The first thing I taste is dirt.
Cold, loamy, in my mouth and under my nails. My cheek is pressed to something wet and rotting. Leaves. The air is sharp enough to sting the back of my throat when I drag in a breath that doesn’t feel like it belongs to me.
Crickets scream. The wind moves through the trees in a slow, shuddering roar, like the forest is breathing around me.
Then the pain hits.
It’s not everywhere at once, the way people describe car accidents. It’s focused, a blazing brand right over my heart. A starburst of agony punching through my ribs, pulsing in time with a heartbeat that’s racing hard enough to make my vision blur.
I jolt onto my back with a hoarse noise, clutching my chest. My fingers hit bare skin.
I freeze.
I’m half-naked. My pajama top is shredded, hanging off one arm in ribbons. Cool night air slicks over my ribs, my stomach. Goosebumps rush across me like a flock of birds taking off all at once.
“What the—” My voice breaks. It sounds wrong. Rougher. Like I’ve been screaming for hours.
I force my eyes down.
There, over my heart, the skin is not skin anymore.
A mark burns there—black and silver, seared into me like someone pressed a brand to my chest. It spirals out from a central crescent, lines and fangs and looping script I don’t recognize. The edges glow faintly, faint green flickers chasing each other through the ink as I stare.
The agony crests, white hot. My spine arches off the forest floor. A howl tears the night open.
It takes me a second to realize it came from me.
My lungs drag for more air. My head throbs like it’s full of bees. The trees lean in, too close, too tall. Moonlight filters through the canopy in thin strips, painting everything in silver and shadow. I don’t know this place.
I don’t know how I got here.
The last thing I remember is my bed. The small, too-warm room above the bakery. The sound of Mrs. Kellerman’s ancient refrigerator humming through the wall. My phone face-down on the nightstand, a half-read horror novel open on my chest.
Then—
Nothing.
No, that’s a lie. There was something. A pressure in my head, like hands pushing from the inside. Whispers like wind through needles. A low voice under everything, saying my name.
Luna.
Too many voices at once, echoing the same word.
Luna.
“Stop,” I whisper, pressing the heel of my hand to my forehead, as if I can crush the memory out. “This is a dream. It’s just—”
The mark flares, bright as molten metal.
I scream.
The forest answers.
Howls rise, distant but wrong somehow—too synchronized, too hungry. Birds explode out of the trees above me in a rush of wings. Something moves in the underbrush to my left, then freezes.
I am not alone.
Adrenaline slices through the haze. I scramble backward, half-crawling, half-sliding through the leaf mold until my back hits a tree trunk. The bark is rough and damp, grounding and unreal all at once.
“Who’s there?” My voice cracks again. I hate that it does. “I swear to God, if this is some Ashridge hazing thing—”
A low laugh comes from the shadows to my right.
Not amused. Not friendly. It scrapes along my skin like claws.
“Little town humans,” the voice murmurs, drifting closer. “Always so certain someone else planned the nightmare.”
The hairs rise along my arms. The wind shifts, blowing from the trees toward me.
And I smell him.
It’s stupid, that I notice the smell first. But it slams into me: smoke and pine resin, wet stone after rain, the copper tang of blood laid over all of it. Animal and human and something else, some old wildness that makes my whole body go very, very still.
A shadow peels away from the trees.
He is tall. That’s the first thing, because he blocks out a strip of moonlight as he steps between two pines. Broad shoulders, dark jacket open over a black t-shirt, jeans muddy to the knee. Bare feet on the cold earth.
His eyes catch the light and reflect it back, not human at all in that instant. Wolf-bright. Storm-gray shot through with pale rings that glow for a heartbeat before dimming.
He stops five feet away.
I stare up at him, breath stuck somewhere between my chest and throat. My Mark—capital M, I don’t know why the word crawls into my mind like that—throbs harder.
He looks like every whispered warning in town grew a body and walked out of the tree line.
“Luna Hart,” he says quietly. He knows my name. “Open your eyes.”
“They are open,” I snap automatically, because panic has always translated to sarcasm for me. “Who the hell are you?”
His mouth twists, not quite a smile. There’s nothing gentle in it. “You don’t recognize me.”
