A Luna for the Lycan King

Luna Torte Lycan King

Lucky Draw.

Allissa

I floated between consciousness and some dark sea, adrift in shadows with nothing to cling to but his smell. There was no mistake that Alfred was beside me. A thin thread of memory tried to pull me back, but everything slipped through my fingers, leaving me drowning in uncertainty. How long had I been out? My pulse beat like a frantic drum as I fought against the heaviness, the haze, the tight metal around my wrists. Time had all blurred together, and I lost track of it. I braced myself and slowly opened my eyes. He was right in front of me. His eyes met mine, and I could see the pain in them again.

"Lissa, gods, Lissa. Do you need a drink? Are you hungry?" The beast inside me recoiled, confused by its own emotions. I

wanted to scream, to tell him how deeply he'd wounded me, how nothing could ever be okay. Instead, a different urgency took

hold, more primal and immediate: my throat was parched, and I

felt the sharp gnaw of hunger twisting in my stomach. My senses

seemed magnified, every discomfort elevated by the small life

growing inside me. But all I could do was stare, barely registering his movements, until he snatched a bottle from a table, broke the

seal, and thrust it forward.

"Look," he said, desperate to convince me of something I hadn't yet accused him of. "Let me help you."

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**Lucky Draw

I could live without food for a little while, but I knew I needed to drink. As if he was reading my mind, he knelt down, his touch agonizingly tender, tilting the bottle to my lips with hands that had once been my shelter. Water flooded my mouth with sweet relief. His actions were very gentle, and I was struggling to figure out his angle. Was this bad cop and good cop?

Alfred's eyes never left my face, searching for signs of forgiveness, of anything but the cold detachment I wore like armor. His voice cracked with each confession, raw and relentless. "It's like I'm in a fog. I don't know what's happening half the time. Flashes of my life come back to me and some things I don't even remember. I can't remember meeting Ivy again. I don't know how I ended up in her bed, time and time again."

His words lashed against me, each one a new bruise. I fought to remain indifferent, but the story he spun had talons that sank into my resolve. He hesitated, struggling for control, his breath jagged. "I didn't want to leave you that day, and I tried to fight and stay. But the next thing I knew, I was on a plane. What's happening to me? Has my beast gone crazy? Am I crazy? Lissà, I would never our pup-" He stopped, shaking his head in violent denial, tears coursing down his cheeks. "I would never have betrayed you. Did the mate pull blind me? I'm getting more confused as time moves on. When I wrote you that letter... I had to think it was because c the mate bond. But now, I don't know who I am. I know I hurt you. But I-"

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His voice shattered, and I saw a man unraveling before me. Some distant part of me wanted to reach out, to acknowledge the truth in his turmoil, but the pain was too fresh, too consuming.

I forced the words from a place I didn't recognize, each one an icicle. "She is pregnant with your pup. Focus on your new mate."

My response was a scalpel, cold and precise. He flinched as if I'd struck him, and a fleeting regret touched my heart before it hardened again. I saw him-really saw him—so lost and desperate, and the possibility of brainwashing began to take shape in my mind. But nothing, I resolved, could change the new path I was on, the new life I was building with Darren. He was my mate, my future. I couldn't look back.

My words hung in the space between us like thin strands of ice, fragile and glistening with a cold truth. I waited for him to speak, to crack through the silence with his own fragile confessions. When he did, his voice was small, smaller than I'd ever heard it, a distant echo of the man I once knew. His head dipped low, and he murmured, "I know, and I tried talking to her about it." There was shame there, drowning out the anger that flickered behind his eyes, an anger I understood all too well. He looked up at me, his gaze unsteady, his mouth half-open like a wound. "I'm trapped," he said again, and his words seemed to hang in the air, unfinish and incomplete, like so much of our life together. "I'm trapped, and I just want to go back to the way things were."

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I should have felt satisfaction at his admission, but all I sensed was a hollow ache where certainty should have been. This was not the scene I'd imagined countless times in my head, where my rage would burn bright enough to set the world on fire. Instead, he was like a candle guttering in the wind, and all I could do was watch his flame grow smaller, more distant.

