The Luna's Bodyguard [a mature werewolf romance]

Ch 26: Destiny

AURORA

It was almost impossible to hold back tears as my beautiful sister was escorted out of the room by a contingent of guards, still struggling to get to the man forced to bow before the King. The Lathurna Prince's flinty eyes were full of hate as a boot ground his face into the floorboards, digging in until the oiled wood creaked under the pressure. What had she called him, again? Fallon?

I was too young to remember much of my time here as a child, though I vaguely recalled the mopey older brother all the Lathurna sisters liked to demand piggy back rides from. It was a shame to think that Mila was the only one left to share his name. To understand his pain.

Ophelia would be able to understand it, too. Perhaps that was why the Fates had tethered their souls together. It had been a startling experience, during the fight, to see a bright, platinum chord manifest between them, stretching from Fallon's ring finger to hers. Everybody else seemed oblivious as it thrummed with their shared power, whispering a faint hint of their thoughts as they spoke using only their minds.

Even more perturbing was the second string, wrapped around the thumb of her dominant hand. This one was gold, nestled beneath the signet ring my mother pressed into Ophelia's hand the night we fled. Memories flooded back, and this time there was nothing to stop them; the anti-glamour wards in the keep thwarted whatever spell had been placed on my mind.

"With my blood and bones I bind you," my mother said, clutching her bleeding hand to her chest. Her severed pinky finger lay in Ophelia's outstretched palms, the van Arsdale Alpha's signet ring perched on the knuckle, blood welling up in the engraving. "You will keep Aurora away from the Pendragons, until the day she chooses to confront them herself. And when the threads of fate pull you close to the heir and his father, you will slaughter them like the pigs they are."

Ophelia's eyes were blank as a rabbit's, caught somewhere between exhilaration and fear. "Yes, step mother."

"I am sorry, my child," she whispered, pressing her severed finger — and the crystal of the ring — against Ophelia's brow, leaving a bloody mark of knotted roots behind. As the spell sank into her skin, my mother pulled the ring off and slipped it onto Ophelia's thumb, the metal contracting automatically until the snug was fit.

Guards shouted in the hall beyond. Somebody started kicking at the door to my bedroom.

"We have to go, mumma," I cried.

She only shook her head. "Dear child, you are a force of nature. I am no more your mother than I gave birth to the air we all breathe. And you must go, but I needs stay to feed the spell that will secure your future. And it is hungry indeed."

I fought the urge to gasp as the explosion of the keep shot me back into my body. I didn't understand until now that she had sacrificed her life to trigger the combustion that took down the entire keep — and most of the Crown Pack's soldiers with it.

Some of the energy from that sacrifice had almost gone into Ophelia, it seemed. It made sense, now; why she was always so stubbornly selfless, giving me the best of everything while she contented herself with the scraps. When I was younger, I was too naive to understand what she was doing and took the extra food and better sleeping quarters for granted. As I got older, I realised it was love that drove her to suffer so that I didn't have to.

Now I had to question if it was even that.

Fallon was forced to endure the indignity of his bow as Reginald's court filtered out of the room, tittering behind fans at his expense.