I Left The Wolf King Who Loved Me For The Dragon King Chapter 15

I Left The Wolf King Who Loved Me For The Dragon King Chapter 15

A moon passed, and the high healers confirmed the impossible: I was carrying a child.

The news sent a shockwave through the entire dragon kingdom, as natural succession among the higher dragon flights was notoriously rare and fraught with difficulty.

Aurora immediately went into a frenzy, declaring that we had to orchestrate a true, grand royal wedding—protesting that my initial trial at the peak had been far too spartan for a sovereign matriarch.

Under her command, the entire court was put to work, and plans were drawn up to completely rebuild the ancient stone palace from the ashes.

Yet, looking into the silver mirror in my chambers, a trace of lingering disbelief still blurred my eyes.

I turned to Draekon, my voice barely a whisper. “Look at the reflection, Draekon. Is that truly Aylin? Not some shadow, not a decoy? Are we… are we truly to have a child of our own?”

Draekon didn’t reply with words. He leaned down like a devoted beast, pressing his jaw into the crook of my neck, rubbing against my skin with a fierce, possessive warmth.

“It’s you. It is entirely you, my sweet,” he rumbled, his respiration warm against my collar.

“My heart belongs to Aylin, and Aylin alone. Whatever bloodline you claim, whatever title they strip from you, you are my only universe.”

A sudden sting of heat rushed to my eyes, the long winters of isolation finally washing away.

The morning of the grand wedding arrived, and the entire Obsidian Isle was transformed into a landscape of breathtaking, luminescent grandeur.

Looking at the sweeping arches and the high canopies, I had to marvel once more at the sheer, unbridled wealth of the dragon lords and their absolute infatuation with raw gemstones. Every pillar caught the light, casting a brilliant sheet of silver and gold over the gathering.

But as the rites concluded and I walked down toward the black-sand shoreline to catch the sea breeze, a group of entirely unexpected silhouettes blocked my path.

“Father…?”

I skidded to a halt, my voice flat. “How did you discover the location of my alliance?”

Grimm Selwyn stood before me. It had been less than two moons since I boarded the tribute carriage, yet looking at him now, the features of the man who sired me felt entirely foreign.

The words choked in Grimm’s throat, his chest heaving as he stared at the magnificent white silk of my gown and the heavy crown resting on my brow.

“As long as… as long as you harbor happiness in this life, Aylin… that is enough,” he managed to stammer, his tone dry and scraped empty.

I knew what he was thinking. Had House Selwyn not fractured our bloodline and driven me into the ashes, this day would have marked their elevation into the most revered alliance in the realms—the kin of the Dragon Queen.

But regret had arrived far too late; the ledger was settled, and the past could never be retrieved.

Violet broke from his side, her hands shaking violently as she lunged forward, trying to clasp my fingers.

“Aylin, I beg of you—save your sister! Petition the Alpha King for mercy. You were his fated mate; he will listen to you!”

She wept, her cosmetic paint completely ruined by her tears. “Command him to cease the execution, Aylin. Tell him to stop torturing Bryony. Please, she is your flesh and blood!”

Before I could even summon the breath to refuse, Grimm stepped into the clearance, throwing his arm out to ruthlessly shove Violet back. “Enough, Violet! Look at the horizon—by what right do you speak for Bryony now? I have told you a thousand times, she was the predator who systematically stripped everything from Aylin!”

Violet collapsed into the sand, her voice cracking with a raw, pathetic agony. “But she is my biological child… my only daughter…”

Before their domestic storm could touch me, a heavy, iron warmth enveloped my shoulders. Draekon pulled me firmly against his chest, his golden eyes narrowing into dangerous slits as his apex Alpha aura erupted over the shoreline.

“My Queen will not be managed or leveraged by anyone,” the Dragon King rumbled, the sheer force of his voice rattling the stones.

“Permitting your boots to touch the sands of this island was a temporary mercy. Now, take your vanguard and leave our borders.”

Without waiting for their compliance, he swept me into his arms, turning his back on them as he carried me back toward the palace gates, leaving Violet’s hollow, weeping shrieks to fade into the breaking waves.

…

Months later, during a temporary journey back to the neutral borders of the northern forest to lay a bouquet of fresh moon-orchids at my mother’s headstone, a rogue faction breached my vanguard’s defense.

The ambush was swift, and a heavy sedative knocked me into darkness.

When clarity finally returned, I forced my eyelids open to find myself bound to a stone chair within an unlit, damp cavern. Standing before me, illuminated by a single torch, was Ulvarr.

“Aligning yourself with rogue factions to kidnap a pregnant female,” I scoffed, a cold, mocking sneer curving my lips. “Is this the grand strategy of the great Alpha King?”

Ulvarr rolled his chair closer, his hands trembling as he reached out to clasp my fingers. His deep voice carried a desperate, frantic warmth.

