distances. Empty rooms. Controlled environments.

River Aelindor had skipped the tutorial entirely. She was already running through it. Of course she was.

"River Aelindor, you are going to be the death of me," Lucian muttered, following her through.

✦✦✦

AELINDOR OUTER FOREST

She ran faster than Lucian had ever seen her run.

The speed was wrong. Wrong for a woman whose magic had been considered average until her wedding ceremony. Wrong for a Fae princess whose physical capability had never been her defining characteristic. Wrong in the specific way that everything about River had been wrong since the ceremony: too informed, too capable, too driven by knowledge she couldn’t explain and power she hadn’t known she possessed.

She was running as fast as a female wolf could in human form with zero training.

If her worry wasn’t bleeding through their matebond, he would have enjoyed this. But right now, his wolf was on alert. He was in protector mode, scanning their surroundings for threats as they ran. All clear so far.

Without warning, she stopped at the edge of a clearing and crouched down. Lucian dropped next to her, staying hidden in the trees. His body shifted into the posture it defaulted to when combat was probable: low, still, every sense amplified, his wolf running calculations behind his ribs at a speed his human brain couldn’t match.

Atlas was already walking towards someone on the field. Someone who Lucian knew. That was General Willow, Vesper’s father.

"Why would he come here if he knew..." River mumbled.

"If he knew what, River?" Lucian whispered.

General Willow was someone Lucian had dealt with on more than one occasion and someone that Lucian did not trust. But gut instinct and certainty were two different things. River was being too specific, and false parley would be crossing the line, even for someone like General Willow.

Through the matebond, her frustration pulsed. The frustration of a woman who had answers and couldn’t share them, who was watching a scene unfold that she’d already seen, who was operating from a playbook written in invisible ink that only she could read.

"He knows Vesper is using dark magic. Why would he agree to meet her father?"

Ah, that would make sense. Lucian didn’t answer for a moment. He sniffed the air.

The wind carried information that his wolf processed faster than his mind could translate. Scents layered over scents. The forest. The clearing. Atlas’s Fae magic. General Willow’s scent. And underneath all of it, woven through the tree line in a grid pattern: bodies. Hidden. Warded. Waiting.

Shit.

"Willow has men surrounding the area. They are using magic to conceal themselves, but I can smell them. If I were to guess, at least one hundred are spaced out." His gold eyes scanned the forest behind them.

"Since when can you smell concealed soldiers?" she whispered.

"Since always."

"You never mentioned that."

"You never asked." He smirked. The smirk was automatic, the muscle memory of a man whose default setting in River’s presence was warmth, even when the warmth was being delivered in a forest beside a field where a hundred soldiers were waiting. "You also never mentioned you could make portals."

"We all have secrets, Lucian."

The line was casual. Tossed off. Delivered with the particular lightness of a woman who was managing three simultaneous crises and had run out of bandwidth for self-awareness.

She had no idea how hard it hit.

We all have secrets, Lucian.

Yeah. They did. Hers was a portal and a timeline and intelligence from a source she couldn’t name. His was a matebond and a word his wolf had screamed at her bonding ceremony and a love so total it had survived every corridor he’d hidden it in and every column he’d pressed it against and every wall he’d slid down while her grief poured through his chest.

We all have secrets. His biggest secret was her.

"These are not equivalent secrets, River. Nobody wakes up one day and randomly makes a portal. That takes training," he said, his voice flat, filing the observation for later. "How many did your father bring?"

"His personal guard. That’s it."

Lucian was still for three seconds. The stillness of a warrior calculating distance, threat density, angle of approach.

No.

Absolutely not. Not today. Not ever. Not while Lucian was breathing.

Atlas had raised him.

That fact was older than his crown, older than his title, older than every alliance and every treaty and every political calculation that had shaped his reign. Before Lucian was a king, he was a boy, and the boy had a man who believed in him, and that man was standing in a clearing outnumbered a hundred to one with his chin up because Atlas Aelindor did not lower his chin for anyone, and Lucian loved him for it and hated him for it in equal measure because the chin was going to get him killed.

Atlas Aelindor was the best king born in a thousand years, and he was not dying on this grass. Every soldier in those trees was about to discover exactly what happens when they cross Lucian Moon.