Royal Wolf Box Set by Haley Weir
Chapter Nine
When Cassandra returned to the castle, she didn’t tell Aeron about the attack. She couldn’t think about it without also thinking about how she and Rubius gave in to making love to each other inside the abandoned cathedral. She walked through the castle corridors and felt as if she had just woken from a dream.
“
Servant called to her, but Cassandra only heard his voice as if it were an echo. She heard it enough to know that Theo was fine and in his room, and that was all she cared to know about at this exact moment. She had left Rubius at the edge of the city. He would go back to the woods, and she would come back here to her lavishly decorated prison, which kept her from returning to the wilderness that she craved.
Sometimes, Cassandra thought, after a tryst that ends up being a rash mistake, the two parties will feel awkward or remorseful and try to get back to their own lives as quickly as possible to pretend as if it never happened.
But that was not the case here. At the edge of the city, Rubius and Cassandra had exchanged hidden kisses and touches that felt like melted gold that sunk into her skin and made her glow brightly from the inside out. That would not be the last time that they made love to each other; it couldn’t be. There was a call to each other that couldn’t be defied; a fated connection that was destined to weave their love together forever. The odds stacked against them would surely deter even the strongest of wills; she was a married queen, trapped inside the city walls, and he was a rival pack leader who wild and free and capable of starting a war if Aeron found out about them. But still, they both knew that nothing could come of their love affair. It was beyond their control.
Every chance they got from that day forward, Cassandra and Rubius snuck off together. He would appear in whatever corner she inhabited in the city, and he would whisk her into every darkened shadow and quiet, empty building, where they would make love as if the world had been set ablaze around them and they were the tinder.
She would sneak off into pockets of the forest, where Rubius would wait for her at any chance that she got to leave the city for even a moment or two. Those were her favorite encounters, where they would make love as both humans and wolves, and lay against the groaning earth.
Eventually, though, Aeron began to notice. Ever since Rubius had told him about the human man who had been watching Cassandra, Aeron had made a pledge to himself that he would be more aware of what was happening around him. And that was when he started noticing a few things.
The first thing that he noticed was that Cassandra seemed suddenly happier than she had been before. Nothing that he knew of had changed, and it seemed unlike Cassandra’s unyielding personality to just wake up “okay with it all” one day. Something had happened – he just didn’t know what. Aeron also caught sight of the way that his wife and Rubius quickly look away from each other whenever he was around. It was unnatural and obviously a forced reaction. People will look at other people randomly throughout any time period of being together within the same vicinity, even if just by accident. But with Rubius and Cassandra, it became painfully obvious that not only were they intentionally not looking at each other, but that it pained them to keep their eyes off of each other.
On a trip into the forest, in which Aeron and Cassandra went to go check on the forest foraging of their pack, Aeron happened to look up at the exact moment Cassandra had taken her eyes off the task at hand and was distracted by something moving in the far-off trees. When Aeron quietly followed her stare with his own eyes, he saw what his wife was looking at. Rubius was within the trees. Aeron’s stomach sank and he wanted to confront his wife. But when she turned back around after the brief second, Aeron saw that she looked happy. She looked overflowing with fulfillment. Cassandra smiled at him and then pleasantly excused herself, stating she wanted to try and do some foraging on her own. But Aeron knew that wasn’t the truth. He needed to see his wife’s indiscretions with his own eyes.
Sure enough, after prowling close enough to hear the low utterances of pleasure, Aeron caught the two of them together. He wanted to go pull Rubius off of her, to put an end to this right now and send Rubius elsewhere. But he didn’t. It wasn’t that he couldn’t his power and reach could definitely best even Rubius, but Aeron saw the new source of his wife’s happiness, and he still loved her too much to see her unhappy. He turned and walked quietly away.
When Cassandra finally returned from her “foraging” with nothing to show for it aside from a smile on her face, Aeron simply kissed her on her cheek and hugged her to his side. He knew that he would confront her about this one day, but that was not that day. He had no desire to pick a fight with Rubius, either, but Aeron was still fiercely protective and wouldn’t hesitate to protect his family from anyone, even if that person happened to be a fellow shifter and respected rival. As usual, his strategy was to try diplomacy first and to figure out the whole story. But he didn't get a chance to be heard before several of the servants in the castle began to rush around in panicked whispers.
They were talking about someone who had just recently been killed. It was the same young human from the hunting party, and the very same man who had tried to abduct Cassandra. Immediately, Cassandra’s mind jumped to Rubius. For a second or two, she wondered if Rubius had killed the man, but he hadn’t beaten that guy up much at all, only enough to knock him out. And she had been with Rubius after they had left the man on the street, so unless Rubius had gone back to kill the human, it couldn’t have been him. But even though Cassandra was certain that murdering this human wasn’t something that Rubius would have done, it didn’t matter what she thought. What mattered were the rumors spreading and descending upon the royal house like a swarm of locusts. Once the rumors reached the king’s ear, something would have to be done.