Page 28 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

Air rushed against the wound. I folded forward, or tried to, but my body no longer cared what I wanted. I hit the ground on my side, one hand pressed to my neck, and felt blood slip between my fingers.

Someone was crying.

Someone was shouting.

The wolf stood over me, shaking, his muzzle dark.

No one came closer.

Through the ringing in my ears, I heard the colder voice again.

“What have you done?”

The wolf looked down at me. Gold eyes. Blood on his mouth. Horror in a face that should not have been able to show it.

I tried to breathe but my lungs refused.

The moon above him blurred into a white smear.

I thought of Tessa on the terrace, waiting for her dog. I thought of my father telling me I had nothing to prove. I thought of Grant’s hand brushing my wrist and my own stupid certainty that four days of humiliation would be the worst thing I had to survive.

A laugh tried to move through me but it became a cough. The black lines under my skin pulsed once, spreading from the bite toward my chest.

The old man said, very softly now, “She will be dead before dawn.”

Chapter 5:

Damage Control

Ian

Blood changed everything.

Before blood, there were laws. There were rites, borders, alliances, elders with old hands, Alphas with colder eyes, and wolves pretending a circle made violence respectable.

After blood, there was only the woman beneath me.

Human.

Bleeding.

Marked.

I had my teeth in her shoulder, and the taste of her went through me like a command no Alpha had ever been strong enough to give.

She should have been wrong. Humans smelled thin to wolves. Sweet sometimes. Sour with fear. Loud with salt and perfume and the small chemical traces of their soft lives. They moved through the world wrapped in soap, wine, medicine, and denial. Fragile bones. Slow reflexes. Too much trust in locked doors.

She didn’t smell thin. Under the champagne, torn flowers, blood, and panic, there was something in her that struck deep enough to reach the animal and the man at once. Heat. Skin. Anger. A sharp green note from crushed hedge leaves caught in her hair. The clean, living salt of her fear.

I knew her before I knew her name.

That was the horror.

My jaws opened. The moment my teeth left her, the mark answered. Black lines spread from the bite, branching under her skin in a pattern no human body should have survived for a single breath. Her back arched off the grass. Her scream had already torn out of her, but pain dragged another sound from her throat, lower and rougher, and it put murder in me so fast the circle vanished under it.

I turned on the first hand reaching for her.

One of Silas Thorne’s wolves had stepped too close.