My stomach was already twisted into a knot before the trap even snapped.
Something had been bleeding out in my forest for hours, leaving a trail of heat that made the back of my throat itch. When the ground finally shook, I knew I hadn't just caught a predator. I'd caught something that was never meant to be breathing this close to human fence lines.
The night air was wet and heavy, clinging to my skin like a damp shroud. I moved fast, hood pulled low, boots finding the silent patches of moss where the mud thinned. My pulse was a frantic hammer against my ribs. Too loud. Too sharp.
Get it together, Fillia. It's just a job. Trap, sedate, relocate. Simple.
Except nothing about tonight felt simple.
The trap line was only supposed to hold livestock killers—those oversized, mutant wolves that got too bold during the winter. Big, ugly, mindless things.
Not... whatever this was.
I smelled the metal before I heard a sound. Iron. Silver. And the bitter, chemical sting of the poison I'd mixed myself—enough to paralyze a bull, but not kill it. That mattered. It had to. I wasn't a murderer; I was a protector. Or at least, that's the lie I told myself every morning.
The first snare was untouched. The second, still set. The third—
The ground didn't just move; it exploded.
Wood cracked like a gunshot. Chains shrieked. Something slammed into the earth hard enough to rattle my teeth in their sockets. I staggered, the breath punched out of my lungs. My ears rang with a high-pitched whine. In the trees above, birds scattered like shrapnel against the moon.
Then came the sound.
A low, broken growl. It was wet, thick with pain, but it wasn't panicked. It was pure, unadulterated fury.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
I forced my legs to move.
The clearing was a disaster zone. Saplings had been snapped like toothpicks. The mud was churned into a dark slurry. One of my heavy steel traps was embedded halfway into a tree trunk, looking like it had been hurled there by a hurricane.
At the center of the wreckage, something massive was down on one knee.
Blood soaked the ground. It was dark—too dark—and steam curled faintly off it in the freezing air. I stopped breathing. My heart did a slow, painful roll in my chest.
Yellow eyes lifted.
They weren't glazed with shock. They weren't wild with animal fear. They were focused. Lethal. Locked onto me with the precision of a sniper.
Every instinct I had—the human ones and the ones I kept locked in a cage—screamed at the same time.
Run. Hide. Shift. Fight.
The thing in the trap pulled once. The chain held, but the silver spikes bit deep into flesh that shouldn't have been human. Because it wasn't. No wolf had shoulders that broad. No wolf knelt like a fallen god. And no human moved with that kind of terrifying, fluid grace even while half-poisoned.
Lycan.
The word hit me like a bucket of ice water. My mouth filled with bile. This is bad. This is "end of the klan" bad.
His chest rose in a slow, controlled rhythm. Even wounded, even chained to the dirt, he wasn't afraid. That was the scariest part. He looked at me like I was a minor inconvenience he was about to solve.
"You," he said.
The sound rolled through the clearing, vibrating in my marrow. It was rough, clear, and entirely too sentient.
My fingers twitched near the knife strapped to my thigh. Yeah, right, Fillia. Like a six-inch blade is going to stop a Lycan. I forced my voice to stay level, even though my knees felt like jelly.
"Stay still," I ordered.
He laughed. It was a single, dry huff of air. No humor. Just cold observation.
"Wrong night to play hunter, little girl," he said.
My skin prickled with static. The ground under my boots felt... strange. It hummed, responding to a pressure I couldn't explain. I tried to ignore it. A human habit. A safe habit.
"I'm not here to kill you," I said, stepping closer.
"Then you're stupid."
He yanked the chain again. The metal groaned, bending under a strength that shouldn't exist. My chest tightened. The air around him felt thicker, heavier, like it was saturated with his sheer will.
"I poisoned the spikes," I warned, my voice trembling now. "The more you move, the faster it spreads to your heart."
His eyes flicked down to the blackened wound on his leg, then back up to mine. "Good," he murmured. "That means you wanted me alive. That means you want something."
That wasn't how this was supposed to go. He was supposed to be a beast. A mistake I could fix quietly. Not a man with a voice like velvet and eyes that saw right through my human costume.
I edged closer, despite every cell in my brain screaming No! The silver was doing its ugly work—the wound carried an aroma that was not pleasant, a mix of burnt ozone and metallic rot. The poison was slowing him, though. I could see the way his fingers curled a second too late.
He was still deadly. He was still a monster.
But in this moment, he was mine.
"You attacked the village livestock," I said, trying to find my footing in the conversation.
"I attacked what was fed to me," he countered, his teeth flashing—sharp enough to make my palms sweat. "That wasn't livestock. That was a trap. Just like you."
My stomach dropped. Fed to him? Who in the village was feeding a Lycan?
"Where are they?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
He smiled wider. "Too late."
The forest went deathly quiet. No crickets. No wind. Even the trees seemed to be holding their breath, waiting for the punchline. I should have turned around. I should have cut the line, let him bleed out, and moved my klan three states away.
Instead, I reached for the heavy-duty sedative in my pack.
The moment my hand moved, his gaze sharpened into something terrifying. "No," he said. It wasn't a request. It was a command.
I felt it then. A pull. Not just the pressure of an Alpha, but something older. Something ancient. It tugged at the wolf inside me, calling to her like it recognized her. My head spun. My stomach lurched.
I screwed up. I really, really screwed up.
"You can't take me," he said slowly, his voice dropping an octave. "Not like this."
"Watch me," I snapped.
The syringe was in my hand before my brain could process the danger. I lunged.
He moved faster.
The chain didn't just bend—it snapped. Metal shrieked as it gave way. Pain exploded through my shoulder as he lunged forward, grabbing me by the jacket and yanking me down. I hit the mud hard. The wind vanished. Stars burst behind my eyes.
He loomed over me, one knee pinning my ribs into the muck. He was heavy. Hot. So close I could smell the blood, the poison, and something dark and wild underneath. His hand wrapped around my wrist, pinning it to the ground. Controlled. Not crushing, but absolute.
"You should have run," he whispered.
My vision swam. My chest burned. The forest around us began to pulse in low, dangerous waves, responding to the panic spiking in my blood. I did the one thing I promised I'd never do.
I shifted—just a fraction. Just enough to survive.
The ground surged.
Thick, black roots snapped up from the mud like whipcords, twisting around his injured leg and yanking him off balance. He roared as the poison spiked in his system, his body slamming back into the dirt.
I didn't waste the second. I lunged forward and plunged the sedative into his neck.
He convulsed once. Twice. Then his muscles went slack.
Silence crashed down around us like a physical weight.
I lay there in the mud, shaking, my ears ringing so loud I thought I'd gone deaf. My hands were slick with his blood and the filth of the forest floor.
He was breathing. Slow. Forced. But alive.
I stared at him—this Lycan, this nightmare—trapped and drugged in my territory. And that's when the real horror set in. He hadn't attacked me because he could. He'd stopped because he felt it. The same tether, the same ancient pull that was currently vibrating in my own bones.
I backed away, my heart hammering a rhythm of pure dread. This wasn't an accident. This was a beckoning.
One sentence clawed through my mind as I reached for the spare chains:
If he wakes up fully out here, the forest won't be the only thing that answers him.