THE FERAL CLAIM

CHAPTERTHREE

Chapter 3

LIR POV: Cold was the first thing that returned.

Not the soft cold of falling snow, but the hard, biting cold of frozen ground pressed against bare skin. My cheek was numb. My fingers were numb. The rest of me existed in a distant, throbbing haze of pain and heat. The bite on my neck pulsed like a second heartbeat. Between my thighs, the sticky remnants of Rovan’s seed had partially frozen and then thawed again with the rising fever of my approaching heat. Fresh slick mixed with it, warm and humiliating.

I tried to move. My limbs refused.

Voices reached me first—low, controlled, male. Boots crunched through snow. Someone cursed under their breath.

“Tracks end here. Blood. Omega scent. Strong.”

“Heat?”

“Spiking. And something else. Foreign Alpha claim. Fresh.”

A larger presence moved closer. The air itself seemed to thicken. A scent rolled over me that was nothing like Rovan’s—heavy leather, woodsmoke, and the deep, unmistakable musk of a dominant Alpha who had never needed to raise his voice to be obeyed. It pressed against my instincts like a physical weight. My half-conscious body tried to curl in on itself. It failed.

A gloved hand gripped my shoulder and rolled me onto my back.

I forced my eyes open.

The Alpha looming over me was massive. Broad shoulders blocked out the gray morning sky. Military-short dark hair. Sharp, angular features set in a cold, unreadable mask. Piercing steel-gray eyes that flicked over my n***d, bloodied body with clinical assessment and something darker beneath. When those eyes caught the claim bite on my neck and the drying seed still streaking my thighs, they flashed red for a fraction of a second.

A low, dangerous growl rumbled from his chest.

“Foreign Alpha,” he said. The voice matched the rest of him—deep, controlled, edged with steel. “Recent. And unfinished.”

I tried to snarl. What came out was a broken, rasping sound. My throat was raw from screaming in the chamber and from the cold. I shoved weakly at his chest. My hands were too numb to form fists.

He pinned both of my wrists to the snow with one hand. The strength in that grip was absolute. I might as well have been a child. His other hand gripped my jaw, turning my face toward him so he could examine the bite more closely. His thumb brushed the torn edges of the gland. Pain flared. I jerked. His hold did not allow it.

“Still fighting,” he murmured. There was no softness in the observation. Only calculation. “Good. Means you might survive the next few hours.”

He released my jaw, then scooped me up as if I weighed nothing. One arm under my knees, the other supporting my back. My n***d body pressed against the cold leather of his coat. The movement forced another thick trickle of mixed seed and slick down my thigh. His nostrils flared. The red in his eyes deepened.

“Patrol,” he ordered without looking away from me. “Sweep the tree line. If any of the foreign pack crossed the border, kill them. No survivors. Signal the estate. I want the interrogation cell prepared and the healer on standby.”

Someone answered with a sharp “Yes, Alpha Kane.”

Kane.

The name settled into my dazed mind like a stone dropped into deep water. I had heard it before, whispered in fear and reluctant respect among rogues and border runners. The northern territories’ iron-fisted Alpha. Untouchable. Unyielding. The last wolf anyone wanted to cross.

He carried me through the trees at a steady, ground-eating pace. Every step jostled the ache between my legs and the burning claim mark on my neck. I drifted in and out of consciousness. Sometimes I was aware of the cold wind and the scent of him surrounding me. Sometimes I was back on the mating stone with Rovan’s knot locked inside me. Once I tried to struggle. His arms simply tightened until I could not move at all.

The estate appeared like something out of a dark story—high stone walls, heavy gates, watchtowers manned by silent warriors. The gates opened at Kane’s approach without a word being spoken. Wolves stepped aside. Eyes followed us. No one questioned the n***d, bleeding Omega in their Alpha’s arms.

He did not take me to a healer’s ward.

He took me down.

Stone steps. Cold air that smelled of damp rock and iron. A heavy door opened and closed. I was lowered onto a narrow cot bolted to the wall of a small, windowless cell. The only light came from a single iron fixture high on the wall. The door locked with a solid, final sound.

Kane stood over me, removing his gloves one finger at a time. His steel-gray eyes never left my body. I could feel the weight of that stare on the claim bite, on the bruises darkening my hips, on the mess still streaking my thighs.

“Name,” he said.

I turned my face away and closed my eyes. Silence was the only weapon I had left.

He moved faster than I expected.

One knee landed on the cot beside my hip. His hand fisted in my hair and forced my head back. Not hard enough to tear, but hard enough to make refusal impossible. His face was inches from mine. Up close, the red in his eyes was brighter, fed by my scent and the foreign claim still clinging to my skin.

“Name,” he repeated, quieter. More dangerous.

“Lir,” I rasped. The word scraped my throat raw.

“Lir.” He tasted the name like he was deciding whether it deserved to exist. “The foreign Alpha who marked you. Who is he?”

I stayed silent.

His free hand gripped my thigh and forced it open. The movement was clinical and brutal at once. Cool air touched the wetness between my legs. His eyes dropped. Another low growl vibrated through his chest when he saw how thoroughly I had been used.

“He knotted you,” Kane said. Not a question. “Left his seed. Bit you. And still you ran. Either you are very brave or very stupid.”

I tried to close my legs. His hand held me open with insulting ease.

“I am neither,” I whispered. “I am leaving.”

A humorless sound escaped him—almost a laugh. “You are in no condition to leave. You are in heat-spike from trauma. You are bleeding. You are leaking another Alpha’s claim. And you are on my land.” His thumb brushed the inner crease of my thigh, deliberately close to the mess of seed and slick. “That makes you my problem until I decide otherwise.”

