Chapter 658: She Hit Him Like Lightning

Vesper let out a cold chuckle. "Get the hell out of my cell."

That did it.

Lucian moved.

No warning. No wind-up. One second he was standing six feet from her and the next his hand was around her throat and her back was against the stone wall, her manacles pulled taut and her feet off the ground.

He didn’t squeeze. The hand was a frame. A display case. A way of holding Vesper Willow’s face at the exact height where she had to look into his eyes. He leaned in close enough that she could see the gold flooding his irises, the pupil narrowing to a slit that wasn’t human, the muscle in his jaw jumping with the rhythm of a man holding back something.

When he spoke, his voice was not singular, his wolf braided with his own.

"You spit on her. You sat in a cell you earned and spit on a woman who came to set you free. You called her a whore. You laughed. You think this is amusing. She might have come down here with compassion. I am not her."

His grip tightened. Vesper’s breath shortened.

"Tristan is done being your weapon. River is done being your target. You don’t touch her. You don’t practice blood magic. You don’t go near Tristan or River in any way, through any channel, by any method. And you show respect." He let that settle. "Consider this your first and only warning. Our next conversation won’t have words. Do you understand?"

"Yes," Vesper gasped.

He released her and she fell to the floor.

"Say her name. You know what it is."

Vesper’s mouth trembled. Her eyes were wet and furious.

"River."

"Full name and title."

There was a long moment of silence.

"River Aelindor, Crown Princess of Aelindris."

He turned without a word.

The door closed behind him.

The corridor was empty. Quiet. The palace was holding its breath the way palaces did when something seismic had happened in their lower levels and the vibrations hadn’t reached the upper floors yet.

✦✦✦

AELINDRIS PALACE - EAST WING

Lucian was following River’s scent trail like a compass following north.

Her emotions were flooding into his chest and he did not like them. She was afraid but not for herself. Lucian could tell the difference. This felt closer to anxiety, like a clock was ticking, and fear of what happened if she wasn’t fast enough. Life-or-death urgent.

Lucian turned the corner.

She ran into him.

Full speed. Her body collided with his chest and the collision sent a jolt through Lucian’s nervous system that had nothing to do with physics.

Electricity.

The word was inadequate. The sensation was a full-body detonation that started at every point where her body made contact with his and radiated outward through his ribs, his spine, his hands, the soles of his feet. He had been near her since the ceremony. He had been in rooms with her. He had breathed her scent from across courtyards and corridors and council chambers.

He had not touched her.

The last time his hands had been on her skin was before. Before the ceremony. Before the scent hit. Before his wolf said the word that rewired his entire operating system. Every interaction since had been conducted from a distance his discipline enforced because the distance was the only barrier between what he was and what the world was allowed to see.

The touch obliterated the barrier.

His wolf surged with a force that nearly buckled his knees. Every nerve ending that made contact with her body lit up with a signal so intense his vision whited at the edges. His hands had gone to her arms on reflex, catching her, steadying her, and the skin beneath his palms was warm and alive and carrying a frequency that his matebond received like a starving man receives food.

"River? What’s wrong?"

His voice came out steady. The steadiness was a miracle of engineering, a feat of vocal control that deserved an award and a standing ovation and possibly its own Chapter in whatever manual the Moon Goddess was using to torture him.

She looked up. Pink eyes wide. Afraid. Determined. Carrying the weight of something she couldn’t share.

"Lucian? I didn’t know you were back."

She didn’t feel it.

The electricity. The detonation. The full-body signal that had just rewritten every chemical process in his bloodstream. She had felt a collision. She had felt arms catching her. She had registered Lucian the way she had always registered Lucian: a constant, a man whose presence was warm and reliable and carrying none of the voltage that was currently making his hands shake against her skin.

Just him, apparently.

He opened his mouth. Closed it. No words came, because the words forming behind his lips were words that belonged to a different conversation in a different corridor at a different time, and this was neither the corridor nor the time, and the woman in front of him was afraid and running and the fear was the priority.

"Please excuse me," she said, already trying to move past him.

His hands caught her arms. "Hey, slow down. Answer me, River. What is going on?"

Through the matebond, her anxiety spiked, carrying the particular frequency that meant she knew something, needed to move, and could feel every second she spent standing still costing her something she couldn’t afford.

"I think my father is walking into a trap right now under false parley."

The words hit Lucian’s tactical mind and his tactical mind ate them whole. His face rearranged from warmth into king in under a second, the transition so complete that the man holding her arms and the man assessing the threat were two different people occupying the same body.

"You think," he repeated. "How do you know this?"

River didn’t answer.

Through the matebond, he understood that she had intelligence from somewhere but wasn’t able to tell him what. Whatever she knew, whatever she had seen or been told or experienced, came with a gag order that her emotions were fighting against and her discipline was enforcing, and the discipline was winning.

He didn’t push. He didn’t need a matebond or an explanation on why. She was smart. He trusted her. But there was zero chance he would be letting her do what she was about to do alone.