Luna's breath caught. It had been so long since someone had touched it. She could feel the phantom pain, and it made her gasp, her body shuddering.
Lukas's voice was angry. No, furious. Luna had never before used the word "rage", because to her it was defined by an anger too strong for simple daily debates.
Rage was a word that consumed.
It grew until forever, devouring souls, people, families, houses, kingdoms, everything. It was a fanatical devotion to destruction, an anger so complete that nothing could ever sate it. It was the kind of fire that rested in the pit of a person's stomach, replacing their ability to love with pure hatred. Insatiable, eternal desire for not just the death, but the utter erasing of its source, and anything and anyone close to it.
This was the sort of anger that Luna heard in Lukas's voice. She froze, unwilling and unable to move a single muscle. She didn't want to be the target of that anger. She prayed with all her might to the gods above never to let her feel that, even for an instant. There was no recovery from it. If she ever did, she would be searching for the quickest way to end it, whether that was her own death or the death of the one who cradled it like a child and used it to fuel themselves.
Luna had never been brave enough to kill herself, even to get back at her father. He hadn't been a good parent, considering that he only accepted her once she was six years old, after he realized that his wife wouldn't bear him any children. But he wasn't that bad. Luna's life was the only thing she really had, aside from what she could scrape together from the scraps left for her. For her to kill herself... would require something greater. He had many times offered her the choice to do it, and she never had. He assumed that was loyalty, but he was wrong. She simply didn't believe that it was necessary.
"Who did this?" Lukas asked again.
She had heard it said that cold was the scariest thing to hear in someone's voice. Complete, absolute absence of emotion. Utterly devoid of morality, with nothing stopping them from killing.
Luna disagreed.
Because nothing in her entire life had prepared her for this Lycan's tone. And nothing could have. She would never know fear of a person again, never know fear of anything, if she survived this unbroken.
But that if.
That was looking less and less likely.
Lukas's chest was rumbling, and she could feel it in her bones. He quaked the entire bed, and her whole body. Luna had never seen a Lycan's animal-like qualities closely before. She had never seen a Lycan at all before, only heard and read of them. Unlike Beastfolk, they didn't have any of the features of an animal, but they did have an even more uncanny resemblance to creatures' behaviors at times.
This was one of those times.
Luna hear fabric tearing, and she looked over her shoulder, terrified.
It wasn't the mattress tearing. It wasn't the sheets.
It was her dress.
Luna gaped at Lukas. With eyes smoldering with that undeniable, absolute rage, he was deliberately and methodically tearing her dress to pieces while she watches with an open mouth.
"If you want to cover that, you're going to have to find something else to wear," he said through his teeth. She could see the growl that made his throat tremble as he struggled to speak intelligibly, but he was doing it wonderfully. His voice was that of a refined male, low and even.
The threat was all the more clear. Luna would be torn to pieces, even if he didn't do it himself, by the other nobles if she didn't obey him to his satisfaction.
"Maybe if you answer some of it can be salvaged," he continued in the same malevolent tone.
"I- I don't need it," Luna said, surprising even herself. "I'm sure you'll take good care of me, Lukas Warwick."
His eyes flashed with surprise, then darkened even more, and he leaned forward.
Luna felt a shift, then she was pinned on her back again, with him hovering over her.
So fast.
Too fast.
"You're right," he whispered in her ear. "I will."