Chapter 15
606 Words
CHAPTER 15 — WHAT FOLLOWS HER
KAEL — POV
Hours pass before the forest settles.
But I don’t.
I stay in the trees long after Selene disappears down the winding road, my thoughts pacing as violently as the wolf inside me. Dalton’s scent still lingers near the cabin—gunpowder, arrogance, territorial and wrong.
He touched her.
Her shoulder.
Her waist.
Guiding her like she was something fragile he had the right to move.
A low growl coils through me before I can choke it back. The wolf wants to hunt him. Humans don’t understand what that kind of touch means out here.
But I do.
Selene belongs to nothing—not to him, not to Mira, not even to this forest that is trying to swallow her whole. And yet when she looked back at me, eyes searching the darkness…
Something in me answered.
Something I haven’t let rise in years.
Damn her.
Damn the way she smells—warm, curious, alive.
Damn the way she said my name like she wanted me close.
Damn the way I wanted to go to her.
I force myself to breathe, to shift the furious ache in my ribs into something manageable. But before the anger can cool, something else prickles the air.
A scent.
Wrong.
Rotting.
Old.
My muscles lock tight.
It followed her.
The thing that attacked the cabin—the thing older than wolves, older than shifters—it’s still moving. Tracking. Searching.
My pulse spikes a warning against my bones.
Selene is out there with them.
Them—humans who cannot smell danger until it’s breathing down their necks. Humans who think their guns can stop ancient hunger.
Fools.
I step forward, deeper into the path her truck took, inhaling sharply. The scent slithers through the trees, thin but present.
Not her scent.
Not Dalton’s.
Not Mira’s.
The other thing.
The one that wants her dead.
My jaw tightens. Every instinct lunges forward—animal, violent, territorial.
She is out of sight.
She is unprotected.
And something is watching her.
A vibration shivers through the ground. Not footsteps. Not wind.
A pulse.
Like the forest itself is reacting—warning me, pushing me.
Go.
The wolf claws upward, close to the surface, muscles heating with the shift I’ve been holding back all day.
I don’t question it.
I run.
Branches whip past, tearing at me. The forest bends for me, not against me, the way it only does for those it recognizes. My body moves faster than thought, faster than breath, until lights appear through the trees—the headlights of Dalton’s truck winding down the mountain road.
And something else.
A shadow trailing far behind them.
Not human.
Not animal.
Not anything that should be walking on this earth.
My chest burns.
I bare my teeth.
If it touches her—
If it even looks at her—
I will tear the forest open with my hands.
I drop low, stalking the tree line above the road, matching the truck’s speed with silent, predatory steps. Every breath drags the scent of Selene through me—ink, rain, fear she tries to hide.
She shouldn’t be with them.
She should be with me.
Where I can watch her.
Where I can keep her safe.
Where the dangerous things in these woods know to stay the hell away.
One thought slams through me, clear and vicious:
I’m not letting anything take her.
Not while I’m still breathing.
And not even the forest itself is strong enough to change that.
Tonight, the hunter follows her home.
And it’s not the monster in the shadows.
It’s me.
- Writer
