The wood at my back was solid and cool.
Lucian’s body in front of me was anything but.
He boxed me in completely—one palm flat beside my head on the door, the other wrapped around my wrist, pinning it at my side. Heat rolled off him in waves, tightening the air between us. His chest rose and fell too fast for a man who’d just walked across a field; his jaw was clenched hard enough to crack teeth.
His eyes—those molten gold eyes I’d once thought were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen—flickered dark at the rims. Not fully black, not yet, but shadowed in a way that made my instincts hiss, *danger.*
Pine and smoke and male sweat flooded my nose, thick and heady.
I swallowed.
“Do you have a death wish?” he asked, voice low and rough. “Throwing your human body into a ring of wolves li
