Chapter 3
The snowflakes hung frozen in the air, an oil painting with the world held on pause.
The Cleansers stayed locked in their poses, soul-shackles still raised, pinned as though nailed in place by some monstrous force, terror flooding their eyes. It was the absolute, animal dread of a lesser thing before an apex predator.
Out of the dark came footsteps. With each print that fell, the ice and snow drew soundlessly aside.
A man walked out of the storm. He wore a long coat of dark leather, its hem snapping in the freezing wind, and he moved like a beast pacing the bounds of its territory. His features were cold and knife-cut, carrying an arrogance that held the whole world at a distance. This was the Black Wolf King of Nightfell — Draven Vale.
He didn't spare the Cleansers a glance. He only flicked one hand as he passed. Those killers, untouchable a breath ago, came apart in an instant — dissolving into a fine red mist that folded into the blizzard. No screams. No struggle. Only a sickening quiet.
He stopped in front of me, his vast shadow swallowing me whole.
"Ashmoor's little castoff," he said, low and mocking, his voice deep and magnetic and without a trace of warmth. "They spent this many of the Council's dogs on one exiled woman."
I flinched back on instinct and, too spent to hold myself upright, dropped into the snow.
And in that moment — as his body neared mine — a strange chemistry detonated inside me. My heart lurched hard. The wolf-soul I'd thought long dead was slamming against my ribs, and somewhere deep in me a voice was screaming: get closer to him.
Draven's brow drew a fraction tighter. He'd plainly felt the same senseless pull. But as he lowered his gaze, a strand of my hair grazed the side of his throat on the wind, and the scent of it slipped into him.
Draven went still. Those cold, distant gray eyes constricted the instant the scent hit — as though he'd been struck by lightning.
"That scent…"
His hand shot out and seized my jaw. In the next breath his gray eyes snapped narrow, the pupils splitting into a beast's vertical slits, crimson bleeding out to swallow the color whole. A low growl tore from his throat, and black claws slid glistening from his fingertips.
He looked like a man wrestling another beast inside his own skin. His breathing turned ragged, the pressure rolling off him more chaotic by the second, until the blizzard itself began to churn in time with him.
He let me go all at once and staggered back a step.
It was a thing Nightfell had never seen. The Black Wolf King… had given ground.
He stared at me, his voice gone hoarse to the edge of breaking.
"Impossible," he murmured, his fingertips shaking with the sheer force of the shock.