Chapter 5 5

Chapter 5

Layla

...

The room went silent all at once — the kind of silence that has weight to it, that presses down on your shoulders like a hand.

I held my breath without deciding to. The Lycan King's eyes stayed locked on mine, and something in my ribs pulled tight, like a rope drawn one turn too far.

His expression didn't shift. Cold. Distant. A trace of something close to contempt sitting just under the surface.

I can't look weak in front of him.

Not even a flicker of it. If I wanted any chance of standing under this man's protection, I needed him to see something other than prey.

I unclenched my hands slowly and made myself breathe at a normal pace.

Alexander Hagard Raizel stood directly in front of me now. Beside him, Hendry Gargan stayed bowed, confusion written plainly across what I could see of his face.

I let my expression soften and lifted my chin to meet the King's eyes.

"Your Majesty. We meet again. Forgive me for this morning — I didn't recognize you, and I was too shaken to greet you properly."

I kept my voice even, deliberate. I needed him to understand that our first meeting hadn't been some calculated move on my part.

Hendry's head came up beside us, clearly waiting for an explanation of his own. I didn't give him one.

Right now, only one person in this hall mattered. In a world built out of monsters and older magic than I understood, this man was the only thing standing between me and whatever came next.

"Hm."

His eyes moved over my face, unhurried, then traveled the rest of the way down, cataloguing me the way you'd inspect something you were considering buying.

Then he closed the distance.

All of it, gone in one step.

He was close enough now that I could feel warmth off his skin, close enough that the room around us seemed to fall away entirely. I locked my knees and refused to give him the satisfaction of a step back.

Whispers picked up around the hall. Every wolf in the room was watching how close we stood, eyes bright with speculation.

He didn't break eye contact once.

"Alpha Hendry Gargan."

Hendry straightened immediately, dropping his head. "Yes, Your Majesty."

"The girl in front of me," Alexander said, unbothered, almost bored, "I understand she was your fiancée. And that she's just ended the engagement herself."

His eyes never left mine while he said it.

"Is that correct?"

The air around me had gone thick, hard to pull into my lungs. His presence alone seemed to be taking something out of me by the second, and those eyes wouldn't let me look anywhere else.

"Y— yes, Your Majesty," Hendry managed, glancing toward me and getting nothing back.

I kept my attention entirely on Alexander.

Of course he already knew everything. A Lycan King's senses put him above every other wolf in the room — he'd heard the whole exchange the moment he walked through the door.

"Hm." His gaze shifted again, tracing down toward my mouth this time, like he'd noticed something there worth a second look.

A small smile crossed his face.

"Then I'll take her."

Said lightly. Like an afterthought.

"She'll be my slave."

The silence that followed had a different texture entirely — the kind that could break bone.

My thoughts emptied out completely.

A princess. Property?

I wasn't the only one caught off guard. Hendry's face had gone rigid, disbelief plain across it as he stared at the King.

"Your Majesty, even without the engagement formally ended, she remains the princess of Erland Noir, and—"

"I want her." Alexander cut through him without raising his voice at all.

There was nothing to argue with in that tone. It simply didn't allow for it.

"Do you intend to stand in my way?"

That calm was worse than any shout could have been.

"And that disgusting excuse for a king," he continued, voice dropping colder with every word, "has already allied himself with the Underworld. One of my own died because of him. The message still found its way to me regardless."

The room shifted around us, tension rising by the second.

"He'll answer for that." His eyes sharpened as they returned to me. "And his daughter—"

Something dark passed behind his gaze.

"—will kneel at my feet."

"A lesson, for anyone who thinks provoking me comes without cost."

The murmurs turned to a roar.

Hostility filled the room instantly, every set of eyes swinging toward me like I was the one who'd made the decision to betray them. Like I was something contaminated.

Never mind that the crime belonged entirely to Layla Swan's father.

"Knew it. Humans are all the same."

"Can't keep a single promise between them."

"Filthy creatures."

The words came at me from every direction, and none of it mattered — not really, not compared to what I sensed was coming next.

Panic finally cracked through whatever composure I'd been holding onto.

Layla Swan's father had killed the wolf envoy sent to Erland Noir.

That wasn't in the book. Not yet, not this early.

In the story, the war between humans and wolves only spiraled after Layla Swan died. But I was alive. I was wearing her name, her crown, her fate.

So why had everything already gone wrong?

Before I could untangle any of it, hands closed around my arms.

Metal snapped shut over my wrists.

Chains.

Sound started sliding away from me — voices overlapping into a single blurred wall of noise as several of the high-ranking wolves began shouting, throwing whatever was in reach.

"Kill the human!"

"Filth!"

"You can't trust a single one of them!"

The words hit my ears strangely, distorted, like I was hearing them underwater. My breath wouldn't come easy.

The room tilted.

The chains. The shouting. The objects hitting the floor near my feet.

All of it felt — recognizable. Not new. Like I'd already lived through this exact moment, somewhere, sometime.

What is this?

Something inside my chest cracked open, and it hurt worse than anything I'd felt since the vase came down on my skull.

Tears started without permission. I stared at my bound hands while the room kept flickering in and out of focus.

I shook my head, trying to clear it, eyes stinging.

Why does this feel like memory instead of the present?

Why does it hurt this much?

Is this even mine to feel?

A high ringing built behind my ears, drowning out the rest, everything in me climbing until I couldn't separate it from the noise.

Then everything went quiet at once. Dark, total, and complete.

