In Love With The Wild

CHAPTER4

Caspian Vane

I’d dreamt of her again.

Her beautiful face. Those intense eyes. The unruly red hair. Her quiet resolve to uncover the truth and the defiance in her stance. Except this time, she didn’t run from me — she ran into my arms. And I’d kissed her.

Before I got turned, women bent over backwards for me without question. Maybe it was growing up as the sole heir to wealthy parents, or maybe it was simply being alpha but even the girls in the pack weren’t much different from normies. They all fell in line.

But this one had a mind of her own.

And God, was it refreshing. Even her name was refreshing.

Neve.

She looked so out of place among the other folks she might as well have had a neon sign tattooed on her forehead. Maybe it was the wet red hair plastered to her face, or the way she moved through the bar like she was working a crime scene. Either way, I waited and let her come to me.

When she finally shed her drenched trench coat and slid onto a barstool — completely unaware she was being watched — my heart somersaulted. She was beautiful. It wasn't just her face. Her entire being was magnetic.

My curiosity got the better of me, so I looked her up. Her parents had been killed in a ghastly accident. It had been all over the news. She’d aged out of foster care, picked up a dead-end job just to survive. And yet, in spite of everything, her heart was still big enough to seek justice for strangers. For the innocent victims turning up dead across the city.

If only I’d met her before the incident. Before the infection. Before lycanthropy swallowed my life. We might have had a real shot at something.

But that wasn’t my reality anymore.

I was terrified — terrified I’d lose control and hurt her, the way I’d nearly hurt others in the months since I first wolfed. I couldn’t let her get close. If she ever found out what I was, she’d hate me. I was sure of it.

I cursed the woman who bit me all over again.

Most of the time, I avoided people entirely. My wolf got restless around the scent of fresh blood — excited in the worst possible way. It was why I’d bought the mansion on the hill and retreated into seclusion. Store-bought red meat had stopped satisfying it months ago. It wanted a fresh kill now. I’d learned that if I kept my distance from people, I could keep my wolf from hunting them. It worked.

Most of the time.

Full moon nights were another matter. Those nights I had zero control. I always woke up naked by the seashore with no memory of what came before.

The one thing I’d figured out was that my wolf hated alcohol. Drunks were safe around me. Their blood repelled it. So I bought The Glass Den. It was the closest thing I had left to a normal life.

The strange thing about my wolf was how it could sense a normie from a mile away before my own eyes ever found them. It had sensed Neve the moment she stepped toward the bar, before I’d even seen her face. Like a predator catching a scent on the wind.

Maybe that was why it had nearly lunged at her. She didn’t just look out of place, she was an oasis in a desert. My starving wolf wasn’t about to let that slip by. So I told her to run.

Thankfully, she listened.

What I still couldn’t explain was the jolt. That sharp, electric thing that passed between us when our skins touched. She’d felt it too — I saw it in her face, even as I kept mine carefully blank.

What was that?

She came back the next day, more determined than ever. I’d secretly hoped she would, even though I wasn’t sure she’d dare. I was glad to see her. And immediately afraid of what my wolf might do about it — which was why I’d spoken to her the way I did.

I hadn’t planned on saying anything tonight. Hadn’t planned on bringing her back here either. But when I saw the disappointment cross her face, something in me broke quietly. I couldn’t let her walk away. So I followed her out the door.

I ignored her in the cab because I had no idea what to do with what I was feeling. How had I come to care about this woman in just over twenty-four hours? It made no sense. Beautiful women had thrown themselves at me before — this was nothing like that. I just couldn’t name what it was.

“Hungry?” was the best I could manage when we arrived.

What I actually needed was time alone to think. But that wasn’t something I could ask her for.

In the kitchen, I stood there for a moment, unsure of myself. I hadn’t cooked in nearly eight months. My appetite for normal food had disappeared alongside everything else. My wolf wanted raw meat, and whenever I tried to eat like a person, my body rejected it violently.

But tonight felt different. She made it feel different.

It took twenty minutes, but I managed to pull together a stir fry pasta from the scraps left in my pantry. As I plated it, it struck me that I hadn’t had a single guest in this house since the day I moved in.

In my old life, I hosted. Parties, gatherings, family dinners, the kind of noise and warmth I’d taken for granted. Now my parents couldn’t understand why their once-social son had relocated to another country and become unreachable.

I called when I could. Checked in. Declined every invitation to events I would have loved to attend. I couldn’t bring myself to explain that I was a werewolf now, and that my isolation was the only thing standing between them and what I’d become.

I missed them. I missed who I used to be.

I cursed the woman again. Then immediately caught myself. Because if none of this had happened, I never would have met Neve.

She had her back to me when I returned from the kitchen, standing in front of one of the sculptures like she was having a private conversation with it. She turned at the sound of my footsteps.

“You’re back,” she said, and smiled.

Her smile melted my insides. In wolf form, my tail would have been wagging embarrassingly. I pulled myself together.

“Dinner,” I said, and led her to the dining room, a room I had never once used.

I watched her eat in silence. There was an irony to it I didn’t miss. Usually when my wolf sat across from its dinner, it was the prey that went quiet.

“This was lovely. Thank you.” She looked up when the last bite was gone.

I nodded.

“So,” she started, and I could feel her choosing her words carefully, “are you going to tell me something now, or…”

She didn’t finish the sentence. But her resolve was unmistakable. She hadn’t come all this way for pasta.

“Let’s take a walk.”