"Every time, I end up blanking out and waking up in bed with her," he continued, each word a confession and a plea. "You have to believe me, Lissa. It's like I'm disappearing. Like I'm dying. I just want us back."

The sincerity in his voice chipped away at my armor, the sharp edges of anger dulling against the weight of his pain. "Are you even aware?" I asked, my voice rough with skepticism, with fear of believing him. "Do you know if she's brainwashing you?"

The word hung heavy, a leaden possibility that made his eyes widen with shock, with a terrible kind of hope. "No," he said, the denial not of someone lying but of someone genuinely lost. "Is that what you think is happening? That she's...that I'm...?"

There was so much vulnerability in his eyes, so much of the old Alfred mixed with this new, broken version, that I found myself caught in the space between doubt and sympathy. My emotions tangled and frayed, each one pulling me in a different direction, none of them clear.

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"We won't know for sure without outside help," I said finally, hating the flicker of pity that crept into my voice. "And we won't

know until then."

"Does that mean..." His words faltered, and I saw the chasm of uncertainty spread wide and deep inside him. He caught my gaze and held it, desperation clawing its way to the surface. "Does that mean you'll come back to me, despite everything?"

I wanted to recoil from the naked hope in his question, from the way it sought to drag me back into his world. A place I could never belong again. His eyes begged me for an answer that I couldn't give, not now, maybe not ever. Part of me wished I could lie, give him some temporary balm for the gaping wound between us. But truth had its own kind of cruelty, and we both needed it to bleed clean. The tremor in his hands, the wreck of his soul... it was all too much to ignore. And yet, could anything-any kind of outside help or revelation-really reverse the damage done? Silence stretched, a tightrope between past and future, and Alfred's breath came in ragged pulls as he waited for me to speak. His plea hung there, haunting and persistent, demanding an answer. An answer he would get, but not the one he wanted.

"Too much has happened. Too much pain," I said, each word like a brick building a wall between us. He winced, but I pressed on, unable to stop. "I have a fated mate now. And you have..." I

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stopped myself from saying it, but the accusation hung there, unspoken but understood. He bared his teeth, a wounded animal cornered, and I expected him

to snarl at me, to lash out in anger and hurt. Instead, he was silent, the fight momentarily drained

from him.

"None of it is my fault," he said at last, low and insistent, but I could hear the doubt eating at him, softening the edges of his conviction. "Not my fault," he repeated, the words hanging lifeless between us. He was clutching at straws, at anything that could possibly absolve him, absolve us.

"You don't get it," I said, the floodgates opening with my raw pain. "I was there alone. I lost a pup, Alfred. A pup that never even had a chance. You left me to die. Leaving me there meant killing me, for all you knew."

I saw the moment my words hit him, saw the tremor in his hands and the way his eyes shuttered, tried to close themselves off from the pain. He staggered back as

if he could physically distance himself from what I'd said, but he couldn't. He couldn't escape it, couldn't escape me.

"You think I wanted that? To hurt you? To lose you?" he asked, the words edged with disbelief and a rising fury.

I held his gaze, my silence as damning as any answer. "It wasn't really me." He tried to catch my eyes, but I couldn't look at him,

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not when I knew what I was about to say.

Lucky Draw

"But it is you," I replied, forcing myself to be the unforgiving mirror to his hope. "You and Ivy. You and your new pup. That pup exists no matter what... no matter how it happened. It is a constant reminder of what was robbed from me. And when I see you, that is what I remember. Whether you have been brainwashed or not."

His face twisted in rage. "None of it is my fault," he said again, the insistence turning sharp and angry, as if he could use the words to strike at me instead of confess to me. He was losing his grip, losing his control. I could see it happening, see him unravel like a too-tight thread finally snapping under pressure.

"I can forgive you," I said, knowing it wasn't what he wanted, knowing it would cut just as deeply. "But I can't be parted from Darren."