My legs gave out and I went down, chains dragging against stone.

The last image before the darkness took me was Rina, running toward me, trying to put her body between mine and the crowd — and past her, those blue eyes. Watching. Cold. Unmoved.

---

"Save him—"

"If you fail again, then—"

A ring, sharp and sudden, cut through the dark and dragged me back up out of it.

My eyes opened. Breath came uneven, like I'd woken from losing something I never should have had to lose in the first place.

My teeth found my lip. I couldn't explain the ache sitting in my chest, or why the tears hadn't stopped even now that I was awake.

Something about all of this felt wrong in a way I didn't have language for.

I wasn't someone who broke easily. I'd never been that person.

And yet here I was — hollowed out, undone.

"So. Awake, my little slave?"

The voice was already familiar.

My vision cleared slowly, and the room came into focus.

Chains, still on my wrists. My dress, the same one from the hall, now torn and filthy.

I looked down at myself and felt something close to disgust.

But that wasn't the worst of it.

I didn't recognize the room. And the man I'd hoped might shelter me — the Lycan King — sat across from me in a great carved chair, watching me the way you'd watch something you already owned.

Something in me went taut, coiled tight and ready to snap.

Behind him, through floor-length windows, night had already fallen. In the dark, his eyes read even sharper, catching what little light there was like something built to hunt.

"Come here." He rested his chin against his knuckles, unhurried. "Crawl to me."

Every ounce of air in my lungs went still.

"I intend to strip whatever pride you have left before I send your body back to your father."

Said flatly. Like a decision already made and filed away.

I went still.

He wasn't bluffing. I could hear that much in the register of his voice.

I knew enough history from my own world to understand exactly what happened to captured women in wars like this one. Used. Broken. Discarded, then disposed of.

I was fairly certain that was the fate waiting for me here.

It explained the chains. It explained why he'd brought me to this room.

My throat closed around a swallow.

No. I need to think. I need to buy time, negotiate, anything.

I opened my mouth to try.

"Shh." He rose, and the single sound silenced me completely.

"You don't speak to me," he said, stopping in front of me. "You're a slave. That right doesn't belong to you anymore."

Steady. Almost gentle in delivery. Absolute underneath it.

Then his hand closed around the chain, and he pulled.

My body lurched forward, stumbling after him before I could brace for it.

"Ugh—!" Pain lanced up my arms where the metal cut deeper into skin already raw. My legs barely kept under me as he dragged me forward without slowing.

I didn't scream. Some instinct told me screaming might be the thing that finished this.

He pulled me straight to the balcony.

The stone hit my knees, and wind cut across my skin immediately, sharp and biting. The railing here was wide-set, gapped enough that one shove would be more than enough.

Below stretched a forest, dense and black, and the drop beneath it looked bottomless. We were standing at the edge of something built into a cliff face — high enough that the cold alone made my stomach drop.

"I can smell them," he said, conversational, like we were discussing the weather. "Titans, several of them, hiding down in that treeline. Their blood carries a long way."

"Do you want to know what's interesting?"

He was enjoying this. Turning my fear over in his hands like a coin.

I said nothing. Whatever plan I'd been assembling in my head had already dissolved into nothing.

Because something bigger than fear had settled into my chest. The dreams. This crushing sense that I'd already lived this exact scene once before. It kept me frozen in place more effectively than his grip did.

The chain pulled taut again, forcing my head up.

Pain flared where the metal tore the wound wider. I could only imagine how I looked — filthy, wrecked, on my knees in front of him.

Those eyes again. Sharp enough to cut.

"Nothing to say, even now?" His voice cooled further. "Bold, for something worth so little."

His grip tightened on the chain.

"I'll tell you something, then." A faint curve touched his mouth. "I don't know why. But those Titans down there can't leave your blood alone."

The bottom fell out of my stomach.

"They're fighting each other over the right to hunt you."

Cold spread through me.

"Even with me standing beside you, they could barely hold themselves back from tearing into you right in my own halls."

My throat went tight, words backing up behind it.

"Should I drop you over the edge?" His tone hadn't changed at all. "Let them take you apart down there, and send your father a lock of your hair as proof it happened?"

The smile stayed faint. His eyes didn't match it at all.

Rage, sitting patient underneath.

And I had nothing left to counter it with. My body had gone weak and hollow, refusing to answer whatever I asked of it.

That feeling again — the suffocating certainty that I'd already been here.

Why can't I change any of this?

Why does it all feel like something already written?

Grief pressed against my ribs, and it had nothing to do with the chains.

"Tell me, Your Majesty." My voice came out shaking despite everything I did to steady it. "What is happening to me? Why does this hurt worse than dying did? Am I losing my mind?"

I couldn't hold any of it back anymore. The ache had gotten too large for whatever room I had left inside me.

For one instant, something crossed his face.

Confusion. Unfamiliar on him, gone almost as fast as it arrived, replaced by something sharper.

"A slave with a talent for theatrics," he said coldly. "Feigning madness to buy herself an exit."

The chain jerked again, hauling me upright even though my legs had nothing left to offer.

He pulled me away from the balcony without any care for the wounds already bleeding down my wrists, and threw me onto the bed.

The impact knocked what little breath I had straight out of me.

Fabric tore, loud in the quiet room.

My eyes went wide.

"Let's see how well you keep pretending," he murmured, low, right against my ear, "when I use you the way I use anything else that belongs to me."

The words went through me like ice water.