Wolves of Black Veil

The terms of the deal had been simple. Clean. A ghost transaction in a warehouse that reeked of brine and death, fetid miasma thick in my throat and tasting of coppery blood and something cloyingly sweet and putrid, the reek of death rotting beneath the docks. Two crates, each bristling with deadly silver, voodoo bullets and my own twisted handiwork. Tiny bullets, each one imprinted with a potent curse, a voodoo charm that I had painstakingly concocted and wrapped. Six months' peace in Marchelli territory, the asking price. It was written in the foul smell of the rot on the breath of the dockworker who had made the deal. It had been a good deal. Until the ambush. The Beta’s growl, a low, guttural rasp that scratched at the hair follicles at the back of my eardrums, splintered the silence. The long, wickedly curved claws of his hands drummed a frantic tattoo against the coarse wooden planks of the makeshift table, a morbid percussion drummed in the cavernous room. “Where’s the rest?” His voice was a snarl. Hot breath reeking of wolf and something else. Something that stank like betrayal. I smiled. A brittle, false thing of a smile. My teeth bared white and bright. “That’s it,” I said softly. "Forty rounds. Hollow point. Silver nitrate and a touch of… persuasion." The voodoo had been my own personal Research & Development project, a potent whisper of darkness that I’d woven into the bullets myself. He didn’t believe me. Shifters weren’t known for their sense of subtle charm. Wolfish eyes that never missed anything. “You think we’re stupid, little girl?” His voice was a snake’s bite, fangs drawn in poisonous anger. “I think you just made a deal with my father,” I said, my voice hardening. “And if you have a problem with the quantity, you can take it up with—" The warehouse shook. Reality buckled. Every rat froze in its tracks and every cell in my body jolted, keyed on high alert. The air itself shivered with a sudden surge of heat as the pervasive stench of sulfur suddenly vanished. And then that low, predatory hum vibrated through the warehouse like the growl of a caged beast. A subsonic purr of raw power so primal that it left me frozen on the spot. He’s here. And the knowledge crashed into me, raw and undeniable. The Beta went white, his wolfish nature overcome by the sudden flood of information, the claws of his hands twitching in time with his nostrils that flared and twitched. His eyes widened in a terror that mirrored my own, and he dropped to his knees. The others followed suit. Gone was the hard-edged aggression, and in its place was sheer fear. Abject and complete. Then he stepped out of the shadows, from the warehouse’s dim interior to fully corporeal. Six-foot-something of straight-up predatory masculinity incarnate, a creature sculpted from darkness and dripping with lethal grace. His angular body moved with a fluid smoothness that made my heart catch in my throat, made me gasp. Amber-colored eyes, pits of incandescent fury, bore down into mine. The world shifted on its axis. My legs felt like rubber. He was wrong. Alpha. Ancient. Wicked. I couldn’t breathe. Not from fear exactly, but from something else. A primal knowledge that told me without telling me, a scream of instinct and acceptance lodged in the back of my throat, that rang in my ears and shook the very ground on which we stood. His voice, a low roll of deep velvet tinged with gravel, sliced through the static-filled silence. “No need for bowing. You may all rise.” But his gaze never left me, intense and burning as he fixed me with a stare that branded itself into my soul. The electricity of his presence buzzed in the air between us, a roaring static as if the storm were about to break in its fury. My skin crawled, every nerve ending alive with a tingling, numbing pain. I wanted to scream. Curse his very existence. Fight him with my bare hands. Do anything to break the choking silence. But I was frozen, locked in his gaze, held by the sheer physicality of his presence. Close now. He was so close now that I could smell him, sharp musk and earth and that third, dangerous scent that invaded me like a whispered promise. He didn’t touch me, but he might as well have, the physicality of his presence a gravitational pull on my skin. “You smell of lies,” he murmured, the words like a venomous hiss of ice water on my spine, the silent crack of whip upon flesh. “Tell me, mafia girl. Did your father think he could cheat me?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, my teeth gritted so hard I thought they might shatter. His head tilted, a predatory smile quirking on his full lips. A collar materialized in his palm, black leather interwoven with gleaming silver buckles and etched in ancient runes that thrummed with an energy that resonated against my own skin across the room. “Wrong answer.” And then, black.