Rough laughter echoed from the stairwell behind me. Two Rogues, packless and lawless wolves hired to ruin me, were closing in fast. My stomach dropped. If they caught me in this state, I was dead. I gathered the last of my strength and threw myself against a heavy suite door that was slightly ajar.
The carved mahogany door clicked shut and locked automatically behind me, cutting off the Rogues' footsteps. A thick scent of winter cedar and crushed obsidian hit me at once.
My knees buckled. I slid down the door to the floor, gasping as I tried to breathe through the dominant Alpha pheromones filling the dark room.
I fumbled along the wall for a light switch. Before I found it, a low male voice cut through the dark with clear Alpha authority.
"Get out."
The command hit me hard. My heart slammed against my ribs, and a sudden sense of soul-deep calm washed over my panic. It was the first stage of the Recognition Ritual, the pull of a fated mate.
I bit the tip of my tongue until I tasted blood.
"Please," I whispered, my voice shaking. "Just let me hide for a minute. There are men outside hunting me."
The tall shadow near the floor-to-ceiling windows did not answer. The floorboards creaked. He moved toward me slowly, like a predator closing in on cornered prey. His aura pressed down on my chest until I could not draw a full breath.
A large, calloused hand shot out from the dark and clamped around my wrist. Where his rough skin touched my feverish pulse, a sharp jolt of static electricity ran up my arm. I gasped and flinched back against the door.
His large frame froze above me. Through the haze of contact, a phantom roar echoed in my skull. His inner beast was awake, and it screamed one word: Mine.
At that moment, the Wolfsbane peaked. The dark room spun, and the stranger blurred in my drugged mind into the cruel, sneering face of my husband from our humiliating wedding night five years ago.
Panic took over. I shoved both hands against the stranger's hard chest and thrashed as tears spilled down my face.
"Don't touch me!" I sobbed. "I'm already married! I'm Dillan Graves's wife, the young mistress of the Graves Pack!"
The man went still. The heat from his body vanished, replaced by a cold so brutal it made my teeth chatter.
"The Graves Pack?" His voice dropped to an icy purr. "So you're a married woman."
His words barely registered. The fire in my belly twisted into agony. Driven by the drugged fever, my hands stopped pushing and curled into his shirt. My body arched up against his cool skin.
He sucked in a sharp breath. His free hand tangled in my hair, and his fingers gripped my jaw, forcing my face up toward his shadowed gaze.
"Do you have any idea that you're playing with fire, little wolf?"
I let out a broken whimper. Hot tears splashed onto the back of his knuckles.
"Help me," I begged, my nails digging into his forearms. "It hurts so much. Please."
In the dim reflection of the city lights outside, his obsidian eyes burned like coals. His ragged breath ghosted over my damp neck.
With a low growl, he hooked an arm beneath my knees and swept me off the floor. The sudden loss of gravity made me cry out, and my arms flew around his broad shoulders.
He crossed the living room in three long strides, kicked open the bedroom door, and tossed me onto the center of a king-sized bed.
I curled into a tight ball on the mattress, shivering. The mattress dipped as he knelt on one knee at the edge. His long fingers slowly unbuttoned his cuffs as he looked down at me.
A sliver of moonlight cut through the gap in the heavy drapes and fell across his chest. Below his right collarbone was a pale, jagged scar, the unmistakable mark of an old liquid silver burn.
"Since you threw yourself into my den," he murmured, his voice echoing through the quiet bedroom with cold finality, "don't blame me for what happens next."
He leaned down. His cool lips brushed the sensitive shell of my ear, sending a violent tremor down my spine as the mate bond snapped taut between us.
The last rational corner of my brain screamed at me to run, but my drugged body betrayed me and arched into his touch.
His mouth crashed onto mine in a punishing, bruising kiss that stole the remaining air from my lungs. His Alpha dominance pinned me to the sheets.
The sharp sound of tearing silk ripped through the silence. I squeezed my eyes shut and let myself sink into the dark.
Searing pain collided with a terrifying wave of pleasure. I bit down hard on my lower lip to lock the shameful cries inside my throat, and a tear of humiliation slipped into my hair.
Feeling my rigid tension, his rough hands paused. He slid a warm palm beneath my back and traced slow circles against my trembling skin as he murmured against my temple.
"Relax, baby. Let go."
In the dark of that foreign suite, every rule I had ever believed in broke. I surrendered the innocence I had guarded for twenty-two years to a nameless predator whose face I could not even see.
As one final tremor tore through me, my strength gave out completely, and the blackness swallowed me whole.
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