I shoved at his chest again. The partial shift flickered under my skin—claws threatening, canines aching—but my body was too depleted to complete it. Kane caught both of my wrists in one hand and pinned them above my head against the thin mattress. The position stretched me out, exposed and helpless. His other hand returned to my thigh, higher this time.

“Fighting will only make this worse,” he said.

Then he touched me.

Two thick fingers slid through the sticky mess between my legs and pressed against my entrance without warning. I jerked hard. A broken sound tore from my throat. I was still swollen and tender from Rovan’s knot. The stretch burned. Kane did not slow. He pushed both fingers inside me in one steady, ruthless motion, sinking them deep.

My back arched off the cot. Fresh slick poured around his fingers, my body responding even as my mind screamed. He curled the digits and pressed against the sensitive place that had betrayed me the night before. Pleasure sparked white-hot and unwanted. I thrashed. His grip on my wrists did not yield.

“Still so tight,” he muttered, almost to himself. “Even after taking a knot. And already producing slick for a stranger.” His fingers moved—slow, deliberate, exploratory. Not kind. Not gentle. He was mapping me, claiming information with every stroke. “Your heat is climbing fast. Trauma-triggered. Dangerous.”

“Stop—” The word broke on a gasp when he scissored his fingers inside me.

“No.” Kane’s voice remained level, but the red in his eyes had spread. His scent thickened in the small cell, leather and smoke and dominant musk pushing against Rovan’s fading claim. “You are on my territory, marked by an enemy pack, and going into heat. I will not have foreign pheromones driving my warriors into a frenzy. I am going to scent-mark you until the worst of it is buried under mine. Then the healer will see to the rest.”

He added a third finger.

The stretch forced a raw cry from me. My hips tried to twist away. He followed the movement, fingers buried deep, working me open with the same controlled power he seemed to apply to everything. Tears of rage and overstimulation burned at the corners of my eyes. My c*ck had hardened against my will, curving against my stomach. Kane ignored it. His focus remained on the place between my legs and the claim bite on my neck.

He leaned down. His mouth brushed the torn gland. Not a bite—not yet—but a deliberate drag of lips and tongue, spreading his scent into the broken skin. At the same time, his fingers thrust harder, deeper, curling with every stroke until my thighs shook and my breath came in short, punched-out sounds.

“Hate me if you need to,” he said against my neck. “But your body is already answering. Feel how wet you are. How easily you take my fingers after what he did to you.” Another firm thrust. Another flood of slick. “I am not him. I do not need an audience. I do not need to break you to own the problem you have become. But I will put my scent so deep that no wolf in these territories mistakes who is responsible for you now.”

His fingers drove into me with steady, relentless rhythm. The wet sounds filled the cell. My hips jerked helplessly to meet the thrusts even as I tried to pull away. The dual sensation of his mouth on the claim bite and his fingers stretching me open pushed me toward an edge I did not want. Heat coiled low and vicious. My vision narrowed.

“Please—” I did not know if I was begging him to stop or to finish it.

Kane’s answer was to press his thumb against the swollen bud of nerves just above my entrance and rub firm circles while his fingers curled inside me. The o****m tore through me without permission—violent, shaking, humiliating. My c*ck spilled across my stomach in hard pulses. My hole clenched around his fingers, milking them as more slick flooded his hand. A broken, wrecked sound ripped from my throat.

He worked me through it with the same controlled precision, only slowing when the last tremors faded and I lay boneless and gasping beneath him. His fingers slipped free with an obscene wet sound. For a moment he simply looked at the mess he had made of me—come on my stomach, slick coating my thighs, his scent already sinking into the claim bite and the soft skin between my legs.

Then he dragged his wet fingers up my stomach, spreading my own release, and rubbed his palm over the bite mark on my neck in slow, deliberate circles. Scent-marking. Claiming without a permanent bond. Marking territory.

“You will stay in this cell until the heat-spike stabilizes and I decide what to do with you,” he said. His voice had dropped into a lower register, roughened by the scent of my release. “Attempt to escape, and I will chain you to this cot. Clear?”

I turned my face away, chest heaving, eyes burning. Silence was all I had left.

Kane stood. He wiped his hand on a cloth from a small side table, then moved toward the door. At the threshold, he paused, glancing back once. The red had faded from his eyes, leaving only cold steel-gray assessment.

“Rest while you can, Lir. The next hours will not be gentle.”

The door closed. The lock engaged with a heavy, final click.

I lay on the narrow cot in the dim light, body still trembling, thighs slick, the foreign Alpha’s scent now layered thick over Rovan’s fading claim. The heat in my belly had not faded. It simmered, waiting. My mind drifted in exhausted fragments—blood on snow, Kane’s fingers inside me, the absolute strength of his grip.

Outside the thick stone walls of the estate, the wind shifted.

A new scent drifted across the outer grounds—familiar in a way that made my exhausted pulse stumble. Smoke. Blood. f*******n spice. The scent of a rogue who was not supposed to be alive, let alone this close to Kane’s walls.

Jax.

I did not know how I recognized it so instantly. I had never met him. But something in the wolf that lived under my skin lifted its head and snarled a warning and a strange, unwanted pull at the same time.

The scent strengthened for a moment, as if its owner had stepped closer to the walls, testing the air, tasting the chaos I had brought with me.

Then it faded into the wind, leaving only the heavy silence of the cell and the lingering heat under my skin.

I closed my eyes.

Somewhere beyond the estate, a rogue was watching.

And nothing about the northern territories would remain simple now.