“Forgive the execution of this ambush, Aylin,” he murmured, his sharp features pale and slick with sweat. “My lower limbs are dead; I have no circulation. I had no other vector to bring you to my side.”

Instinctively, my hands shifted down, locking protectively over the subtle swell of my abdomen. “What manner of madness are you plotting now, Ulvarr?”

“You are carrying a child,” he whispered, his obsidian eyes clouding over with a violent, murderous storm.

“I didn’t dare lay a single heavy hand on your skin during our courtship… yet you allowed that lizard to plant his seed within you.”

He stepped closer—no, he leaned forward from his chair, his jaw locking. “You and the Dragon King have known each other for a mere handful of suns, Aylin. You cannot have weighed the terms of this union properly.”

Once my shadow warriors smuggle us across the eastern mountains, I will have the high healers purge this parasite from your core.”

“Rest your heart. I command the necessary connections; I will ensure your physical safety throughout the procedure.”

I stared at him, a hollow, bitter laugh catching in my throat. “You are completely insane.”

“Yes! I am mad! Mad beyond the reach of any remedy!” he roared, the poise completely dropping from his face.

“Aylin, you were the one who dragged me from the trench! You were the one who signed the binding scroll with me! I see the rot of my choices now. I know the truth. The only woman I love is you—never Bryony!”

He dropped his head against my knees, his shoulders shaking with a frantic, weeping desperation. “Give me one more trial. Grant me a fraction of a chance. I cannot endure the thought of losing you to the ashes.”

“You are my fated mate, Aylin.”

The sheer, grotesque absurdity of his declaration filled the chamber. Ulvarr wasn’t performing; the sentimentality in his eyes was entirely real.

But his love was a parasite—a suffocating, lethal thing that required the destruction of everything else to exist.

A sharp, ringing laugh left my lips. “Ulvarr, do you truly perceive my heart as nothing but a refuse bin? A repository where you can dump your recycled affections whenever your crown begins to fracture?”

“Your love is a low, pathetic thing compared to what stands behind me now. I granted you ten thousand chances while I was bleeding in that keep, and you threw every one of them into the dirt. You’ve run out of moves, Ulvarr. You don’t get another turn.”

Ulvarr’s pupils contracted into needlepoints, a feral, predatory snarl ripping from his chest. Surging forward from his seat with a manic, unchecked strength, he slammed my body back against the stone floor, his clawed hands ruthlessly tearing at the lace of my collar.

But the strike he anticipated never came.

Instead, a cold, heavy column of silver bit deep into his chest.

Ulvarr went entirely rigid, his obsidian eyes widening in absolute, unvarnished shock as he stared down at me.

My knuckles were white, my hand anchoring the hilt of my mother’s silver dagger—the blade driven perfectly through his ribs, straight into the center of his heart.

I wrenched the steel free and dragged myself to my feet, standing tall in the torchlight as I looked down at the collapsing sovereign.

“I will never allow you to touch me again,” I said, my voice carrying a piercing, arctic finality that echoed through the cavern. “Never again will you threaten my life, my partner, or my child.”

A dark torrent of copper fluid gushed from the puncture, soaking through his leather armor. Ulvarr parted his lips, his jaw shifting as if he were trying to summon a final whisper of devotion, but his lungs failed him, and he could do nothing but cough up a thick spray of blood.

Even an Alpha King, carrying the apex bloodline of the wild, could not survive a silver blade through the heart.

I stepped over his twitching frame, turning my face toward the cavern exit without casting a single glance behind me.

Outside, the midnight sky was illuminated by a blinding, apocalyptic sheet of gold. Draekon had already arrived, his catastrophic fire incinerating the remaining rogue warriors until nothing but ash drifted through the pines.

There was no longer a single threat left in the realms capable of crossing my path.

…

When the deep snows of winter finally settled over the peaks, my child was born into the warmth of the palace—healthy, whole, and safe.

I never cast my gaze back toward the northern forests or the territory of the wolves. Together, Draekon and I governed the dragon flights with absolute balance, carving a kingdom of prosperity out of the volcanic stone.

Last winter, I had been packing my belongings, waiting for the day Bryony would throw me out. This winter, everything from House Selwyn was nothing but a past left behind. Bryony survived the execution of her rites, but after winters of being bound to the half-witted Zarath and enduring the brutal politics of the keep, her sanity had entirely fractured. She spent her days pacing the perimeter of her quarters, a hollowed-out shell of the princess she once was.

Ulvarr was buried in an unmarked trench deep within the unlit thickets of the woods.

No living soul ever journeyed to his clearing to sweep the winter frost from the stone.

The northern pack raised a new Alpha lord to the throne within a matter of moons, and before the snows could melt, the name of Ulvarr Greyfang had been entirely erased from the history of the wild.

But none of those accounts mattered to the nursery anymore. What mattered was the immutable truth carved into the very fabric of my soul: from this day forth, until my very last breath, my life belonged entirely to me.