POV: Rowan
To look at your salvation and know that touching it would turn it to ash was a specific kind of hell.
I knelt in the freezing mud of the Black Forest, my massive frame casting a long, impenetrable shadow over the girl shivering violently on the ground. She was entirely naked, her fragile human shell stripped bare by the brutal regression of her first shift. Her knees were pulled tight to her chest, her pale skin smeared with wet dirt, lips tinted a dangerous, bruised blue.
And she smelled like absolute heaven.
The intoxicating, heavy scent of spun sugar, crushed pine, and wild rain rolled off her heated skin in suffocating waves. It bypassed my lungs entirely and sank straight into my bloodstream. My heart, a scarred, blackened muscle that hadn't felt anything but rage for f
