CHAPTER 1_ Mine[Part 1]
1440 Words
*Lilah*
The last glass on my tray tips, wobbles, and goes over just as a hand I don’t want on my body slides up my thigh.
“Oops,” the guy at table four slurs, his eyes glued to my chest as beer soaks my apron. “Guess you’ll have to bend over for me again, sweetheart.”
I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste blood.
Smile, Lilah. The rent is due in five days. Mom’s meds are already behind. Smile and survive.
“It’s fine,” I say, keeping my voice even. “I’ll bring you another one.”
His fingers creep higher. “Why don’t you just sit on my lap, and we’ll call it even?”
I take his wrist, peel his hand off my leg, and pin it to the table.
“Hands to yourself, or no more drinks,” I say. “House rules.”
For a second, anger flares in his watery blue eyes. Then Hank’s voice booms over the music.
“Lilah! Quit flirting and move your ass. We’re drowning here.”
Flirting. Sure.
I let go and step back before my mouth gets me fired.
The bar is a cheap dive on the edge of nowhere—sticky floors, grimy neon signs, and a jukebox that only plays music older than I am. Outside: endless black highway and whispering pines. Inside: stale beer, bad pick‑up lines, and my skull trying to beat its way out through my right eye.
Full‑moon migraine. Of course.
I grab a fresh beer, balance it on my tray, and start back through the crowd, dodging arms and elbows like it’s a sport. Naomi catches my eye from the corner stool—dark curls, wicked grin. Next to her, Bella sips a soda, her worried blue gaze flicking between me and the clock on the wall.
I tap my wrist: *Almost done.* Naomi rolls her eyes like she doesn’t believe me, but lets it go.
My head throbs harder, a sharp, throbbing pulse. The air feels thicker, heavier. It always gets worse on nights. The moon is full, even when I can’t see it.
I’m halfway to table four when someone screams.
The sound knives through the music—high, real, wrong.
The band keeps going for half a second, then the guitarist curses and rips his cord out. The speakers squeal to a dead stop.
“What the—”
The rest of Hank’s curse dies as a body crashes onto the floor in front of the tiny stage, skidding on spilled beer. Chairs clatter. A woman shrieks and jumps onto the table I just left.
The guy on the floor groans and pushes up on his hands.
His fingers end in dark, curved points.
Not nails. Claws.
They drag furrows in the wood with a shriek that makes my teeth ache. His shoulders hunch, his shirt straining as bones shift beneath his skin like something is trying to crawl out.
“Dude, you okay?” a drunk in a baseball cap asks, reaching for him.
The guy whips his head around.
His eyes are wrong.
The whites are veined with gold, his pupils stretched into glowing slits, like there are candles shoved behind them.
“Holy s**t,” someone whispers. “What is that?”
The man snarls. Literally snarls. His lip curls, teeth lengthening into points before my eyes.
The tray slips from my hands. Glass explodes at my feet.
Run, my brain says.
My legs don’t move.
“Get down!” Hank roars. “Everybody out!”
Panic detonates.
People shove toward the door, tripping over chairs and each other. Beer and broken glass splash around my shoes. Someone slams into my shoulder hard enough to spin me; my right hand smacks a table edge, sending a bolt of white‑hot pain up my arm.
I grab the nearest chair to steady myself and look up just as the…thing on the floor pushes fully upright.
His shirt rips at the seams. His breathing is off, too shallow, too fast. He drags in a breath, lifts his head, and—
Spots me.
Our eyes lock.
For a heartbeat, everything else fades. Noise blurs. My headache spikes so hard my vision whites out.
His gaze sharpens, something like recognition flaring there. His lips peel back from his new teeth.
He lunges.
He never reaches me.
He hits something invisible halfway across the room and slams back like he runs into a wall. Air shimmers. A table flips. Wood cracks.
Another growl cuts through the bar—deeper, colder. It vibrates in my bones, in the pain behind my eyes, in the invisible knot forming in my chest.
“Enough.”
The voice isn’t loud, but it might as well be a siren to whatever monsters we’ve just let in. Every head that’s still in the room snaps toward the entrance.
The crowd parts without thinking.
He walks through the chaos like it’s nothing. Tall, broad shoulders stretching the fabric of a black shirt, jeans hanging low on lean hips. Sleeves shoved up to his forearms, veins, and tendons standing out under tan skin.
Dark hair, a little too long, falls across his forehead. His jaw is strong and shadowed with stubble. His mouth is a hard line.
His eyes are what stop my heart.
Amber. But not warm. Burned gold, lit from within. They slide over the bar and everything in it like he owns it, every drunken soul in it, without contest.
No one holds that gaze.
Until he finds me.
For one long, suspended breath, his eyes lock on mine.
The bar ceases to exist.
The howls, the shouts, Hank’s curses—they all dump into a muffled blur. All I can see is heat and gold and something in his gaze that feels like a question he’s been asking the universe for too long and finally got an answer to.
The pressure in my skull ignites.
Something slams into me from the inside, like a hand punching through my ribs and closing around my heart. Heat explodes outward from that point, flooding my veins, roaring down my legs, my arms, up into my face.
My knees buckle. I grab the table at my back to keep from dropping.
The half‑shifted creature on the floor groans. “Alpha—”
The man with amber eyes doesn’t even look at him.
“Down,” he orders.
The half‑shifted man falls flat like his strings got cut.
“Vale Alpha,” someone near the door whispers. “Holy—”
Alpha. Vale.
The names buzz through my skull, sparking along nerves that already feel flayed open.
The Alpha walks straight toward me.
My brain shrieks *move*; my muscles have forgotten how.
His presence is a physical force by the time he stops in front of me. The air around him hums. Up close, it roars. It presses against my skin and slides into my lungs with every helpless breath.
Up close, he’s somehow worse.
Better.
His eyes are brighter, rimmed in a darker shade like molten metal cooling at the edges. There’s a faint scar along his jaw disappearing into stubble. His scent hits me—pine forest, cold air, smoke after rain, and something darker underneath that makes every hair on my body stand on end.
“Who are you?” he asks.
His voice is low and rough, like gravel over silk. It slides down my spine and curls in my stomach.
“Lilah,” I manage. My mouth is dry. “Lilah Hart.”
His pupils expand. His nostrils flare like he’s tasting my name.
The pressure behind my eyes explodes. Pain shoots down my neck into my chest, right where that invisible hand is still wrapped around my heart.
I gasp.
Shock flashes over his face, chased immediately by something like anger. At himself. At the world. At me. I don’t know.
His hand lifts, fingers calloused and big and too gentle as they brush my cheek.
Lightning.
I jerk, but the spark is already racing under my skin, cracking everything open. Heat surges down my throat, across my collarbones, lower.
Something inside me jerks awake and answers him.
My n*****s tighten hard against my bra. My thighs clench. There’s a hot, throbbing ache between my legs that has no business existing while a half‑monster lies twitching ten feet away.
His gaze drops to my mouth. Darkens.
He leans in, breaths hot against my lips, smelling like mint and smoke and danger.
“Mine,” he says.
- Writer
