Elara's POV
"Let it go, Voss. It's just a mere animal attack and nothing more than that."
My editor's voice was a giant pillar I kept hitting. I hugged the file so tight against my chest as if it could protect me from the world, the picture inside feeling so much like a secret I was too scared to tell. The victim's name was Helen. She was same age. Just like me.
"But the river… the full moon… the pattern…" My voice was a meek whisper, lost in the newsroom's clatter. "There was no blood at the scenes. It's like their bodies were just… completely drained."
"Coincidence." He said, without even looking up from his screen, his fingers flying across the keyboard as he seriously wrote about a new downtown art installation.
"I need you on the mayor's story, not this vision of wonder. You're a junior reporter, not some kind of a character in a horror movie."
The dismissal was a physical blow which took me off balance. I was just the pitiful orphan girl no one believed in. Weak. Timid. The one they'd hired out of pity after the demise of my both parents.
My working desk was in the back, near the terrible trembling fluorescent light that has left everyone with headache. It was a place where they put people they hoped would quit someday.
But I could not let it die off. Helen's face, smiling in her driver's license photo, haunted my heart so deep. She had no other person to speak on her behalf.
That night, the rain went with me to a part of the city I have always avoided, where the buildings were too close to each other as if sharing some deep secrets.
My destination was a bar known as The Glass Den. The name, written on a napkin, was found tucked away in Helen's pocket.
There was a thick and low air inside like a held breath. A slow, heartbeat rhythm pulsed right from hidden speakers. And behind the bar, I saw him.
Lucian Drax.
He moved with a liquid precision that was hypnotic, polishing a glass, his focus so absolute. His eyes, a startling silver, cut through the haze, finding me the immediate moment I walked in the bar. It felt more like he'd been waiting for my coming and less like he saw me.
With my wet coat hugging me so tight as a result of the rain, I slid onto a stool. My heart completely thrashed like a caged bird within my ribs.
"You're lost," he said. His voice was calm, but it cut through the music, giving a low vibration I felt deep in my bones.
I swallowed hard, my throat so dried as if I had no saliva passing through. "I'm looking for the truth."
A faint, deadly and dangerous smile touched his lips. It didn't reach his eyes.
"Truth has teeth, you little human. It tends to bite the hand that holds it."
Into a glass, he poured an amber liquid I hadn't ordered and slid it toward me.
"On the house. For your courage. Or maybe… your foolishness."
As I reached for the drink, our fingers brushed. A jolt, electric and hot, shot up my arm. It was so tangible, immediate and impossible to ignore I gasped, pulling my hand off immediately as if burned.
His eyes blazing with a heat that made the air between them tense, expanded. His silver irises shifting for a single, impossible second to a blazing, molten gold.
To that point of contact, the world narrowed to those impossible eyes.
"You should leave," he whispered to me, his gaze leaving me trapped in the unrelenting hold of his stare. The air around us grew heavy and charged.
"Why?" I asked, with the word a breathless plea. My heart hammered so hard that I felt dizzy.
He came close, his scent of ancient cedar and rain overwhelming my senses.
"Because your fear," he murmured, his voice more of a rough caress against my ear, "smells like destiny. And it is listening.....my wolf is listening."
*****
I ran. I ran as fast as I could all the way home, my skin still buzzing from his touch, my mind shouting with the image of those golden eyes. In my empty, cold apartment, I stared at my notes.
Wolves don't walk upright. That's exactly what my editor had said to me. But I had seen the gold in his eyes. I had felt the beast in his stillness, in the sheer, predatory control of his movements.
A sob caught in my throat. I was in over my head. I was just a girl, chasing shadows that could bite back with a notepad.
A knock brought an end to the silence. Three authoritative, sharp taps. Not like the friendly tap of a neighbor.
My blood dried up instantly and my skin immediately went cold. I crept to the door, peering through the peephole.
A man stood there, putting on a dark coat, his posture so rigid. He flashed a badge, quick and professional. Detective Marek.
"Can I help you?" I asked on opening the door a crack. The chain lock still on.
His cold, bold, and scary eyes scanned my face as if he could read my feelings through it, then swept past me, taking in fullness of the tiny, threadbare flat that had seen better days.
"Elara Voss. The killings beside the river. You've been asking questions."
"It wasn't a question. It's my job as a journalist to find out the problems."
"Then your job is about to get you killed." He stepped a bit closer, the chain lock straining.
The scent of gun oil and rain clung to him. "Stop looking into The Glass Den. Forget about Lucian Drax. Or….the next body that will be pulled off from the river will be yours. He doesn't protect humans, Miss Voss. He feeds on them."
He left immediately without uttering anymore word, his warning hanging in the air like a poison. My strength abandoned me so quickly that I crumpled to the ground.
My body trembling uncontrollably in fear. This was too big for me. I was so, so afraid. I should have listened. I should have left the story.
But the next evening, as the rain started again, my feet with no permission took me back to The Glass Den, back to him. The pull was a tide I couldn't fight, a siren song written in a language my very blood understood.
He looked up as I walked in, a storm coming together in his silver eyes.
"I told you to stay away." He spoke.
"I can't," I said, the words a terrified, honest confession filled with raw vulnerability. It was the bravest thing I had ever said.
He moved around the bar with that predator's grace, stopping so close that I could feel the heat radiating from his body. The air, alive with unspoken things crackled between us.
"What are you?" I breathed, lost in the stormy depths of his gaze.
His hand came up, startlingly slow. His fingers, sure and cool, gently brushed away a strand of wet hair from my cheek. The touch was a brand, searing my skin.
"I'm your end," he whispered, his voice so raw with a truth that terrified me. "And I'm...your beginning."
And then his lips came to mine, and the world fell very far away from me.