The rush of nutrients and vitamins made his head spin, his throat stick around a tacky swallow. And with a low groan, he stood, ambling toward the river. Pausing only to taste the wind, searching for danger that lurked beyond mere sight.
There was nothing but silence. The gentle breeze and the whisper of water bubbling over stone.
Kneeling, he dipped one massive hand into the creek, drawing up a palm full of sweet, crisp liquid.
All it took was a sip.
One wonderful, impossible sip and he knew.
Slick. In the water.
And not just slick, but a perfect match. He could taste it at the back of his skull. It lit up his brain with a barb of stark realization, of instant unwavering belief and dedication to a new path. A pulse of liquid heat shot through his nervous system, making his cock swell and bloat.
Bewildered, he turned wide, amber eyes upriver. Nostrils flared, head tipped back, he searched for any hint of that precious fluid on the breeze—and found none.
But the hunter needed no convincing. His body had hardened, pupils swallowing the sinister ring of color as his mane grew rigid.
The rut.
It struck hard. Fast. Descending with an unnatural weight that consumed everything, leaving behind only hunger. Possessive, ravenous starvation for the breeder producing that particular blend of scents and flavors.
His.
Cock weeping and painfully hard, his balls drew tight against his body. Giving greater access to a blend of deadly hormones not yet seen before, for the hunter had been infected with Trax foryears. Mutated on a genetic level to endure the price of living so long with the deadly virus, he was changed. No longer Anhur, but something else. Bigger and faster.
Utterly feral.
Fixated upriver, he coughed up a snarl. Teeth snapping shut, lips peeled back. And then, as his testicles continued to dump white-hot fury into his veins, a guttural, bellowing roar erupted from deep in his belly. A primal challenge to anything with ears and a cock that a dominant male was staking claim onthatpussy. Declaring ownership of the slick gushing from the cunt he would reshape to suit his monstrous knot.
Willing to kill any who might take what was his, he would lay their bodies at her feet. Broken into pieces and strung through the trees. Their screams a serenade, their innards a beautiful, gory mosaic of his devotion to the female that would whelp his young.
Vibrating with eager rage, the hunter crashed into the wood. Ignoring the shadows that begged him to melt into their embrace, he was a blur darting between the trees. A juggernaut on a mission.
In his wake, only a skinless carcass.
Prepared and forgotten.
Chapter 23
“Hadim,please!” she gasped, begging just as he’d commanded her to do—her voice going soft and ragged aroundthe wrong name.One that shocked him sober, for there wasn’t a male alive who the Alpha despised more.
That they looked so much alike was a curse he’d long grown weary of carrying.
To be reminded of it now, in this precious moment of victory, served only to ignite his temper. Pouring lye in open, infected wounds that refused to mend.
But there was something else.
Something that soothed his fury with a far more satisfying reward. A revelation.
There was butoneway she could have known that insufferable prick. But a single reason she would mistakehimfor Hadim—this miraculous, escaped Hathorian female had once belonged to the named Heir of the Karahmet throne. Hadim himself.
Trained to know only what Hadim had bothered to teach her. Wholly ignorant of her heritage, her biology, or the workings of her hormonal cycle that had ensnared her so fully, she was a creature of unfathomable value.
That she was here at all was a miracle, until he realized how much she must have gone through to simply survive. And then he knew it to beimpossiblethat she was standing before him at all. In heat. Defiant. Healthy and absent any hint of the Trax virus.
But to know she wasHadim’s? That she’d escaped her harem, navigated through the city, and had evaded the packs of roving, desperate males starving for a taste of female flesh. Managed to get through the wall and survived the wilds only to succumb to her nature at his feet?
His cock pulsed, a band of hot steel flexing against her swollen walls.
