POV: Elara
Coming back to consciousness felt like swimming up through a pool of dark, warm honey.
The blistering, bone-melting agony of the Awakening Heat was completely gone. In its place was a heavy, thrumming vitality I had never experienced in my twenty years of life. My veins felt thick, packed with a dense, foreign energy that hummed in perfect rhythm with my heartbeat.
I slowly ran my tongue over my bottom lip.
A sharp, spicy metallic taste lingered there. Blood. It wasn't my own. The memory of the massive stranger tearing open his own wrist and pressing it to my mouth flashed behind my eyelids. He had fed me his blood to stabilize my core.
The realization should have horrified me. In the wolf world, ingesting another’s blood was an intimately possessive act, a primitive bindin
