Chapter 1 - Rhea
1252 Words
This warehouse reeks of rust and deceit.
Rain leaks through holes in the roof, tapping on puddles that mirror the faces of men I shouldn’t trust. Men I know better than to trust. My wolf paces under my skin, restless and ready. Across the open floor, six Vargheist envoys wait beside a cargo crate the size of a truck bed. Their head envoy, Harland Skar—hatchet-scarred, half-smile like a cracked blade—spreads his hands.
“Alpha Robur. Good of you to come yourself.”
“If I send others, you'll lie,” I say wryly. “At least this way I can watch you do it.”
Holly, my Beta, stands at my right shoulder, bow slung low. She's as sharp as her name. Acker hovers behind her, young and headstrong and itching for a fight. We outnumber them. They know it. Yet the way Harland Skar’s men relax makes my hackles rise. They're like predators who think they’ve already eaten.
“Let’s keep this polite,” I say. “You move your weapons route off Robur land. You stay alive. Easy enough, I'd have thought.”
He gestures to the crate. “We brought an example of what we’re willing to pull back. Purely demonstration, Alpha. Respect.”
Respect. The word tastes of silver.
I motion Holly forward. The lock is new, and the hinges smell wrong. When the lid creaks open, the air burns my throat—metal, chemical, holy-wrong. Pouches of powdered silver, trip mines, bullets with pearly seams. Not a demonstration. An invasion.
My teeth lengthen. “You brought live weapons into my territory.”
Skar smiles thinly. “Knowledge is peace.”
I’ve heard enough. “Holly.”
Before she can move, the world snaps.
A gunshot cracks the rafters. Something hisses overhead. The hiss smells like burning rain.
“Down!” Holly drags Acker behind the crate as silver dust falls like glittering ash. Another shot. Then chaos; boots, shouts, ricochets that spark blue fire where silver meets steel.
I yank my mask over my face. “Masks on! West exit!”
Vargheist shooters herd us toward the main doors. s**t - trap. I shove Holly toward the side platform instead. “Culvert,” I shout. She nods once and hauls Acker after her.
The crate explodes in a plume of silver fog. My skin prickles. I feel every vein, every pulse of poison trying to eat through it. I leap onto the platform, shoulder the chained door. Holly’s bolt cutters flash; the padlock clatters. Water roars below.
“Go!” I shove them through. They jump into the culvert’s black throat and vanish.
I’m about to follow when the air changes—again.
Under the reek of silver is a new scent. Not pack. Not Vargheist. Something electric and alive: wild mint crushed under boot, rain on ash. My wolf stops pacing and... howls.
You've got to be kidding me...
No. NO. Not now. Of all times, not right now!
A man shouts behind me. The enforcer I kicked earlier lunges from the shadows, knife flashing. I catch his wrist, twist it, and drop him hard. His bone pops loudly, and Moon forgive me, it's satisfying. But he still grins, blood on his teeth. “Like him, do ya? Well, sorry, but you won’t keep him, Alpha. He belongs to the heir.”
“What 'him'?” I snarl.
He only laughs, as if the situation couldn't be funnier.
Bootsteps. Not his. Not mine. Heavier. Closer.
I spin toward the main floor.
Through the smoke and flicker of broken lights, a figure moves, and my hackles raise. But not in response to any threat; this is deeper, more sensual than that. Pleasurable. He's crouched behind fallen shelving, pistol low and steady. Jacket torn, face shadowed. One of his legs is braced strangely, the other planted with the precision of a man who’s long since adapted to pain. He fires once; a Vargheist gunman on the catwalk drops like a puppet with its strings cut.
Omega.
The scent hits full force. Clean cloth, heat, salt. Garden mint. Recognition detonates in my chest like an unholy firework.
Mate.
He doesn’t see me yet. He’s scanning the field, calculating. Efficient. Calm. Too calm for someone unaligned. Not Vargheist—their aim’s never that good, and his was exceptional. Not Robur—I’d know his face. I'd have ridden it by now, such is the stranger's effect upon me.
So who, then? A rogue? A fricking ghost?
Stranger things have happened. One of my ancestors had a Mate bond with a vampire back in the eighteen hundreds.
The man shifts his weight; I see the gleam of metal where his pant leg ends just below the knee. Prosthetic. Silver-stained. Adaptive straps rigged for combat.
My heartbeat stutters, then doubles, and trebles, an electric thrum in my chest like butterflies.
I move before thinking, silent across the slick floor until I’m close enough to feel the heat off his body. My wolf presses at my ribs, whimpering, begging, desperate to touch, to bite, to claim. I've never wanted anything this badly in all my twenty seven years, and it's heady and overwhelming and f*****g inconvenient.
He turns.
Steel eyes, storm-dark. The barrel of his pistol lifts, not to my head but to my center mass—clean line, no tremor.
Then he smells me.
The world judders around us.
His pupils blow wide; mine match them. The bond between us roars awake like a spark in dry timber. Heat punches low and deep in my abdomen. and my heart seems to physically turn to face his, terrifying in its rightness.
He flinches back a half step, breathing hard, trying to shake it off. “No,” he mutters, voice rough as gravel. “f**k, no. Not again.”
Again?
Gunfire interrupts him. A Vargheist sniper reappears on the mezzanine, weapon raised.
“Down!” I grab the stranger’s jacket, drag us both sideways as the shot rips past. We hit the ground together, and he twists with me, fluid, practiced, as if our bodies already know the same rhythm.
He fires once from beneath my arm. The sniper crumples. Smoke trails through the air like silk.
It was like a dance we knew by heart.
For a heartbeat everything stills. His breath ghosts against my throat. My hands are on either side of his ribs, feeling the tremor that isn’t fear but fury restrained.
Up close, I see the scar that splits his temple, the fine sheen of sweat on his neck, the slight hitch in his prosthetic’s movement as adrenaline fights pain. I should move.
I don’t.
He's beautiful.
“Alpha,” he says, quiet, almost disbelief. It sounds less like a title and more like a curse.
My wolf surges, regardless. Mine.
I open my mouth to demand a name, a reason, anything. But Holly’s shout slices through the smoke from the culvert tunnel.
“Rhea! What the hell?! Move!”
I start to rise. So does he. Again, it's remarkably fluid, this sudden unison between him and me.
A metallic clatter interrupts us—the sound of a safety pin pulled. We both glance up.
Across the warehouse, a Vargheist enforcer grins and tosses a grenade our way.
Silver-charged. Too close. Too fast.
He shoves me behind him, shoulders square, gun coming up—
—and the grenade lands between us and begins to hiss.
To be continued…
- Writer
