Folded beneath the photo is a note. My hands shake as I open it.
“She’s beautiful when she cums, isn’t she? I’ve seen it so many times. In her apartment. In your forest, Tonight at your window.
She tastes like honey when she says my name.
-T.”
The paper crumples into a tight ball in my fist.
And the last item... a pair of Lumi’s panties. I lift them with a claw. They’re wet, not with her release, but his.
I draw a deep, ragged breath, pulling the air deep into my lungs, searching for a trace of skin, of sweat, of him, but there is only a sterile, mocking void.
The gods haven’t just hidden him from the air itself. The scent of him is being choked out by a chemical silence that makes my fangs ache to sink into something solid.
I can tell he’s male... that he’s wrong. But I can’t track a glitch in the world’s design—I can’t hunt a shadow that refuses to cast itself.
I am a predator with no trail, standing in a room of broken glass while she sleeps, completely unaware that he was just inches away.
A broken sound tears from my throat.
He’s been in her apartment, watched her pleasure herself, stolen her clothes... and I can’t even find him.
I vault through the open window, my heavy frame clearing the sill with a grace that defies my size. The moment I hit the snow, the walls of the cabin fall away, replaced by the silence of the forest.
The first tree snaps like kindling in my hands. Then another.
He watched her.
Another tree. Bark splinters under my claws.
He has pictures of her.
Wood cracks and falls.
He touched her things, marked them like a dog. Left them for me to find.
I tear through the forest like a hurricane. Destroying everything in reach.
Trees older than civilizations. Gone.
Branches. Roots. Anything I can get my hands on.
Mine. She’s mine. And I can’t protect her from someone I can’t find.
By the time the rage burns itself out, there’s a clearing where there wasn’t one before.
The scent of raw sap and slaughtered pine is thick enough to choke on.
I board the windows—one by one. Blood smearing the edges like a sacrifice.
He’ll never watch her again. Never see her through the glass. Never get close enough to?—
My claws sink into the wood as I hammer another board in place. The sound of them striking iron nails echoes like a death knell through the valley.
I’m not sealing her in, I’m sealing him out. A thrahking tomb for anything that dares whisper to her again.
The sun is rising by the time I finish, but every window is sealed. It’s finally safe.