It isn’t a question, but something in his voice fractures on the last word anyway.
I scan his face, fighting through the pain. Strong jaw, a faint scar along his cheekbone like a claw mark that half-healed. Hair dark enough to swallow the moonlight, pushed back carelessly. He can’t be much older than late twenties. Maybe thirty.
I’ve never seen him before. I’d remember.
“Should I?” My hand curls around the shredded edges of my top, trying to cover both my chest and the burning symbol that refuses to be ignored.
His gaze flicks down, then follows the line of my arm back up. When his eyes land on the mark, the air between us snaps tight.
His pupils blow wide. Every muscle in his body goes predator-still.
“Fuck,” he breathes. “It took you.”
“The… tattoo fairy?” I manage weakly. “Because I didn’t consent to—”
“That’s not a tattoo.” His voice goes flat, dangerous. He takes one step closer, then another, until he’s a looming wall in front of me and the tree at my back suddenly feels too small.
I should be more afraid.
I am afraid. My heart is racing, my hands are shaking, and every instinct I’ve ever had is screaming at me to run.
But there’s something else under it. A pull, deep in my bones, dragging me toward him even as my brain yells no. The mark thrums in response to his proximity, heat seeping outward beneath my skin.
I can feel his body heat from here. His scent wraps around me, thick and heady. My breathing stutters.
Who the hell is he?
He reaches out.
I flinch.
His hand stops inches from my chest. Fingers curled in, like he’s holding on to his own restraint by a thread. His jaw clenches once, hard. He looks at the mark like it’s a loaded gun pointed at us both.
“Don’t,” I whisper. I don’t know whether I mean don’t touch me or don’t stop.
“I have to see.” Low, raw. “I have to know exactly what it did.”
“It?” I echo. “What are you—”
His fingertips brush the edge of the mark.
The world detonates.
Heat slams through me, not burning this time but… claiming. Like something ancient just snapped awake inside my chest. My back hits the tree so hard the bark bites into my skin, but I barely feel it. Every nerve lights up.
Images flash behind my eyes: a forest on fire, wolves tearing through shadowed shapes, blood soaking into roots that pulse like veins. A pair of gray eyes under a blood-slick moon, staring at something—someone—with savage determination.
A voice I don’t know, chanting in words my ears can’t understand but my bones do.
Mate, something inside me whispers, exultant and terrified. Mine.
I choke on a gasp.
His hand jerks back like I’ve burned him. He staggers a step away, then two, dragging both hands over his face. For a moment I see something ugly in his expression. Not toward me. Toward himself.
“No,” he mutters. “No, no. This isn’t—shit.”
“Stop talking in cryptic alpha riddles,” I snap, because focusing on term paper levels of bullshit is easier than focusing on my body trying to rewrite itself under my skin. “Tell me what this is and what you did to me.”
His hands drop.
He meets my gaze fully for the first time.
The impact is physical. Like standing too close to a bonfire. His eyes are wild around the edges, regret and hunger and fear all tangled together. But his voice, when he speaks, is steady. Controlled.
“I’m Raiden Wolfcrest,” he says.
The name hits me like a second blow.
Ashridge is small. Gossip travels faster than actual mail. I’ve heard that name in whispers since I moved here. The Ghost Alpha. The traitor. The war-winner who disappeared the night the blood stopped.
Every warning Mrs. Kellerman ever murmured over tea pours through my mind.
Stay away from the Wolfcrest land, Luna. Their old Alpha made a deal with the dark and never came back. The forest keeps the debt.
“You’re dead,” I say numbly, because that’s the only thing that makes sense. “Or banished. Or—whatever happens to wolves who run.”
“Rumors are efficient.” One corner of his mouth lifts, then falls. “I’m not dead. Not yet.”
He looks at my mark again. His throat works. “But I should be.”
The world only now clicks into a hideous alignment.
This is the man who walked away from his pack the night they needed him. The man the town has collectively spat on for two years. The man whose legend smells like smoke and blood and broken oaths.
And he is looking at me like I am the bullet he’s been waiting for.
“What did you do?” My voice is quieter now. No room left for jokes.
His answer is simple.
“I bargained with something older than this forest,” he says. “I traded my mate’s soul for the power to win the war.”
