Bound by Duty

[15] A Vulnerable King

Alex tightened his grip around her, thinking she was cold. He raised the windows of the car until there was just enough space for ventilation. He looked at his mate carefully. He knew she wasn't asleep. He also knew that she wasn't her usual self when she was being provocative.

She didn't know that she didn't have to be provocative. Her mere presence provoked him. Thinking so, he smiled. It was a gentle smile filled with hope and longing cemented for a hundred and seventy years. If anyone in the palace saw this smile, they would seriously doubt their eyes.

Knowing that she was not being her usual self made him intensely curious about why she behaved the way she did, and what exactly was her original self. He was like a starving man, hungering for any tidbit he could receive about her. Any small piece of information could satisfy him immensely, thinking that he was one step nearer to making her accept him.

Perhaps to his headstrong mate, their mating was something usual, something that happened to every wolf when he or she was young. Something that was supposed to happen anyway in her life. Something that happened at the right place at the right time. She probably wasn't able to recognise the significance of meeting one's true mate, the enormity of the situation, being quite young herself.

But it was different with him. The last couple of decades of his life had been spent struggling to reclaim parts of his humanity that had been lost by him. As the years went by, it became increasingly hard for him to go on without having his anchor around him, his mate. He had looked for her in every single pack secretly, but he hadn't been able to find her anywhere. He routinely made visits to the packs every twenty years but to no avail.

He had been forced to come to the conclusion that she was a Wanderer. So he had spent some time in the forests close to the palace. But he couldn't get very far. Duty called. He had to run a country - no, an empire of werewolves. Things needed to be done, wolves needed to be protected. His people needed a sane ruler.

And people needed to not know about his slow degeneration into a beast.

"Don't pretend as if you didn't enjoy it," Lycan, his wolf, said snarkily. "It wasn't as if the freedom of numbing yourself didn't give you high in itself."

"Can you honestly tell me that the high can compare with the pure joy of finding a mate?" Alex retorted. "Being animalistic in itself was freeing, liberating, allowing me to let go of human thoughtfulness and relying on pure instinct. Aggression was not a choice but my nature. But now..."

Lycan didn't reply to that, expressing his silent agreement to that statement. It wasn't just the man who required a mate, it was the beast too. As much as they were separate entities, they were also one. Alex looked at his mate, his thoughts trailing off.

He remembered with how much difficulty he had summoned all his available strength and decided to visit the packs again to find his mate. Someone he was desperate to find, kiss and kidnap back to the palace, tie her down there so she could never leave.

Once he found her, he understood that the goddess worked in mysterious ways. From her initial act of running away, a cry for freedom, he knew she wouldn't be bound. She wouldn't be tamed. She was a force of nature and any attempt to control her on his part would only be a struggle, ending in utter ruins.

He also knew, though, the moment he laid eyes on her, that she was perfect. Perfect for him. And so he didn't hold back on all the love he had been planning to shower on her since he had found out about mates when he was thirteen.

He took a deep breath in, remembering the way she had almost forced, coerced him into rejecting her. Her eyes were practically pleading with him to reject her so she could be... free? He didn't know what she wanted. He didn't know what she needed. He didn't know her. He only knew the bare facts of her life, but he didn't know them from her eyes. He couldn't know how to stand in her shoes, because he didn't know what her shoes entailed.

There was no starting point to knowing her. So how could he proceed?

It could only be from scratch, with a blank slate. He decided that whatever her past was, it didn't matter. Whatever she did, why ever she did it, and who she did it to, nothing mattered. They were in the present and couldn't live in the worry of the past or the anxiety of the future. What mattered was that she was his present and he was hers. Bickering over something that could happen in the near future was not a sensible, adult thing to do.

Alex decided that he could let it go. He could learn to not pass his judgements. He could learn to be her mate and not her king, which made a whole lot of difference. He had a choice before him - to either begin this relationship with a solid foundation of trust or begin with a slew of questions and doubts hurled at one another.

That would only be a disaster in the making and through that, he could only see a crossroad where she would choose one way and he would be forced to choose another. He had made his mistakes. He too had his own secrets. He could understand, and he could let her have hers.

Hearing her breathing becoming even, he carefully adjusted his posture to make her sleep more comfortably. As he looked at her, he reminded himself that she was not only his mate but also the queen of werewolves. Ideally, he would have preferred that she participate and take a keen interest in the ruling and affairs of the kingdom.

Any queen of werewolves never took on only the rule of a nurturing, motherly figure for all their kind. She ruled by example, fighting and struggling for each of their issues in the front lines, trying to restore justice to every one of their kind. The queen ruled side-by-side with the king, having an equal amount of regnal power.

But, he thought dubiously, would that be too much to expect of a twenty-one-year-old who had barely any experience in life? Would she not be overwhelmed by the roles and responsibilities of a ruler? What would happen if she decided that she no longer wanted to have anything to do with ruling or the kingdom? How was he to proceed if his expectations weren't met?