Three hundred years of violence written on his body.
Three hundred years of curse.
This close, I can also see something else. Something I didn't expect to find in the eyes of a monster.
Exhaustion.
He's so tired.
The realization slips through the rage-heat like a knife through water, there and gone. This dragon—this Beast King, this killer of forty-seven omegas—is tired in a way that goes deeper than muscle and bone. Soul-tired. The kind of tired that comes from living too long and carrying too much, from watching centuries pass while the weight on your shoulders only grows heavier.
For just a second, I almost feel sorry for him.
Then another wave of heat crashes through me and the feeling burns away, consumed by the inferno of rage and need and feral violence that is my inheritance.
The dragon's eyes close slowly, like he's bracing himself for what comes next. Like he's done this forty-seven times before and knows exactly how it ends.
Then magic ripples through the air like heat shimmer off summer stone, and he begins to shift.
-
The transformation is nothing like I imagined.
His scales ripple like water disturbed by wind. That massive dragon form starts to collapse in on itself, to compress and reshape into something smaller. Bones crack and reform with sounds that make my stomach lurch—wet and visceral, like green wood snapping, like joints being wrenched from sockets.
Scales sink into skin with whispers of metal sliding against metal. Wings fold and fold and fold again, disappearing into shoulder blades with meaty thuds I feel echoing in my own chest. The magic in the air presses against me, heavy and electric, tasting of ozone and old blood.
Thirty seconds.
Thirty seconds, and there's a man standing where the dragon was.
He's naked. Of course he is—the shift destroys clothing. But my heat doesn't care about logic. My heat sees: naked alpha. Massive. Scarred. Radiating that smoke-and-stone scent like a bonfire in winter, and my mouth floods with saliva while rage spikes even higher in my blood.
He's huge even in human form.
Nearly seven feet of muscle and violence barely contained in skin. His body is a map of three hundred years—every battle, every wound, every moment of suffering carved into his flesh in white and silver scars. Claw marks rake across his chest in four parallel lines that must have caught ribs, left them healed uneven beneath the skin. Burns mottle his shoulders, old and silvered, the texture of melted wax smoothed by time.
But it's the scars on his ribs that make me pause.
Parallel lines. Too precise to be from any battle. Too deliberate, spaced exactly one finger-width apart.
Forty-seven of them.
I count them twice, sure I must be wrong. But no. Forty-seven neat, careful lines, carved into his own flesh with whatmust have been surgical precision. Someone made those marks on purpose. With intention.
Why would a monster mutilate himself forty-seven times?
The question surfaces and drowns just as fast, pulled under by the next wave of heat before I can chase it.
His face matches his body—brutal and unforgiving. All hard angles and sharp edges, like someone carved him from granite and never bothered to smooth the dangerous parts. Cheekbones that could cut. A jaw that looks like it's never relaxed, not once in three centuries. Lips pressed into a thin, grim line. Black hair falls past his shoulders, wild and tangled with leaves and forest debris.
And his eyes.
Still golden. Still slitted. Still utterly inhuman despite the human face they're set in.
He doesn't speak.
Just looks at me with those ancient, exhausted eyes. And something in his expression—something in the set of his shoulders, the tension in his jaw—makes me think of the wolf I killed during my last heat. That moment right before I tore out its throat, when it looked at me and knew, absolutely knew, it was going to die.
