Connor sat across from Derek, studying his King.
Derek looked terrible. His eyes were red-rimmed, ringed with dark circles, the face of a man who had not slept in days and looked like he had been engaging in a staring contest with a furnace.
Connor had already heard the whole of it from Declan before being brought in, every awful piece of what had happened in that study.
And of course, they had drilled him first, a long string of questions to test his memory, to be certain he was truly Connor and not some Umbra wearing his face, before they would let him anywhere near the King’s quarters.
"She’s a white Lycan," Derek said, his gaze fixed down on the stacks of documents littering his desk.
"I know," Connor said.
Derek exhaled slowly and fell silent. The quiet stretched on, heavy and uncomfortable.
After a while, he looked up. "Why aren’t you saying anything?" he asked. "Aren’t you going to blame me too? Go on. I don’t need your deference right now, Connor. You can speak as freely as you like. Say what you think of me."
Connor shrugged. "I have nothing to say, Your Grace. Because I wasn’t the one standing in your shoes. It’s not my place to judge a decision I didn’t have to make."
Derek said nothing for a long moment. Then, quietly, "Tell me how you lost her that night. Who took her?"
Connor drew a breath, and began to narrate it. How a certain werewolf woman had approached the queen in the hotel. How she had told Kira something that stopped her dead in her tracks.
"She told the queen," Connor said carefully, "that her mother was alive."
That caught. Derek’s eyes flew to Connor at once, sharp and sudden.
"Her mother. Alive?"
Connor nodded. "I tried to listen in on their conversation, Your Grace, but I’ll be honest, I was distracted. I kept getting this feeling that something was wrong, that the night was about to turn. I only caught snippets."
He paused, gathering them. "The woman claimed that Rolf wasn’t the queen’s father at all. That the queen was a hybrid, and that her true father had been a Lycan. And that her mother, not Rolf, was the original heir of Moonfang."
Derek stared at him, and as he did, piece after piece began to slot into place in his mind.
The reason Rolf had despised Kira so deeply, so personally, every day of her life. The reason he had scrubbed every trace of Kira’s mother from the world, erased her so thoroughly that no one in Moonfang dared speak her name.
The reason he had sent Kira to Derek in the first place, in Chloe’s stead, instead of giving up his own beloved daughter.
Derek had always known of Rolf’s hatred for his wife. But somehow, in his own blindness, his own bottomless mistrust, he had let it twist him into believing it was all a strategy to let him lose his guard.
He had let his deepest fears turn him into a monster, hurting Kira with his cruelty.
He had spiralled. He saw that now, very clearly. The terror of being another Lycan King who had been made a fool of by werewolves a second time had closed over his head like dark water, so much that he had not given her so much as a single moment to explain herself before he tore her to pieces.
And the truth, the truth he could no longer outrun, was this. Rolf’s hatred for Kira had been real and total her entire life. And Kira had always, always been loyal.
Even when she had looked him in the eye and said she was loyal only to herself, he understood it now for what it truly was. It was the armour of a girl who had been given nothing and no one to be loyal to. It was a shield, not a betrayal.
He had been so consumed by his own trauma that he had refused to see the trauma she had carried all along. He had stood there and demanded trust from her.
Trust, from a girl whom no living soul had ever once given a reason to trust. And he had demanded it without ever offering her a scrap of his own in return.
And she had borne every bit of it. With a smile.
I choose to be cheerful because happiness shouldn’t depend on the time of year, or on what’s going right. It’s a choice.
Her words, from their honeymoon, drifted back to him, and Derek blinked hard against the tears that had suddenly welled in his eyes.
"Oh, damn you, Kira," he breathed. "How could you carry on like that? Like nothing was ever wrong? How could you smile through all of it?"
That deep, aching pang lanced through his chest again, the one that had not left him since the moment she fled.
He pressed his hand slowly over it, rubbing, his gaze locked on the surface of the desk, and for a few seconds he forgot entirely that Connor was still in the room.
Connor leaned forward, watching his King weep silently, openly. He had never once seen Derek like this in all his adult years, and he honestly did not know whether the kindest thing was to slip quietly out of the room, or to stay and offer some word of comfort.
"Is there anything you need me to do, Your Grace?" he asked carefully.
Derek looked up, blinking rapidly, using the back of his thumb to quickly flick away a stray tear that was about to fall down his cheek. He cleared his throat aggressively, trying to regain his rugged composure.
"What else did you hear?" he asked, his voice still rough.
Connor shook his head. "Not a great deal more, Your Grace. Or perhaps I just can’t recall it clearly. It was a chaotic night."
Derek inhaled deeply, let it out slow, and steadied himself. "Were you able to identify the woman? Her pack? Where she came from?"
Connor opened his mouth to say yes, but then, he instantly slammed his jaws shut.
Because he had seen it. That night, he had confiscated the woman’s purse, and inside it he had seen the sigil of the Crystal Moon Pack. And he had caught the scent of Alpha Braxton clinging to her, although he had thought nothing of it then.
Now, he knew exactly where to look for the queen.
So, if Kira had fled to that pack, to those people, would she truly want Derek coming after her?
After everything that had been said in that study, after the way her own husband had broken her open in front of the whole household, perhaps what she needed most was space and distance. Time, far away from the man who had wounded her.
"No, Your Grace," he lied. "I wasn’t able to identify her."
Derek gave a tired, dismissive wave of his hand. "Go, then. Get some rest. You’ve earned it."
Connor rose, bowed, and crossed to the door.
"Connor," Derek called.
Connor turned back, and found his King’s gaze pinned squarely on him. "Yes, Your Grace?"
"If you ever breathe a word to anyone," Derek said, "that you saw me shed a single tear today, I will skin you alive. Slowly."
A soft chuckle escaped Connor before he could stop it, and he shook his head.
"Your secret is safe with me, Your Grace," he said, making a small show of zipping his lips shut with his fingers, and throwing away the imaginary key.
Then he turned and walked out of the office, grinning to himself.