I square my shoulders and nod once, my voice firm with my resolve as I say, “I don’t want you to let me go. I want to claim you just as much as you want to claim me. I don’t care what you are, as long as you are mine. Just as I was always meant to be yours. I want you—every part of you, wild and untamed.”
His lips curl into a wicked grin, his silver eyes dark with something primal. He drops his hands and takes a step back. Then another.
His body doesn’t just grow, it transforms. Expands into something massive, untamed. His fur thickens like a living storm, claws unsheathing like curved blades. The transformation is startling. Any trace of the man behind the beast is gone. The creature that stands before me is pure Migoi.
His roar splits the night, shaking the stone beneath my feet. The sound of a predator. A command. A warning.
A thrill licks up my spine.
His silver eyes lock onto mine—not a man, not a beast. Only—my mate. He drops his head back and roars, “Run.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Dahlia
Fear slams into my stomach like a lead weight, dragging at my limbs until instinct kicks in, screaming at me to do what he commanded.
I spin and bolt, darting into the nearest tunnel. I have no idea where I am going in this rabbit warren of crisscrossing caves. I don’t think—I can’t think—I just keep moving, feet pounding against the uneven ground as though the devil himself is chasing me.
But Eryon isn’t the devil. He’s something far worse. He is a god of winter. A harbinger of hunger and the hunt. And I am the willing sacrifice.
My breath comes fast and uneven, my pulse thundering in my ears. My feet slip over loose rocks, but I recover—too fast, too precise. My body is stronger than it should be, my muscles burning but not faltering. Strength pulses through my veins, something wild, something new. For a flickering second, the thought crosses my mind—could I truly outrun him?
The tunnel splits ahead. The left slopes upward, a faintbreeze curling through the passage. I veer that way, lungs pulling in air as I chase the promise of open space, of escape. The incline steals my breath, my calves tightening, but I don’t stop. My ragged breaths drown out all sound as I push onward, until?—
Eryon
I feel my form growing, larger even than the beast’s mantle. Change shivers over my skin, not just elongating my thick white fur but standing it on end.
My claws unsheathe, sharpening to their full lethal points. My vision sharpens, cutting through the darkness as if the mountain itself bends to my sight—every rock, every shift of shadow clear as day.
I hear her.
The frantic pound of her heart. The raw scrape of bare feet against stone. Breath, shallow and uneven, caught between instinct and exhilaration. She runs—fast, reckless. Blind. She doesn’t know these tunnels. But I do.
Her scent trails behind her like a lure made only for me—sunshine and spring, fire and defiance, undercut by something richer. Something deeper.
Her desire. It curls in the air, potent and intoxicating, filling my lungs until my body thrums with the need to claim her.
The beast inside me scrabbles at my skin, wild and insistent, demanding I tear through the dark after her and take what is mine. The same beast that raged when I saw her collapse, her skin as pale as the surrounding snow. The same beast that nearly lost her.
Only with the sheer will borne of centuries do I restrain myself. I let her run. Not in fear. Not in desperation.
The first time she ran, it was to save me. To shield me from death, even when it should have been me protecting her. That moment—the sight of her falling, the breath torn from her lungs—will haunt me until the end of my days.
But now—now she flees in promise, in surrender. And this time, I will catch her.
She has laid her claim on me. Asked me to lay mine on her. Spoken the words, but more importantly, proven them with her actions.
Actions I hope never to see repeated. She has given up everything for me. She has chosen not just me, butus. Never again will I doubt her. Never again will I let fear cloud what I already knew from the moment I saw her—she ismine.
Heat floods my veins, primal and absolute. My cock throbs at the delay, the restraint nearly unbearable, but the longer I wait, the sweeter the moment will be when I catch her. This time, I will not doubt. I will not hesitate.
She has chosen me. Not as a last resort. Not out of desperation. But because she is mine as surely as I am hers.
I can almost see her as she races through the tunnels, tuned into her exact location. Keeping myself from running to her becomes more than I can bear, and at last—I unleash my beast to pounce upon her like that damned avalanche I pulled her from.
Only unlike the temporary snow, I will consume her like the mountain. Unmoving, unshakable, endless as time.
