Page 27 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

I scrambled backward until my spine struck one of the stone posts.

The wolf landed over me. His paws struck the grass on either side of my body. His head lowered. His breath washed hot over my throat. I could see every tooth in his mouth, every scar beneath the dark fur, every impossible line of power in the beast pinning me to the earth without touching me.

I could not move. I could not think.

The wolf inhaled against my neck and a violent shudder moved through him.

Behind him, people shouted orders, prayers, curses. The name Ian came again and again. The woman in white was crying now, or raging. I could not tell. The old man yelled something about the mark, the circle, the moon.

The wolf’s head snapped toward them, his lips peeling back.

Silence dropped hard. Whatever they saw in him, it frightened them more than I did.

Then his gaze came back to me. I had never understood what it meant for fear to become calm. I had always thought fear was panic, noise, movement. In that moment, with the wolf’s eyes burning into mine and my body trapped between the stone and the grass, fear went quiet inside me.

Clear.

I was going to die. Not metaphorically. Not socially. Not in the way I had joked about surviving the weekend. I was going to die because I had chased a dog through a hedge and fallen into something that should not exist.

Henry whimpered and the wolf’s ears flicked. My hand moved before I gave it permission. Slowly, carefully, I reached for the dog’s leash where it had tangled around the post near my hip.

The wolf watched my hand and his chest vibrated with a sound so low I felt it through the ground.

“I’m just getting the dog,” I whispered.

Ridiculous. As if he understood. As if manners mattered to monsters.

My fingers closed around the leash as a man stepped forward behind the wolf.

“Ian,” the colder voice said. “Move away from her.”

The wolf’s body went still and every muscle above me hardened. The air changed again, and this time I felt it from him. A pressure building under his skin. A fight inside the beast. Command against hunger. Law against whatever had pulled him across that circle and set him over me.

The old man spoke fast. “The human has contaminated the rite. Kill her before the mark chooses.”

Mark.

Chooses.

The words reached me in the wrong order.

Then the wolf lowered his head to my neck.

“No,” I said.

It came out small, but it was a word. It was mine.

His eyes met mine and for one impossible second, the beast hesitated. I saw something human there. Buried. Horrified. Fighting.

Then the wolf’s jaws closed on the place between my neck and shoulder.

Pain detonated through me and I screamed. It tore out of my throat and scraped raw on the way. The world became teeth, heat, and the brutal weight of a body holding mine down while something alive and burning poured into my blood.

Hands grabbed at the wolf. He snarled around the bite and drove them back without letting go. I hit his chest with my fists. Once. Twice. Useless. My knuckles sank into fur and muscle. He was everywhere, too hot, too heavy, too real.

The pain changed. That was worse. It spread from the bite in black, branching lines I felt before I saw them, rushing under my skin with a cold burn that made my limbs jerk. My vision flashed white, then silver, then red. The grass vanished. The faces around us blurred into streaks. Henry’s barking stretched thin and distant.

The wolf released me.