Marked Beneath The Blood Moon

Chapter 2

Rhydian's POV

I had been tracking that scent for almost a mile before I ever heard her voice crack.

It caught me out of nowhere while I was cutting across Moonhollow's border territory on a patrol I should honestly have handed off to someone lower ranked hours earlier. One breath of wind changed everything about my night. My wolf surged up hard and immediate against the inside of my own skin, delivering a single word with the force of a command rather than a thought.

Mine.

I had never scented a true mate before. I had heard other men in my position describe the feeling, back when I still allowed myself to imagine I would ever get to experience it firsthand, and none of their descriptions came anywhere close to the reality of it. It was not attraction. It was recognition, ancient and absolute, the kind capable of making a war leader forget every ounce of caution that had kept him breathing this long.

I had stopped expecting it, if I am honest. Twenty eight years old, an Alpha since twenty two, when my father died and left me a territory instead of a childhood. I had watched other men in my position go soft the moment they found their mate, distracted, careless, and I had told myself for years that I would rather never have one at all than let something like that get inside my guard. Standing in that clearing that night, I understood immediately how foolish that particular vow had been. There was no guarding against this. There was only running toward it as fast as I could go.

I had been out along that stretch of border more out of habit than necessity. Nightspire's own patrols were more than capable of handling a routine sweep, but I had never fully trusted anyone else's eyes the way I trusted my own, not since the war with the Ashgrove packs had cost me two Betas before Fenwick, both good men who had died on ground I should have walked myself. It was that same restlessness, that refusal to delegate what I could still do personally, that had put me on Moonhollow's border on the one night it mattered more than any patrol I had run in a decade.

I ran the last half mile with no plan beyond reaching her.

When I broke into the clearing, four rogues had a woman surrounded, one already gripping her wrist, the rest fanned out with practiced patience to block whichever direction she might try to run.

Something in me that I rarely let off its leash came fully loose.

"Leave her alone," I said, and my own voice sounded strange even to me, low and wrong, wolf riding far too close to the surface of it.

The rogue holding her froze first. Slowly, all four of them turned to look at what had interrupted them.

"This isn't your territory, stranger," one of them started, more bravado than sense behind it.

I didn't bother answering. I let them see exactly what was underneath my skin instead, and that proved answer enough. Three of them broke and scattered within seconds, choosing survival over whatever this had originally been worth to them. The last one, still gripping her wrist, hesitated a beat too long, and I put him flat on the ground hard enough that running suddenly seemed like the wiser option to him too.

Then it was only the two of us.

She stood breathing hard, one hand pressed flat to her chest, dark hair coming loose from its braid, moonlight catching something almost gold in eyes gone wide with fear that was already, visibly, beginning to turn into something else entirely. I understood, because I felt the same shift happening in my own body. The mating heat did not particularly care that we were strangers to one another. It only cared that we had finally found the one thing we were built to find.

"Thank you," she said, voice unsteady.

I closed the distance between us before either of us decided to be sensible about any of this.

"Mine," I said, low, my hands settling at her waist like they had always belonged there. She did not pull away. She swayed into me instead, fingers curling into the front of my shirt, her scent rising thicker with every second until it became the only thing in the world I could think clearly about.

I tilted her face up toward the moon and kissed her like I had spent my whole life waiting for exactly this, because some unspoken part of me understood, even in the dark, even without knowing her name, that I genuinely had.

She kissed me back like she was drowning and I was the only air left in the clearing.

The hours that followed belonged only to the two of us, the forest, and a moon gone strange and red at its edges. I will not pretend I regret any part of what happened between us that night, even knowing now that neither of us ever saw the other's face clearly in that darkness, that neither of us spoke more than a handful of words beyond the ones the bond pulled out of us on pure instinct. When my wolf finally demanded I mark her properly, seal what had already passed between us so that no distance could ever unmake it, I did not hesitate for even a moment. I sank my teeth carefully into the join of her shoulder and throat, flooding her system with enough calm through the bite that she felt only pleasure where there should, by rights, have been pain.

Mine, I thought, again and again, long after either of us had any use left for words. Finally, finally mine.

We lay tangled together afterward in the damp grass while the blood moon slid slowly toward dawn, her back against my chest, my arms wrapped around her like I could hold the entire world at bay simply by refusing to let go.

