Page 26 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

He looked furious.

No.

That was not right.

Fury was familiar. I knew fury. My mother’s clipped kind. Grant’s wounded kind. My own, banked and waiting under good manners. This…was something else. Something older than temper and less human than attention. I could not look away from him.

The man who had reached for me lowered his hand.

Good decision.

The old man near the altar spoke sharply. “Ian.”

The name hit the circle with weight.

Ian didn’t answer. His chest rose once. Slowly. His nostrils flared. I became aware, with horrifying clarity, that he was smelling the air.

Smelling me.

My skin went hot beneath the torn dress.

“No,” the woman in white said.

Her voice was thin now. The old man lifted a blade from his hip and that broke whatever strange grip had held me.

I stumbled backward, dragging half my skirt under one heel. “Okay, that is plenty. I am leaving. Everyone can keep the knife, the mood lighting, and the cult lawn.”

“Do not let her cross the line,” the old man snapped.

Two more figures shifted behind me. I turned and they were blocking the way back to the hedge.

My heart slammed against my ribs.

“Listen,” I said, and the word came out too sharp because terror had finally found my tongue. “I am here for a wedding. I chased a dog. I have absolutely no interest in whatever this is, and if one of you so much as touches me, I will scream loud enough to ruin every rich person ritual on this island.”

One of the men smiled but his teeth looked wrong. And that was when the whole night changed.

The man across the circle, Ian, made a sound low in his chest. His body locked and people began shouting. The woman in white backed away from me as if I had brought plague into the circle. Henry barked and barked, twisting at his leash.

“Ian,” a man commanded from the northern edge of the circle.

That voice was different from the others. Colder. Stronger. Used to being obeyed.

Ian still didn’t answer. His eyes had changed and I saw it happen. One moment they were dark. The next, gold burned through them, bright and animal and impossible.

My breath stopped. My brain tried to reject it. Contacts. Light. Shock. A head injury from the fall. Any explanation that belonged to a world with taxes and dental appointments and sisters who married cheating men.

Then…Ian’s hands changed. Claws tore from his fingers and a scream broke somewhere in the circle.

It might have been mine. It might have been everyone’s.

His shoulders heaved, and his body seemed to fold around a violence too large for skin. Fabric ripped. Bone cracked. The sound was wet and terrible, followed by a snarl that turned my blood cold.

I tried to crawl backwards as my palm slid through ash.

Ian lunged. No one stopped him, maybe no one could. A massive black wolf hit the grass where the man had been, larger than any animal I had ever seen outside a nightmare, all muscle and teeth and moonlit eyes. He crossed the circle in a blur.

Straight toward me.