Silence crashes around us. Even the crickets seem to shut up.
“Your… mate.” The word tastes wrong on my tongue. “Congratulations, I guess? That sounds like a personal problem. How does it involve me?”
He flinches. Just a fraction. But I see it.
He takes a slow step closer, then kneels in the leaves so we’re eye-level. It’s an oddly gentle move from a man who looks like violence personified.
“Luna.” My name again, like an apology. “It involves you because the spirit took me at my word. It chose a mate I didn’t know yet. One who carried the right blood.”
His gaze drops to the mark, then back to my face.
“The night I disappeared, I gave it you.”
Everything inside me goes hollow.
“I don’t even know you,” I say, a laugh bubbling up, brittle and sharp. “I’ve never seen you. I moved here after the war. How could you—”
“It didn’t tell me who you were.” His voice cuts through mine, low and ragged. “Only that she existed. That my mate would be the price. I thought—” He breaks off, jaw clenched. “I thought I could carry the sin and she’d never know. That she’d live her whole life untouched.”
His hand fists in the damp leaves at his side. “I was wrong. It marked you. It woke you. Now every hungry thing in these woods can smell what you are.”
I stare at him because I don’t know where else to look. The trees tilt around us. My Mark throbs, but the pain is distant now, under the roar of my pulse.
“What I am?” The words scrape out of me. “According to you, I’m collateral.”
“You’re my mate.” The words are so quiet I almost miss them.
Something low in my gut twists. I hate that the word lands somewhere deep, like it’s been waiting.
“No,” I say immediately. “No. I didn’t sign up for this. You don’t get to just declare—”
“It’s not a declaration.” His eyes flash, wolf-bright again. Not at me. At the situation, the sky, himself. “It’s a bond. The mark in your skin is mine because I am the one who owes the debt.”
“Get it off.” My fingers claw at my chest before I can stop them. The skin is hot under my touch. “If you put it there, you can take it back.”
His hand darts out, catching my wrist. Not hard. But his grip is unmistakable.
The contact is a shock. Not just warmth, but recognition. My body leans toward him before I can order it not to. The forest sounds recede, replaced by the rush of our combined breathing.
Heartbeat moment, my mind notes distantly, hysterically. This would be swoony as hell if he hadn’t just confessed to signing my soul over like a foreclosure notice.
“I didn’t put it there,” he says, voice dropped to a rough whisper. We’re too close now. I can see the faint stubble along his jaw, the flecks of darker gray in his irises. “The spirit did. It came to collect.”
“How generous,” I bite out. “Maybe next time it can send a calendar invite.”
His mouth twitches again, pained amusement this time. “You’re not supposed to be funny right now.”
“I’m not supposed to be a lot of things right now.”
We stare at each other, a fragile, miserable standoff.
Then a howl rips through the forest, closer than before. Answered by another, and another.
Raiden’s grip on my wrist tightens.
“They’ve scented you,” he says, all traces of humor gone. “We’re out of time.”
“Who?” I demand, even as a colder fear crawls up my spine. “Your pack?”
“My pack,” he says, “and everything else I invited into these woods the night I bartered you away.”
He pulls me to my feet in one smooth motion. The world tilts; I stumble against his chest. Heat, scent, the electric awareness of his body inches from mine—it all slams into me again.
“Let go,” I protest, half-hearted even to my own ears.
“I can’t.” His breath brushes my temple. “Not tonight.”
“Why?” I whisper.
He looks down at me, eyes dark and determined and so, so tired.
“Because,” Raiden Wolfcrest says, like he is confessing the oldest sin in the world, “I vanished to avoid paying the price. And now that it’s come due, every predator out there wants what I owe. You.
“I am the one who put your soul on the table, Luna. So I am the only thing standing between you and everything that wants to collect.”
Somewhere in the darkness, something snarls, closer this time, snapping branches as it runs.
Raiden’s fingers lace with mine, rough and sure.
“Run with me,” he says. “Or you won’t make it to dawn.”
My heart hammers against the burning mark. The forest holds its breath.
And for one wild, impossible second, I wonder if running with the monster who doomed me might be the only way to learn how to survive him.
