WOLFLESS: Accidentally Marked By The Devil's Son-Chapter 99: Challenge.
Chapter 99
The transition was sudden. One moment, Lucian was kneeling on the freezing, familiar stone of his mansion; the next, he was watching the opposite wall of the east wing disintegrate.
The realm of the Veiled space opened to orange lights and the air was heavy—thick with the scent of forests, scorched jasmine, and the copper tang of fear
Lucian barely had time to straighten up before the room itself seemed to revolt against his intrusion.
The atmospheric pressure shifted so suddenly that a heavy, scarred wooden chair came hurtling toward him from the inside.
Quickly, Lucian threw his hand out. He didn’t even look as his hand stopped the wood before it hits him.
Lucian stood amidst the swirling dust of the breach, his hand still outstretched, the shattered remains of the wooden chair falling at his feet.
His senses were reeling; the transition had been like being plunged into a bath of ice and fire simultaneously.
He didn’t move. He didn’t speak. He remained shrouded in the shifting gloom of the portal he had just forced open, his crimson eyes narrowing as he took in the carnage of the room.
Chaos didn’t even begin to describe the scene. At the far corner, the puzzle pieces of the last few hours finally snapped into place with a sickening click.
Standing behind a barrier of churning darkness was a woman whose presence made the claws in Lucain fingers ach to kill. She was eyeless, her face a mask of ancient, bitter magic.
Elena.
No common witch—no matter how talented—could have surgically removed Isabella from the present world within hours.
No one else would have had the audacity to shield a pocket dimension so thoroughly. It had always been her but behind her stood Caleb who was cowering behind the witch, like the coward he had always been.
In the center of the room, the very air seemed to be vibrating with a frequency that made Lucian’s teeth ache
He watched, paralyzed by a rare cold shock, as a creature out of a nightmare—or a prophecy—tore through the remaining furniture.
It was a wolf, yet it wasn’t. It stood on two powerful, silver-furred legs, its stature reaching nearly six and half feet.
Its fur shimmered with a golden heat that seemed to burn the very shadows it touched. Lucian had spent centuries as a Sovereign; he had fought demons, spirits, and the most corrupted of shifters.
He had never seen this with his own eyes, but the legends hummed in his blood.
A Lycan. A female Lycan. And through the bond screaming in his chest, Lucian felt the truth slam into him with brutal clarity.
The girl the world had called wolfless was gone. In her place was the first predator, a creature that shouldn’t exist in this age. Beside him, a sharp intake of breath hissed through the silence.
Clara had stepped through the rift a second behind him, her eyes wide as she clutched her ritual chalk.
The green, earthy magic she had used to stabilize Lucian was already flickering, reacting violently to the raw, celestial heat radiating from the center of the room.
"A Lycan?" Clara’s disbelieving whisper barely carried over the sound of the beast’s heavy breathing.
"Lucian, that’s impossible. That thing had been extinct before the first kingdoms were even raised. That... that thing is a myth made flesh."
Lucian didn’t turn to look at her. His gaze was anchored to the silver-white fur and the way the beast’s shoulders bunched with an unstable power. The beast was powerful yes but it wasn’t fully stable with its transformation.
The bond between them—the one that had been a source of such agony only minutes ago—was now roaring so hard it felt like it would snap his ribs.
"That isn’t a ’thing’, Clara," Lucian rasped, his voice thick with a mixture of terror and a fierce, protective pride he hadn’t known he possessed.
"That is Isabella."
Clara’s head snapped toward him, her expression shifting from shock to pure horror. "Isabella? You mean the...the wolfless girl? Lucian."
The sound of their voices finally breached the bubble of chaos at the far end of the room. Caleb, who had been trying to shrink into the very stones of the wall, looked up.
His eyes, rimmed with the red of exhaustion and the white of cowardice, locked onto the two figures standing in the dust of the breach.
"Elena!" Caleb’s panicked voice break in the heavy atmosphere. He pointed a finger toward the rift. "Elena, he’s here! Lucian is here!"
The eyeless witch didn’t flinch, but her hands slowed their weaving for a fraction of a second.
She turned her head slightly, the hollow sockets of her eyes seeming to "see" Lucian through the vibrations of his dark essence.
"I expected you sooner, Prince of death." Elena mocked, her voice sounding like dry leaves skittering over a grave.
"But you’re too late to stop the transformation. You wanted a strong mate? Well, here she is. I hope you’re prepared for the consequences of a mate who the moon goddess herself despised."
At the mention of his name, the Lycan ceased its prowl. It didn’t lunge at Elena’s shadows. It didn’t move toward Caleb.
Slowly the beast turned. The golden-red eyes locked onto Lucian. There was little to no jasmine in the air, only the scent of wildlife.
Isabella was gone, tucked away behind a wall of fur and ancient instinct. Elena let out a rattling laugh that seemed to vibrate the very shadows clinging to the damp stone walls.
She didn’t move to attack anymore as she watched the lycan attention wasn’t on them again.
She stood with a disturbing sort of elegance, her eyeless face tilted as if she were savoring the thick, suffocating tension radiating from Lucian.
"How poetic it is," Elena began, her voice dripping with a poisonous delight. "I once thought I would have to spill her blood to truly see you undone, Lucian. I thought the only way to break the King of the unholy was to leave him with a cold corpse and a hollow bond. But the Fates... they are far more inventive in their cruelty than even I."
She took a slow, deliberate step back, pulling the shivering Caleb deeper into the protective shroud of her darkness.
The silver-furred beast in the center of the room tracked the movement with a low, bone-deep rumble, but Elena remained unfazed, her focus remaining on the man standing at the breach.
"To think," she continued, her words winding through the room like a serpent, "that you spent centuries waiting for her soul to match your own, only to be gifted with this. You have been mated to a being so ruthless, so fundamentally predatory, that even the Great Mother feared what she had created. The Lycan was never meant to return; it was a mistake the Goddess buried in the sediment of time because she knew it would eventually crave the end of all things. And now, that world-ending hunger resides in the heart of your ’sweet’ Isabella or should I say Bella?."
Caleb let out a mocked cough, his eyes darting between Lucian and the golden-red gaze of the Lycan.
Elena’s hand snapped out, gripping his shoulder with a bruising force as she began to dissolve into a swirl of black smoke.
"Look at her, Lucian," Elena hissed, her form flickering as the pocket dimension began to groan under the strain of her departure.
"She doesn’t see a lover. She doesn’t see a savior. To a Lycan, there are only two things in existence: the pack and the prey. And since you have no pack, I wonder... which one are you to her? I will not waste my strength fighting you today, Sovereign. Not when I can simply wait in the wings and watch to see which mate spills the other’s blood first. Will you kill the beast to save your life, or will she tear out your heart before you can even whisper her name?"
With a final, mocking tilt of her head, the shadows surged upward and when the mist cleared, the corner of the room was empty.
Caleb and Elena were gone, leaving only the lingering scent of rot and the echoes of a threat.
The silence that followed was deafening. Lucian stood frozen as he stared at the creature before him.
lt took a step toward him, its heavy claws clicking against the stone with a sound like a ticking clock.
He reached out through the bond, desperately searching for the soft, jasmine-scented consciousness of the girl who had once looked at him with wonder.
He searched for the Isabella he knew but he found nothing but a vast, golden ocean of primal hunger and a territorial heat that burned his mental touch.
The beast lowered its head, its golden-red eyes narrowing as it evaluated the power rolling off him in dark, icy waves.
It wasn’t a look of recognition. It was the look of a champion sized up by a challenger.
And for a terrifying moment, Lucian realized the bond was no longer a bridge of love.
It was a challenge
