MARKED BY THE FERAL ALPHA KING

8-the hunt 2

“Mate,” he said, and the word wasn’t spoken—hewn. It landed and split something open inside me that had nothing to do with choice.

“No,” I told him, and my voice didn’t sound like mine. “You don’t get to call me that.”

He lowered his head. His lips brushed the place I’d once fantasized a gentle mouth might bless. My body tried to arch away and arch toward him at once. I hated it for both instincts. My wrists burned under his grip.

“Let me go,” I hissed, shoving against his chest. Muscle didn’t give. His claws scored the boards beside my head instead of my skin, shredding wood into splinters that sprinkled my hair. A tremor ran through him, a ripple of fight—not with me. With himself. With something in him that had no language but bite.

His teeth grazed my skin.

Fire.

Not simple pain. Not heat on flesh. A line of white lit through me like lightning finds the tallest tree. It hammered down my spine and set nerve after nerve humming until the hum turned to a note too big to hold. I arched, a sound torn out of me I didn’t know I could make. The bond wasn’t a thread sliding gentle around a wrist. It was a barbed hook. It buried deep and then the line pulled.

He shuddered, a full-body quake that shook the dust out of the air. For an instant, the gold in his eyes broke, and man looked out—haunted, terrified, begging without words for something he would never ask for aloud. Help. Or forgive me. Or—stop me.

The beast took him back and his gaze burned again.

His fangs pricked deeper. Another bolt of heat slammed through me, crackling along the iron bands of my ribs. It hurt and it didn’t, and that was the worst of it; pain was clean. This was not.

I thrashed, cursing him, cursing the Goddess, cursing the stupid, slavish biology of wolves. He pinned me with a knee at my hip and my body answered him like it belonged to him, like it had been waiting for this voice. Shame scorched through me thicker than any scent in the room.

“Stop,” I forced out, and he did—an inch. Enough for breath to come in wet, ragged gulps. The punctures throbbed against cool air. I wanted to claw the bond out of my throat with my bare hands and throw it back in his face.

He hovered, chest heaving, head bent as if the weight of what he wanted could break his neck. “Mate,” he rasped again, but the word had changed. Not a claim. A sentence.

I stared up at him and saw what the stories hadn’t told: the curse wasn’t just rage. It was hunger past choosing. It wore his shape and used his hands. It had learned one word and wrapped its whole mouth around it. It had found me and called me the only name it knew.

Something hammered outside—the slap of boots being forced to move quiet. A low whistle, then three clicks. My ears caught the pattern even through the roar of blood. Soldiers. His? Ours? The cabin breathed, dust falling out of air.

He lifted his head like a hound catching a scent and growled so low the boards under me vibrated. Territory rolled off him the way heat rolled off iron. Mine, the sound said, and I hated how the mark at my neck answered with a pulse.

Figures slid into the doorway—men in dark leather, eyes rimmed with soot. They did not look surprised. They looked like they’d followed the same storm their whole lives. One took in the room with a glance and dropped his gaze, baring his throat; the deference made my stomach turn over.

“Your Majesty,” he said. “Perimeter set.”

Your Majesty.

Kael’s head snapped toward him. The man kept his eyes down. “King,” he corrected himself in a whisper that sounded like ritual. “Feral.”

Another step in the doorway, and a second warrior’s gaze snared on me. The way he looked—curious, pitying, hungry for gossip—turned to fear so fast it left his face blank. He swallowed and edged back behind the first.

Kael’s claws left my wrists. Blood surged back into my hands in a painful rush. He braced his weight on his fists on either side of my head, caging me without touching me. The beast inside him snarled at being asked to wait. The man inside him forced it to.

“Cage,” the first warrior said softly, and before I could decide whether that word meant for me or for him, Kael’s head snapped to him again and the man shut his mouth with a click.

Another soldier slid along the wall, keeping the King in his periphery. He held a length of chain and a collar whose inside wasn’t iron; herbs were stitched there, dark and bitter-smelling. Wards. For him, not me. My mind snagged on that. They’d built a leash for their King.

He lifted it half an inch like a question.

A sound came out of Kael that made all of them flinch. Not a word, not even a growl. A warning beyond language. The soldier lowered the collar until it kissed the floorboards and didn’t move again.

Kael’s gaze dragged back to me. The gold wasn’t all beast now. It was heat, and fury, and something like relief twisted up with both until none of it looked like feeling anymore.

“Mine,” he said, softer. The word scraped my skin raw.

I licked blood from my lip and made myself hold his eyes. “No,” I said. “Never.”

For a heartbeat, I thought he might kill me just to end the argument. Instead he did something worse: he leaned down and pressed his mouth to the punctures he’d made, and the bond threw sparks like a struck flint. My vision spotted. Heat raced under my skin in a shiver I hated and couldn’t stop.

The world tilted. The edges of the cabin went soft. When I tried to shove him away, my arms moved like they belonged to a drunk.

“Selene,” someone said, very far away. Mira’s voice? No, a memory of it. The room had too many men in it for Mira to be here and breathing.

“Take her,” a soldier murmured, and before I could say I wasn’t something to be taken, Kael scooped me up as if I weighed less than the table he’d smashed. The room spun. His chest was a wall. His scent filled my head like smoke in a small space. The mark in my neck beat a second pulse, mocking the first.

I fought once—twice—then the fight ran out like water from a split skin. Shock, my training said distantly. Too much blood, too fast. Too much heat. Too much him.

The floorboards left us. Night air hit my face. The forest tipped and righted and swam. I couldn’t tell if the men outside bowed or hid. My vision tunneled until all that remained was the gold of his eyes and the way they softened for a heartbeat—only a heartbeat, like a man appearing in a window as a house burns.

“Mine,” he said again, to me or to the night or to whatever in him needed the word to be true.

The dark folded over the edges of the world. I went with it, because I had no choice left, and because even fighters must sleep when the ground gives way.

Somewhere as I slid under, metal clanked. Not a collar. Bars. Wheels. A wagon creaked. A voice I didn’t know said, “Secure the Luna.”

I would have told him I wasn’t that. The world hit silence before my mouth could find an answer.