Hold on, my love.We’ve got a long way to go.
20
MEGA SIZE YARN BALL
Lumi-
I thought I knew what fast was.
I was wrong.
The world blurs into streaks of white and shadow—snow and trees ripping past us so fast I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. Wind whips at my face, stealing my breath, freezing tears on my cheeks before I even realize I’m crying.
Andrik’s muscles roll and surge with every stride beneath me. I grip fistfuls of his fur—soft, thick, and impossibly warm. Which is weird, because he’s always cold. It must be some Rhavari thing my brain can’t piece together.
His tail is still wrapped around my waist. Every time we leap, every time we land, it tightens. Like he’s reminding me:I’ve got you. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.
I bury my face in the back of his neck and breathe him in. Even like this, monstrous with not a lick of humanity left, he still smells like cloves, and pine, and home.
I don’t know when he became that.
I don’t know when his scent became the thing that steadies my heartbeat instead of spiking it. I don’t know when his presence became the only place I felt safe.
He leaps again, higher this time, and my stomach drops as we soar over a frozen ravine. I gasp, fingers twisting deeper into his fur, thighs clamping down hard.
A low rumble vibrates through his chest. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was laughing.
“This isn’t funny!” I shout into the wind.
His tail squeezes my waist. His ears flick back toward me.
Yeah. He’s definitely laughing.
I press my cheek against his fur and hold on tighter. The cold doesn‘t touch me here—his body heat bleeds through my clothes, warming me from the outside in. His antlers cut through the wind above me, the left one jagged and broken where he tore it from his own skull.
For me.
He did that for me.
I close my eyes and let the rhythm of his body carry me. Every stride, every breath, every beat of his massive heart against my chest.
He’s terrifying like this, and somehow... even more beautiful. He looks like a mix of a lion, panther, wolf, and stag all molded into one beast.
His body is enormous, easily the size of my car, maybe bigger, and yet he moves like water—regal and fluid.
His fur’s changed, much thicker now, more luminous and silky. It’s a mix of silver and white that twinkles under the moonlight like fresh-fallen snow.
His face is more feline in this form; a lion’s power with a panther’s slickness.
His antlers are larger too, more twisted than before, branching from his skull as if they grew straight from the gods’first forest. There are designs carved into them that shimmer faintly every time his paws hit the ground.
His ears are his most wolf-like feature. They’re large, triangular, and they twitch constantly, listening for danger even as he runs.
His hooves have morphed into giant paws with black iridescent claws that could cleave a human in half with no more than a swipe.
His tail is long and thick, covered in that same silver-white fur. It moves like it has a mind of its own—tightening when we jump, loosening when we land, always keeping me perfectly anchored to him.
I know he was holding this part of himself back from me, because he thought it would scare me, but I can’t help picturing him in a giant cat bed with a mega-size yarn ball, purring as I scratch behind his ears.