I meant to stay awake. I meant to see her face the instant there was enough light to see it clearly.

Somewhere in the drifting space between waking and sleep, I remember thinking that I would build my entire life around whatever this woman wanted, and that the thought did not frighten me half as much as it should have. I had spent six years ruling a territory through discipline and controlled distance, keeping every relationship, romantic or otherwise, at an arm's length long enough to be useful without ever being dangerous to my judgment. In the space of a single night, a stranger whose face I had never fully seen had made every one of those careful walls feel like something I had built for no reason at all.

I did not expect to fall asleep. I certainly did not expect, when I finally woke, to find the space beside me cold and empty, her scent already fading like she had never truly been there at all.

Briar's POV

I left him sleeping in the grass because I did not trust myself to stay.

I had no idea what I looked like to him in that darkness, and no clear idea what his face looked like either, only the shape of his jaw beneath my fingertips as I traced it once, carefully, before I made myself stand. Whatever had happened between us belonged entirely to the forest and the blood moon and nothing beyond it, I told myself, picking my way back through the tree line as the sky began to lighten, sore in ways I had never once been sore before.

It had been, without question, the best night of my life. I intended to keep it exactly that. A single perfect secret, never repeated, never chased, tucked away somewhere no one in my father's house could ever reach it.

I did not yet know that I would not have a choice in the matter.

I slipped in through the side door while my family's voices still carried from the front room, Ines and Callum's new bond apparently the only topic anyone in that house had any interest in discussing.

"The Alpha heir," my father was saying, warmth in his voice I had never once heard directed at me in twenty two years. "Quite the catch, Ines."

"Think of what this does for our family's standing," Corinne added, practically glowing with the news.

I made it up the stairs unnoticed and locked my bedroom door before finally allowing myself to breathe properly. I needed a shower badly, needed to scrub the forest and the ache of him out of my skin before anyone downstairs thought to ask where I had spent the night.

Sitting on the edge of my bed, still wrapped in a towel, I let myself think about him for one selfish, private minute before the day demanded anything else of me. I did not know his name. I did not know his face. I knew the exact weight of his hands, the low, rough sound he made against my throat, the way he had said mine like the word cost him something to give away. I had spent twenty two years being told I was a disappointment in every possible category a person could fail in, and for one night, in the dark, a stranger had looked at me, at whatever version of me he could see by moonlight, and wanted nothing else in the world.

I told myself it didn't matter that I would never see him again. I told myself a great many things that morning that turned out, within the hour, to be completely untrue.

When I finally pulled my nightshirt aside to check the damage on my shoulder, I went cold.

A mark. Clear, deep, already healing at a speed that should not have been remotely possible for a girl whose wolf had never once woken across twenty two years of trying.

If anyone in this house saw it, they would understand immediately what it meant. To carry an outside mark, placed by a stranger with no accepted claim on our territory, was treated in Moonhollow as a disgrace bordering on outright treason. I pressed my palm flat over it and tried to think, tried to plan, tried to imagine even one version of the next hour that did not end in disaster.

The bathroom door banged open before I found one.

"Didn't hear you come in last night," Ines said, delight already curling across her face before she had even seen anything worth being delighted about. Then her eyes dropped to the hand I had pressed against my own shoulder, and her expression sharpened into something considerably worse than delight.

"What are you hiding?"

"Ines, don't," I said, but she was already crossing the small room, already yanking my arm down before I could stop her.

She went very still when she saw it clearly. Then her mouth curved into the cruelest smile I had ever seen on her face, and I had seen a great many cruel smiles from Ines over the years.

"A mating mark," she breathed, delighted all over again, turning my arm this way and that as though the mark might look different from a second angle. "Where did you even find someone willing to touch you. Or did you pay him."

"Ines, please," I said, hating how small my voice sounded even to my own ears. "Just let me explain before you say anything to them. Please."

"Explain what," she said, laughing outright now. "That the wolfless girl snuck off on Mating Day and got herself claimed by some nameless nobody in the woods. There's nothing to explain, Briar. There's only something to enjoy."

She let go of my arm only so she could lean out into the hallway, and then, louder, aimed straight down the stairwell toward our parents, who were still celebrating below. "Dad. Mom. You need to come see this."

I heard my father's chair scrape back immediately, and my stomach dropped somewhere I did not think I would ever fully recover it from.