His eyes darkened, his whole body a tight coil of fury. "If they kill Darren, then you will be forced to be parted from him." His voice was a growl, dangerous and wild. I should have been afraid, but I wasn't. Instead, I felt something harder, something colder settle

over me.

"So, you would willingly hurt me and cause me pain?” I asked, staring him down, meeting his anger with my own. "Make me lose my child again?"

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Lucky

His eyes widened in shock and his bottom lip began to tremble. His eyes filled with tears again, genuine, and I saw how deeply my question cut him. "No," the word was a strangled sob, so full of regret and longing that I felt my heart pull against its chains. "I couldn't hurt you like that. I do love you, despite everything. I'm hurting, and sometimes my beast takes over in anger over losing you, and it scares me."

For a moment, we were both silent, the enormity of it all washing over us like a tidal wave. Then, the distant sound of footsteps from above jolted him back into motion, back into urgency.

His eyes locked onto mine, desperate, wild, and fearful. "I'll try to work on freeing you. But I don't know how long I will remain in control." He reached out his fingers stopping short of my cheek before he curled them into a fist.

"Lissa, I'm sorry," he whispered, his voice cracked as he took in a breath. "I love

you." He turned away just as Ivy appeared at the

door.

Her eyes glinted with amusement and something far more sinister as she stood in

the doorway, a cat toying with its prey. I knew I should have expected her, that it was only a matter of time bore she came to check on her prize, but the sight of her there still sent a cold shiver up my spine. She clicked her tongue in feigned disappointment and shook her head at Alfred. "I told you to wait innoveldrama

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the bedroom for me," she said, a silky command that made my skin crawl. She

looked from him to me and back again, as if deciding just how angry to be. "What are you doing down here?"

Alfred stiffened beside me, his body snapping into an old, too-familiar posture of compliance. The change was immediate, the brief spark of rebellion I'd seen in him now snuffed out like a candle pinched between cold fingers. It was almost too much to watch, the way he seemed to shrink back into himself, the way her voice pulled at him like a puppet's strings. I wanted to scream at him to fight it, to fight her, but the words never left my throat, silenced by the need to survive.

He stammered out a response, the tremor in his voice betraying him. "I was...I was just bringing her some water."

Ivy's lips curled into a knowing smile, slow and serpentine. "Our baby needs you

to be obedient,” she purred, each word a carefully placed brick in his cage. "Come back upstairs with me."

I watched, my heart pounding a frantic beat against the bars of its own prison, as something shifted in him, something that made the last hour seem like nothing but a cruel dream. He glanced at me, a flicker of regret in his eyes, before turning and following her without another word. It was like watching him die a little dh, and with it, a piece of me crumbled.

The room fell silent, the only sound the faint echo of their

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footsteps and the ragged rush of my breath. The chains were cold and cruel

against my skin, reminders of my captivity, of how alone I truly was. My mind

raced with the impossibility of it all, with the knowledge that even if he wanted to

help, Alfred was as much a

prisoner as I was.

I scanned the room, desperate for anything that could help me escape, my eyes darting from the bolted chains on the wall to the large hanging light above me, to the chains that held me tight. Panic clawed at my insides, each breath a battle, each thought a plea. I had to get out. I had to find a way. I didn't know where I was. Couldn't see the outside. I was blind to my whereabouts.

The enormity of it threatened to overwhelm me, but I forced myself to focus.

Alfred's words lingered in my mind, a whisper of hope even as they mocked me. I was trapped. I was alone. But! wasn't broken. Not yet. Without outside help, I realized freeing Alfred was as impossible as breaking my own chains. But I couldn't dwell on that. Not if I wanted to stay sane, stay alive. My world narrowed down to one clear, painful truth: I had to focus on my own

escape, on surviving long enough to free myself. I needed to get to Darren before he walked into their trap.

The determination coursed through me, an antidote to the despair, and I clung to it with everything I had. I would get out. I would find a way. And until then, I would

stay strong, for Darren, for myself, for my child, and for the future I refused to let

go of.

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