Chapter 656: The Devil’s In The Dungeon

Miles passed. The signal kept building. Grief and resolve and fear layering on top of each other, each one amplifying the others, the emotional equivalent of a woman climbing stairs towards a ledge.

Then the pain hit.

Lucian’s wolf form collapsed.

The shift broke mid-stride, his body transitioning from wolf to man without his permission, without his control, the pain so violent it overrode every biological function including the one that kept him in fur. He tumbled across the forest floor. Roots and rocks and packed earth scraped across skin that had been paws a second ago, and his men scattered in every direction.

He landed on his back.

The canopy above him was green and gold and irrelevant because every nerve in his body was receiving a transmission from the matebond that was beyond anything he had prepared for.

River was screaming.

He couldn’t hear it. She was a hundred miles south. But the matebond carried the scream the way it carried everything: at full fidelity, without filter, the exact frequency of a woman whose soul was being separated from something it had been woven into.

Lucian’s back arched against the forest floor. His hands clawed at dirt and roots. The pain cascading through the matebond was borrowed, echo, secondhand, but the secondhand of a matebond transmission was still enough to make his body convulse because the matebond didn’t transmit at reduced volume. It transmitted everything. Including this.

Her pain.

The matebond was forcing Lucian to experience his mate breaking something that she wasn’t supposed to be breaking. Something with her soul.

His Beta was at his side in a flash, shifted and kneeling.

"What is it, Alpha?"

Lucian couldn’t answer. His jaw was locked. His eyes were wide, dilated, fixed on the canopy, seeing nothing in it and everything inside his own chest.

Through the matebond, River’s scream peaked. Her back arching off a stone slab a hundred miles away.

Then the pain stopped.

The sudden absence was worse than the presence. It went quiet, carrying only the faint, exhausted pulse of a woman who had survived something devastating and had nothing left.

Lucian lay on the forest floor, gasping.

He could still feel her. But the signal had changed.

Lucian pressed his palms flat against the earth and breathed.

"Alpha?" His Beta’s voice was careful. The tone of a man watching his king lie on the ground and wondering whether the lie was voluntary.

"I’m fine."

He was absolutely, comprehensively, catastrophically lying.

"What did you do, River," he breathed.

The words were too quiet for his Beta to hear.

Fin stood above him, looking down at a wolf king on his back in a forest at midday, and the expression on Fin’s face was the expression of a man who understood that the worst part wasn’t the pain.

"She broke her fated tie," he said quietly to no one.

Lucian got to his feet. Unsteady. His hands were shaking. His eyes were still dilated. The matebond was delivering River’s exhaustion at full volume, and the volume was making his legs unreliable.

"We’re turning south," he told his Beta.

The command was Alpha-absolute.

Through the matebond, River’s signal was faint and steady and carrying the pulse of a woman who had just destroyed herself.

And the man she didn’t know about was running towards her at a speed that his bones would remember and his joints would regret because his mate was in pain and she was alone and the matebond was wide open and the distance was a hundred miles and the hundred miles were personal.

✦✦✦

He arrived at Aelindris as the sun was setting.

Shifted at the tree line. Dressed. Walked through the eastern gate with the measured stride of a wolf king arriving for a diplomatic visit, carrying zero evidence of the hundred-mile sprint that had brought him here or the matebond that was currently delivering his mate’s heartbeat at a volume that made conversation a challenge.

Through the matebond, River’s signal shifted again. She was awake. She was moving. She was... leaving.

Leaving Tristan’s chambers. Walking through corridors. Alone. Carrying a determination that had weight to it.

Lucian tracked the signal the way a wolf tracks a scent: automatically, without choosing to, the matebond functioning as a compass that pointed at River regardless of what Lucian’s discipline wanted it to point at.

She was heading towards the dungeon.

His brow creased. The dungeon held one person of relevance, and that person was Vesper Willow, and the idea of River going to see Vesper alone after everything that had happened was so far outside the realm of predictable behavior that Lucian’s strategic mind rejected it twice before his matebond confirmed it a third time.

She was going to the dungeon. To see the woman who had crashed her wedding, called her a whore, and used blood magic. Voluntarily. At night. Without telling anyone.

What the hell are you doing, River?

He moved through the palace towards the dungeon level.

He reached the corridor outside the dungeon entrance and stopped.

He could hear them. Wolf hearing carried through stone the way light carries through glass: effortlessly, without asking permission.

"I need your help," River said, voice calm and steady.

"You need my help," Vesper snapped. "The woman who had me tackled by guards, paraded in chains, and thrown in a dungeon wants my help."

"I didn’t do any of those things. I tried to stop the arrest."

"That was all an act and you and I both know it."

Lucian’s hands curled. His wolf pressed forward behind his ribs, a low vibration that existed below hearing and above instinct.

Through the matebond, River’s emotions were steady. Controlled. She had rehearsed this conversation. Her composure was calm. She was being a soldier executing what needed to be done. He understood, except the orders themselves. She was making herself do this and he didn’t understand why. But he knew River and there was a good reason.

"I am here because I need your help. I severed my tie with Tristan to save him. He is free. He can be with you."

The sentence hit Lucian like a fist to the chest. His wolf went very still.

She had severed her tie with Tristan. To save him. For this woman. Did hell freeze over? Because there was zero chance Tristan approved of that.