Winter had come down hard.
It was bone-deep cold that turned breath into white ribbons and made the world feel sharp-edged and honest. The trees stood bare, the air tasted like metal, and even the ground seemed to hold its breath. But in the Great Forest, and especially in the Beast Kingdom, winter wasn't just a season of frost and quiet. For reasons older than memory, it was the opening bell for mating season—a time when urges woke up like buried fires and the whole world seemed to lean toward heat.
That made a strange kind of sense. Nothing warmed you faster than sex when the air tried to steal the heat from your skin. The mating season stretched from the first hard frost until the first timid flowers poked through the snow—right into spring. And right now, in the Feliann Clan, it was loud, raw, and everywhere.
