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My beast settled as sudden silence brought peace.
Every muscle, every joint, every nerve ending in my body unclenched.
What the fuck is happening?
It wasn’t that the quiet brought only peace. It brought a rightness that was foreign to me but that I’d craved my whole life—a thing I’d never been able to explain or understand, a hole that had needed filling. My bones, my blood, my brain all resonated with acceptance. They’re mine now. This was how it was meant to be.
My beast side was satiated for the first time in my life. She was calm. I was in control and not fighting for control of my mind. I didn’t sense her pent-up rage and aggression.
What I felt was satisfaction.
What I felt was confidence.
What I felt was power.
And now Gareth’s pack felt it, too.
“What happened there?” Johnny asked. He was tentative, seemingly unsure.
I hated that I was making him worry.
“I don’t know.”
What I did know was that a bite from a shifted werewolf infected a target, turning them from human to werewolf at the first full moon—if they survived the transformation. Each night leading up to the full moon would bring degrees of agony as their body slowly morphed from human to beast. Their unnecessary human parts died, decaying, while they were still alive and aware. The necessary ones changed, bulked up, transformed. It was torture. Many didn’t live to see the full moon. Those who did were sometimes so traumatized that they were feral beyond repair and needed to be put down immediately.
It was only the males who could bite like that. Or, at least, it had only ever been the males who had created ferals, who had created packs. The bite tied the new wolf to the one who bit them. It didn’t force loyalty, but it made it hard for the new werewolf to turn on their creator. Or, at least, that was the way our mythology went. The stronger the werewolf who bit, the stronger the connection, the stronger the pack.
I was beginning to think that everything I thought I knew about werewolf lore was wrong.
“My queen.”
I shuddered as my uncle’s words rolled on a loop through my head. I wanted to scrub it from my memories. Forget it ever happened.
What have I done?
In born-werewolf families, the blood ties bonded each of us to one another, but blood didn’t mean loyalty. Born-werewolves were rare and therefore had an elevated position in our society. Loyalty came through social constructs of respectability, through wealth and most effectively through fear. No werewolf wanted to be ousted from their family clan, which meant most werewolves stayed in line.
To bite a born wolf like my uncle… To bite a family member… It was definitely stepping out of bounds. It was unheard of.
It’s taboo.
I’d crossed lines that no one would dare cross. Not only did I bite but I did it to a werewolf and an alpha. I should have been horrified. I should have been scared for my life. Instead, I felt empowered. Gareth had bowed to me. His men were mine, with loyalty that felt unquestionable.
That made me…
Alpha. A guttural version of my inner voice rattled me to reality. You’re alpha now.
Even though my beast took the bite, I’d condoned it. I was there, with her, doing what felt natural.
Primal instinct.
My mind returned to Levi’s photos, the scrolls and depictions of female beasts in their glory. The markings on the wolves by her side were starbursts, not webs—a different kind of mark.
If I were to bite another wolf while I was in human form, like partially shift only my fangs just like the males did with a mating bite, what would I produce? What would come of that?
I felt like I already knew the answer, but I was not, in any way, ready to test it.
I’d bitten my uncle in my beast form, and I’d created a link that made him subservient. If I bit another werewolf in my human form…would I create a bond, an unbreakable bond?
