Chapter 3

My hand had just touched the doorknob when High Elder Karen's voice slithered out behind me like a venomous snake.

"Stop right there, Aria. This is the Core Council's final decision."

I stopped and turned around.

"Chief Kyle was badly damaged during his rampage in rut. His beast core has cracked." Karen stared at me without blinking. "Right now, only the Sacred Light power unique to the lion royal family can fully heal his injuries. The elders have decided that if you are willing to give up your Sacred Light beast core to save him, and prove your loyalty to the Alliance, the family will make an exception and stop forcing you to mate with him."

My breathing froze.

Give up my beast core?

A beast core was the source of life and the foundation of power for every high-ranking shifter.

If I lost it, the three-year limit caused by the isolation suppressant would no longer matter.

I would never be able to fully shift again. I would become permanently half-crippled, someone so weak even a cold could knock me flat. This was what the family I was born into wanted—to drain the last drop of life from me just to please the man who had hurt me over and over again.

"And if you refuse..." Seeing my silence, Karen seemed to think I was afraid. "You will be stripped of the Lion King name, branded a traitor to the Alliance, cast out of the family, and forbidden from ever setting foot in the Sun Throne again!"

I clenched my fists so hard my nails bit deep into my palms.

Images from my previous life flashed before my eyes. After I died, not even a whole body had been left behind.

If keeping this cursed identity meant being dragged into hell all over again, then I would rather give up this noble bloodline entirely.

I took a deep breath and emptied every trace of stale air from my lungs.

Then I raised my hand and ripped off the golden lion brooch pinned over my left chest—the symbol of the lion royal family's highest-ranking heir. With a clear metallic clink, I threw it onto the long table in front of Karen.

"Then, Elder Karen, as you wish." I looked straight into his stunned eyes and said each word slowly and clearly. "I choose to leave the lion clan."

Kyle's POV

The private hospital room smelled of disinfectant and the faint metallic scent of blood.

I stood by the bed, looking at Vera's paper-white face and her right arm wrapped in heavy bandages, and crushing guilt twisted around my heart.

Yesterday, I had completely lost my mind. If she hadn't risked herself trying to calm my rage with the wolf clan's soothing arts, half the royal city might have been reduced to rubble in my fury.

"I swear, Vera." I bent down and gently took her uninjured left hand, making my promise in a low voice. "I'll take responsibility for everything you've done for me. Once I've dealt with what I need to handle, we'll get married this fall."

Vera slowly opened her eyes. A soft, heartbreakingly gentle smile touched her lips. "Go, Kyle. I'll wait for you."

When I stepped out of the hospital, the cold night wind cleared my head a little. Before I married Vera, I had to go to the Sun Throne and completely call off the arranged genetic bond with that woman, Aria.

The moment I thought of Aria, I rubbed my brow in irritation.

The black panther clan and the lion clan were the Alliance's two strongest dual-core powers. Breaking off an engagement like this on one side alone would never be easy.

And Aria—that ridiculously lovesick idiot—had clung to me my whole life like something you couldn't scrape off. Just to stay in my line of sight, she would throw away her dignity as a princess and do any absurd thing. If I tried to end the engagement this time, she would definitely cry, scream, and threaten suicide like a madwoman until the entire royal city was thrown into chaos.

And yet, strangely, when the thought of "finally getting rid of Aria for good" fully took shape in my mind, I felt an unexplainable emptiness instead.

"Damn it. Must be the aftereffects of losing control during rut." I cursed under my breath and headed straight for the lion clan's territory.

When I kicked open the doors to the lion clan's main hall, the silence inside felt deeply wrong.

There was no golden figure rushing in from the garden at the first sound of my arrival, eyes shining as she called out, "Kyle!"

There was no cloying lion pheromone in the air, the one always trying so hard to please me. In the empty hall, only a few servants looked at me in fear.

That unexplained irritation instantly flared.

Was she still angry that I had thrown her out of the tent last night? How dare she try this cheap little game of playing hard to get with me?

Standing in the ten-yard-high front hall, I shouted impatiently,

"Aria! Get out here! Stop playing these stupid games. If you come out right now and agree to end the engagement peacefully without causing trouble for the Alliance, then maybe we can still be friends!"