“Fuck off!” Aric growls, his hold tightening around me.
“I wanted her to know whose mating mark claimed me tonight.”
My jaw splinters with pain as the bones beneath my skin shifts and sharp teeth fill my mouth, but I’m listening past the agony. My fists dig into Aric’s shirt, letting him know I want to hear what the asshole has to say. Because he wouldn’t come back to taunt me unless he had a bomb ready to destroy my life.
“Your sweet little friend Bea claimed my mating mark.” His words chill me, freezing my heart in a block of ice so thick it might never recover. “Her wolf found me. Ran right up to me like the good little bitch she is.”
I angle myself as much as I can, only to find a beautiful raven-haired wolf sitting at Kyvain’s feet. Her head is lowered down, but bright blue eyes peer up at me. It’s her. The same floral scent she’s always had tickles my nose, even as the bones there break and start to reform. My lungs squeeze in on themselves until they’re no longer functional and all I can think about is how she crushed on the shyest boy in our village for the last two years.
Only to claim Kyvain as her mate.
“The moon hasn’t finished claiming me yet, but my time is coming soon. I can feel it. Any minute now, the mating will be complete,” Kyvain says proudly as his already sharpened fingers dig into Bea’s beautiful fur at the back of her wolf’s neck.
No! No, no, no!
“And I’ll be finding you soon too,” he whispers with a cruel smile cutting across his lips.
Aric steps forward hard, his chest knocking into Kyvain’s.
He’s ready and waiting for violence all the time it seems.
But so is my wolf.
Magic strikes through me with the force of lightning, leaving hot embers burning through my veins. Warmth sears every inch of me. A rush of power and pain collide in a distortion of cracking bones that overtakes my body.
In a gracefully swift movement only my wolf could make, I leap off of Aric’s back and attack. My nails dig into skin as I launch myself forward hard. My jaws open as a growl straight from hell tears up my throat. Hot blood fills my mouth as my teeth sink into weak flesh, the scent of Kyvain seeming so much stronger as he bleeds. A scream of agony is a whisper of sound in my ears as my pulse pounds louder and louder, but it gets lost in the sea of cries from all the wolves shifting for the first time tonight.
The pack doesn’t know their precious golden son needs help. The shadows of night cloak us, and this chance at revenge is a gift I can’t refuse.
Powerful jaws wrench sideways as my wolf shakes her head, her whole body following through with the violent movement, and meat tears from the limb in a satisfying slick sound.
Kyvain cries out once more before he stumbles away, leaning on a stunned Calvin for support while a familiar dark wolf whimpers at his feet. They don’t cry out to bring the enforcers down on my head. They just stare, shocked.
Blood soaks through my enemy’s shirt, darkening around his upper arm where his flesh that still fills my snout is a divot of muscle within his shoulder.
Russet eyes lock on my blue ones. Aric must see the pain and rage reflected inside my gaze, because his becomes downright murderous when he looks to Kyvain again.
But the moon will claim us all tonight.
Kyvain drops to his knees with more screams that bleed into the cries of others going through the same torture. Calvin stumbles back from his friend, his own shift on the brink, and Bea lies down, her eyes sad and forlorn. Cracking and cries snap through the night as his wolf breaks his feeble body.
It happens much faster for him.
The golden alpha boy doesn’t suffer nearly enough.
I linger and watch as his clothes shed to the snowy ground in tattered strips and flesh rips away from a timber colored wolf possibly three times my size.
My white fur reflects in the depths of his cold blue eyes as his beast looks upon me for the first time.
And something unimaginably terrible happens.
Kyvain’s howl rips through the night in a way only an alpha’s could. It draws a crowd, the other pack members and wolves on the hill heeding his call.
His wolf brings one large paw forward, he comes ever so close to me… and then lowers his head as far down to the ground as he can manage.
“The mating pose,” a woman hisses like a curse.
What. The. fuck.
