Chapter 36

The snapping blazes in the hearth cast a warm, moving sparkle across Karl's etched highlights as he sunk into the overstuffed rocker. His wide shoulders were uniquely slouched internal, as though preparing for a blow, and the standard extraordinary energy encompassing him had decreased to a low, stewing inclination.
Lexi perched on the edge of the adjacent seat, struck by the rare vulnerability emanating from her powerful mate in this sacred space. She had questions, so many questions about the significance of this inner sanctum and the heavy silence blanketing them both. But she bit her tongue, recognizing this as one of those fragile moments where pushing too hard could cause Karl to withdraw into himself entirely.

So she simply held his weighted stare and waited, projecting an open, accepting presence. It was an odd role reversal - she who had grown up an alpha's daughter, trained to lead and command, now hanging back while Karl grappled with whatever demons lurked in his past. But she had learned quickly that the route to breaching this male's towering emotional defenses lay in patience and allowing him to dole out morsels of truth at his own pace.

At last, Karl dragged in a fortifying breath and raked one hand through his tousled ink-black hair. "You've heard the rumors, I'm sure," he murmured in that harsh rasp which never failed to raise the fine hairs along Lexi's nape. "About what happened all those years ago, and how I came to take my father's place as Alpha."

It was not a question, but a statement laced with bitter undercurrents. Lexi inclined her head in a solemn nod, refusing to break his turbulent stare.

Huffing out a mirthless chuckle, Karl shook his head as if amazed by his own daring in finally broaching this subject aloud. "They were mostly right, you know. Every vile, horrific detail about how far I was willing to go to seize my rightful legacy."

A tremor lanced through his powerful frame, then, one that might have been imperceptible to anyone who hadn't studied every nuance of his physicality as obsessively as Lexi. It was swiftly subsumed beneath his typical aura of brutal dominance, but she had caught that fleeting glimpse of rawness. A chink in the armor through which she would endeavor to pry further entry, no matter how he tried to deflect or conceal.

"I was a disappointment from the moment I emerged into this world," Karl continued in that same low, gravelly rumble. "Far too small and scrawny to suit my father's vision of a prime alpha heir, despite my royal bloodline."

A muscle ticked in his tightly clenched jaw as he swallowed hard against the past he could never quite outrun. "Weak and pathetic, he called me on more than one occasion when my wolf proved reluctant to manifest. My brother was the favored son, the pride and joy of the Corbyns."

Lexi fought back a visceral need to argue against the defeated tone coloring his words, the self-loathing woven into every taut line of his massive frame. To reassure him that whatever torments he may have endured in childhood, the male sitting before her was anything but weak. She was mesmerized, however, by the sight of the impenetrable Alpha allowing those memories to bleed through his formidable veneer at last.

"I learned quickly that affection and approval were commodities to be earned through combat primacy and ceaseless displays of dominance." A bitter, twisted smile bared Karl's elongated canines as he met her stare once more. "Love and gentleness were for the dilettantes and feeble-minded. An alpha proved their worth through viciousness, or not at all in my father's eyes."

Slivers of ice seemed to glaze over those molten irises as the memory played out behind them in vivid detail. "When my wolf at last emerged during my Awakening, he was...feral," Karl confessed, each word etched from flint. "Tainted by the lingering trauma of those early years and twisted by desperation to gain my father's elusive favor."

He fell silent once more, seeming to gather the tattered remnants of his steely control. Lexi remained unmoving, mundane sounds of the night deepening around them - the hiss and crackle of the fire, the distant hoots and screeches of nocturnal creatures beyond the compound's walls. Lulling, grounding rhythms against which Karl's momentous revelations hung in stark relief.

At last, he inhaled a steadying breath and fixed her with a searing look from beneath lowered brows. "I slaughtered my way into my inheritance, little luna," he admitted in a voice lacquered with the darkest remorse. "Butchered any who stood in opposition until the only obstacles remaining were those I had once sworn eternal loyalty to before the Moon Goddess herself."

The air left Lexi's lungs in a harsh rush at the implication, the bald truth he laid bare between them with neither artifice nor evasion. The rumors she had always dismissed as lurid exaggerations now stood confirmed.

"Your own parents," she breathed, scarcely more than a whisper on the night-shadowed air. "And...your brother?"

A muscle feathered along the hewn plane of Karl's jaw, but otherwise his expression remained unrelentingly impassive. Carved from stone, his stance radiated the same brutal, indomitable presence that so often sent lesser wolves scattering to whatever dens they could find.

When he remained stonily silent, Lexi raised her chin in a silent challenge, her alpha's blood roaring to life. She did not fear this male, this embodiment of primal savagery who could no doubt tear her apart with a mere flick of his wrist. No, if anything, she only burned hotter in the crucible of his merciless honesty and refusal to make apologies for the being he was sculpted to become.

"Do you truly regret what you were forced to do?" she demanded, well aware she was treading onto ground that would have any other pack member fleeing in terror of incurring the Alpha's wrath. "Or do you merely resent the necessity of it in order to claim your power?"

As ever, Karl did not disappoint. He surged to his feet in an explosion of coiled menace, towering over her in a display of snarling dominion. The searing intensity of his glare could have incinerated stone as his elongated fangs clicked into place.

Any other female would have cowered or run screaming from the sheer savagery radiating from that mountain of muscle and honed ferocity in the firelit gloom. Lexi, however, remained utterly fearless as she rose in turn to face him fully. Equals in every sense, she knew instinctively. He craved no simpering, spineless waif to tremble before him, after all. More than anyone, Karl needed the one female in all of existence who could meet his feral nature on its own uncompromising terms.

And so she held his volatile stare, unblinking and utterly at peace in that moment when his inner beast raged closer to the surface than perhaps ever before. She did not cower, nor seek to placate or retreat. Instead, she reached out to trace one knuckle in a feather-light caress along the silvered ridge slashing across his powerful brow.

A souvenir, she knew. One of countless battle scars etched into his rugged features over the years of merciless combat and conquest. Rather than falter or shrink away as she boldly touched what amounted to a visible reminder of his barbarity, Karl seemed to shudder under her delicate stroke. His eyelids fluttered with something akin to wonder, or awe as his furnace breath washed hotly across her upturned features.

"Feel what you feel, my Alpha," she murmured with conviction, refusing to recoil from the tempest she had stirred within him. For she sensed, somehow, that this confrontation was necessary. That only by glimpsing the full extent of his barely leashed brutality and savagery could he begin to heal the deeper scars that festered in places no sword could reach.

Tremors of simmering energy began to ripple along his powerful flanks as he struggled to process her implicit acceptance. She could feel the raging inferno of his wolf straining against the tenuous bonds of its corporeal cage, unaccustomed to finding any quarter in this world. This was Karl's truest essence, Lexi realized - the raging maelstrom barely contained behind a facade of domineering cruelty all these years.

And yet here she was, still standing her ground instead of fleeing like any sane being in the face of his primal ferocity. Something molten and visceral flared to life in the obsidian depths of Karl's stare as he registered her unwavering courage.

His powerful body swayed closer, the blazing heat of him nearly searing her skin as his muzzle dipped to graze the thundering pulse at her throat. Lexi held her breath, body thrumming with an intoxicating mixture of apprehension and desire as she awaited whatever cataclysmic shift awaited between them.

Any moment now, the fragile threads restraining Karl's feral side would snap entirely. And when they did, nothing would be the same for either of them ever again...