Flashback

It was only a few days after the werewolf ambush and massacre. Derek lay in his royal bedroom, his skin pale against the white sheets, and his breathing shallow. He was only a teenager.

The heavy curtains were drawn against the daylight, which he could not stand. The room felt dim and airless. The pack doctors, Adah and Lorenzo, moved around him in silence, checking the bandages on his arms and the shallow cuts that still stung across his chest.

Nana, Ruby, and Declan stood by the bedside. They all looked hollow, like ghosts wearing the faces of people he once knew. The bedroom was quiet, but it was the kind of quiet that felt heavy with death.

Ruby’s eyes were so puffy she could barely see, and her lips were bitten raw and swollen from trying to keep her cries inside.

She kept whispering the same thing over and over, staring at Derek as if he might disappear too.

"Is he going to be okay? Is he going to die too?"

Nana reached out and pulled Ruby into her side, stroking her hair. She had lost her entire family in the ambush — her mother, her father, and her elder brother Jasper. Derek watched them through half-closed eyes as Nana tried to console her, but even Nana’s hands shook.

He was unable to speak, unable to move. He had never seen Nana cry before, yet right then tears ran down her cheeks while she hugged both Ruby and Declan close. Declank had lost his whole family as well. The room felt too small for all that grief.

Since the night of that massacre, Derek hadn’t said a single word, except for the times he screamed in his sleep and bolted upright, heart hammering as if the blades were still coming.

Doctor Lorenzo straightened with a grim face. He wiped his hands on a cloth and looked at Nana. "We will have to involve herbs to help him recover," he said quietly. "His brain is caught in a loop of that night. If we don’t break the cycle soon, the trauma will drive him to madness. He might... he might kill himself just to make the visions stop."

"Do whatever you can to keep him alive," Nana sobbed. "He must leave this state quickly."

Just then, the heavy oak doors swung open. Uncle Crane walked in, followed by two sombre-looking gammas. He didn’t look at the doctors; he walked straight to the bed and bowed to Nana.

"We found them," Crane said, his voice shaking with a mixture of grief and fury. "We looked into the trail. We know who sent the assassins."

Derek’s eyes opened a little wider, and his ears perked up.

"It was Alpha Rolf Thornclaw," Crane spat. "The Moonfang Pack. That son-of-a-bitch has wanted to rule us from the very start. He’s the one who turned our home into a graveyard."

*** 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

Present Day

Kira sat on the deck for several minutes after Derek had gone inside. Her mind kept turning over everything that had happened, round and round like the waves ahead. She decided then that she would go to Aethelwulf Centralis first thing in the morning. She needed to see Amanda and tell her everything.

Thankfully, The Central was neutral ground, right in the middle of both werewolf and Lycan territories, and it was not far from any of the packs.

When she finally stepped back into the house, her stomach gave a loud, unhappy growl. She rubbed a hand over it and sighed.

"You treacherous little thing," she muttered. "Can’t you let me mourn properly for one day?"

After a quiet dinner she hardly tasted, she found Derek in his study as usual. He sat behind the desk, brows furrowed, eyes locked on his tablet. He didn’t even look up when she stood in the doorway.

Kira scrunched her nose at him. The warm man who had sat beside her on the deck with a beer in his hand had vanished. In his place was the cold King and husband she had come to know so well. His entire demeanour screamed, "Do not disturb."

"Nana sent him here to stop working," she muttered under her breath as she backed away, "but he’s literally the last person on earth who can sit still without working. There are other ways of escape, you know."

She headed upstairs, then changed her mind. A few minutes later, she came back down, poured a tall glass of chilled orange juice, set it on a small tray, and carried it towards the study. She gave a short knock and pushed the door open.

Derek finally looked up when she entered, his gaze narrowing. "I didn’t ask for that," he said coldly.

"I know," she replied, stepping further inside. "I brought it anyway." She set the glass carefully on the corner of his desk with a bright smile. "I’ll leave this here. Drink it whenever you feel like it."

Without waiting for a reply, she turned and walked out, closing the door softly behind her.

Derek stared at the closed door for a long moment. Then his gaze dropped to the glass. He sighed, rubbed his temple, and reached for it.

Was the woman he knew back again?

As he lifted the glass, he noticed a folded piece of paper underneath. He picked it up, unfolded it, and stared.

At the top, she had drawn a very simple, angry-looking stick figure with a crown tilted sideways and a massive scowl and written beside it: ’Spot the difference!’

Below that was another drawing: a picture of a rain cloud with a tiny face and wrote: ’There is no difference. You both look like you’re about to hail on someone. Take a sip, Derek.’

P.S. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you finally let loose tonight and shared a little personal information about yourself with your contract bride.

Sweet Kira: 4. Grumpy King: -0000.

Derek huffed out a soft, involuntary chuckle. The corner of his mouth actually started to lift into a smile before he caught himself, scowled harder, and flicked the note across the desk as though it had burned him.

Why was he always catching himself amused by her dry jokes?

And what the hell was that scoreboard thing? Who the heck is "Grumpy King?" and why was he on negative infinity?

’We definitely know who wears the crown in this house,’ a tiny voice in his head said.