Defying the Lycan King (Kira and Derek) novel Chapter 289

Chapter 289: The Wrong King

Kira and Derek moved through the corridors of the fortress in tense silence. Derek walked slightly ahead, claws still partially extended, amber eyes scanning every corner. Kira stayed close, her body still humming with residual light from the earlier fights.

Every door they passed, they opened and saw empty chambers, abandoned weapon stores, rooms lined with old maps and half-burnt candles.

"Nothing," he said, coming back out of another room.

"Keep going."

They turned a final corner and stopped in front of a heavy wooden door, and Derek pushed it open. Beyond was finally the throne room. They both stepped inside, Derek shielding Kira with his body as they walked in.

"There," Derek said, pointing behind the dais, half hidden by the fall of the curtain.

A narrow door stood in the wall. The bolt on the outside had been thrown across.

Kira stared at it. "We should go check it out."

Derek took her hand, lacing them together, and they went down together. Derek stopped four steps from the bottom.

"Wait."

"What?" Kira asked, looking at him.

He didn’t answer straight away. His head had gone up, nostrils flaring, and Kira watched him work through whatever he was smelling.

"Something’s wrong down here."

"Everything about this place is wrong," she whispered.

"That isn’t what I mean."

Kira was already past him, and the room at the bottom of the stairs stopped her where she stood. It ran perhaps sixty feet, long and both walls were lined floor to ceiling with shelves. On every shelf, in rows so neat they looked measured, sat jars. Each one was full of black liquid.

"This is the jar room," Kira whispered.

At the far end, on a raised step, sat a second throne. Smaller than the one above, and made of shadows. And standing in front of it, with his back to them and one hand resting on the arm of it, was Jake.

He turned round slowly, and Derek quickly moved in front of Kira, shielding her with his own body.

Jake looked entirely human. No shadow or red in the eyes, nothing at all except a middle-aged Beta in a torn shirt with dried blood down one side of his face and a cut above his eye that had swollen it half shut.

"Oh," he said. "You."

Kira stepped out of Derek’s back, all the grief, the fury, the exhaustion of the last days rose up inside her at once.

"It’s over now," she said.

Jake said nothing.

"Do you know what I’ve spent the last three days doing?" She kept walking, past the first shelves, and the light was already beginning to rise up under her skin. "Thinking of how I will put you out of existance. Quiet surprising that it is you, Jake."

Jake took a step back.

"For years you’ve been building this. Breeding an army out of dead men, wearing people like coats and throwing them away when they wear thin." Her voice climbed. "Viktor was a tutor. He didn’t do a single thing to anyone, and you crawled into him and used him to steal a pregnant woman out of a courtyard."

Another step back. He was circling the throne now, keeping it between them.

"But whatever you are, it ends today?" The gold was spilling off her arms in threads, running down onto the flagstones. "You will never hurt anyone again, and you will never distroy any Nexus again. Do you know why?"

She raised her hand and the jars nearest to her began to hum in their rows.

"Because I’m what ends you. That’s what I’m for. I’m the thing that was made specifically so that you would stop."

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