Greymoor Academy: I Accidentally Bonded With Four Lycan Royals!

Chapter 210: 210. Samhain VII—Lyon

Lyon

He’d had one job at the event.

Deliver the damned wedding dress and leave. He’d never been a friend of the Hayes’, and being a half-breed meant he didn’t quite fit in at the pack events.

And unlike Jenny who breezed her way through life, uncaring of that fact, Lyon was constantly made self-aware of the fact that his Mom was a fragile, breakable human every time he attended these kind of events.

But the run-in with Maisie at the fitting affected him way more than it should’ve, and it would’ve been a lie if he said he hadn’t come here to catch a glimpse of her before his flight to New York by morning.

He just had to know she was fine.

Lyon had spent months doing everything in his power to stay away from Maisie Adams. To forget about her.

He could still feel it sometimes. The pain of being beaten within an inch of his life after her mate, the redhead everyone at school was fucking frightened of and like to call The Crusher, had found them together in the club’s bathroom.

The redhead hadn’t stopped at beating him.

He had pushed his claws straight into Lyon’s chest and wrapped his hand around Lyon’s beating heart, twisting it until the wet, gurgling sound of Lyon choking on the blood in his lungs had filled the alleyway.

And he had whispered dark things to Lyon with a fanged smile, telling him all the ways a man could die. And then he made Lyon repeat word for word, his twisted and abridged version of the Ten Commandments.

You will not look at her. You will not speak to her. You will not breathe near her. You will not even think about her. You will not touch her. Not with your hands. Not with your eyes. Not with your filthy fucking thoughts. She is not yours to want. She is not yours to dream about. She is not yours to save. You do not even exist in the same world as her. You will not covet what was never yours to covet.

You will stay the fuck away from Maisie. In this life. In the next. And in every life after that. Because if I even smell you near her again, I will drag you out of whatever grave you’re rotting in and kill you all over again.

Lyon had pissed himself that night. He still couldn’t look at himself in the mirror without remembering it.

It was the shame that made him unable to look Maisie in the eye after that day.

It was completely normal, his friends had told him, pissing yourself when a hulking Lycan was ripping you apart. But Lyon didn’t feel normal. He’d felt like shit. A weakling that could never compare.

Because how exactly did one even compare to men like them? Much less, Maisie herself?

There was a theory that the Goddess bonded pairs that matched each other in strength, in viciousness.

The fact that Maisie had never been bonded with a weak man—Hayes was an idiot, but he was still the strongest Alpha heir in Ashbourne. And beyond. Or the four full-blooded Lycans—it was enough to tell him she was way out of his league.

And maybe that spoke more about him and his inferiority complex.

But either way, he tried to stay away.

When he saw her at school after the wedding, how different she looked, how beautiful, how ethereal, he had a fucking panic attack and hid like a damned coward.

When he ran into her at the library, he ducked out and went straight home.

He avoided the cafeteria like it was infected with a virus. And in the event that he caught a glimpse of her, he tucked tail and fled.

And so when he walked into the men’s bathroom at the fitting and found her sobbing on the floor, he thought, this had to be a cruel sort of joke.

He had tried to forget the way she looked that day in the fitting room. He had tried to forget the sound of her crying. He had tried to convince himself that whatever soft, stupid feeling lived in his chest whenever he thought about her wasn’t worth dying over.

But none of it had worked.

Because the truth was Lyon had always had a weakness for broken things. And Maisie Adams had always looked a little too much like something he wanted to protect, even when he had no right to.

Lyon blew on the cigarette.

He’d told himself he was only stepping outside for air. That he needed a break from the noise, from Maisie, and that little black dress of hers that he was trying his best not to think about—and her mates and how she kept looking at them like she was lovesick.

He needed time away from the party. Away from his annoying sister. Away from their father’s expectations of him and the company.

He’d walked for longer than he should’ve.

The wind was strange tonight. He felt like there was a hand on his shoulder pushing further and further away from the party. A sense of urgency, like he had somewhere he was supposed to be.

And Lyon had just rounded the corner when he noticed three hooded figures pulling away quickly from the side of the building.

Lyon pulled out the cigarette from between his lips and threw it on the ground, stomping on it. He watched the figures curiously.

Three men. The third was shorter than the other two. The tallest one had a sack over his shoulder.

They approached the only black car at the East gate of the pack.

Why were the gates unmanned? Lyon thought as he noticed the second man open the trunk of the car and toss the sack in—

Lyon froze.

No. It wasn’t a sack. It was a black dress.

He had spent way too much time tonight pretending not to look at that dress. Of course he would recognize it upon first sight. And there was the full head of brown hair leaking out from the head of the ’sack’.

For three full seconds, Lyon couldn’t move when he realized just what he had walked into.

She is not yours to save.

The words echoed in his head like a death sentence. The memory of claws squeezing around his heart made his chest tighten.

He should go back inside. He should find one of her mates and tell them what he saw. That was the smart thing to do. The safe thing.

But by the time the thought finished forming, the black car was already pulling away.

He was all the way on the other side of the pack house. They would be long gone before he even reached the hall.

As it was, he didn’t even have enough time to locate his car and trail them.

Lyon’s feet moved before his brain could stop them. He thought about how stupid this was, how suicidal.

He could fight, but he was raised to inherit a business. All he knew was boardrooms and figures. He hated confrontations because he always got beaten. He was completely and utterly out of his depth.

But it didn’t matter.

He just ran.

Because Maisie was in that trunk. Because even after everything, after the beating, after the shame, after months of forcing himself to stay away, he still couldn’t stand the thought of her being hurt.

Jenny had always said he had a hero complex. That one day, it was going to get him killed.

As Lyon sprinted into the woods, following the car, lungs burning, heart hammering against his ribs, he wondered if tonight would finally prove her right.

He should have never followed her.

But he was already in motion.

And some mistakes, once set in motion, couldn’t be undone.