The beast blood Ashes of the heiress

chapter 1 The rain had no mercy tonight. It came down in sheets so thick that Page could barely see ahead of her, the forest floor turning to mud beneath her bare feet with every desperate step she took. Her lungs burned. Her legs screamed. And deep in her belly, the baby shifted, a slow, heavy roll that made her gasp and grab the nearest tree trunk just to stay upright. Keep moving. You stop, you die. She didn't know whose voice that was anymore. Hers. Her mother's. Some buried instinct that had been sleeping inside her for years and had chosen tonight of all nights to wake up finally. It didn't matter. She listened to it. Behind her, not far enough behind her, she heard them. Not footsteps. Wolves didn't announce themselves with footsteps. It was something worse. The heavy, rhythmic crash of bodies built for speed moving through undergrowth that couldn't slow them down. They weren't chasing her like she was prey. They were herding her. Alive, she remembered, the cold and dreaded face of the alpha. Lightning split the sky and for one brutal second the forest lit up white and she saw one of them. Massive. Dark. Moving parallel to her through the trees about twenty feet to her left, not even looking at her, just running, keeping pace without effort. Her stomach dropped. If that one was on her left then there were others she couldn't see and they were doing exactly what she thought, boxing her in, waiting for her legs to give out. Her legs, which were already giving out. She pressed her back against a tree and tried to breathe without sobbing. Her hand went to her belly automatically, the way it always did now, protective and terrified and full of a love she hadn't asked for and couldn't explain. How did it come to this?!! Not even a question anymore. Just a thought she carried. Three months ago she was sitting in a library in one of the most expensive and renowned institutes with her biggest problem being a contract law paper due on Friday. Three months ago her whole future was mappeout d and clean graduate, return to the pack, work for her father's company, get her wolves and finally meet her mate but her father has to approveof of him, even though faith and destiny asigns mate to everyone.live the life that had been decided for her before she could even speak. Three months ago she had never once considered that she would end up here, in a forest in the middle of a storm, with her father's wolves surrounding her and a child in her belly that would change everything. Three months ago she hadn't known Luchian. Lightning again. This time she used it. Scanned left, right, ahead ,and found the gap. A narrow one, between two trees where the undergrowth thinned and the ground sloped downward toward what looked like water. A river maybe. If she could reach it…. She pushed off the tree before she finished the thought. Her feet found the slope and she half-ran half-slid down it, one arm out for balance, one hand still pressed to her belly, her breath coming in gasps that the rain swallowed whole. Behind her she heard the shift , the change in their movement when they realized she'd broken the pattern. The wolves herding sound became something sharper. They were done being patient. Run, Page. Run like your mother's prayers are behind you. She ran. Two years earlier, Page had never once been late to a class in her entire academic life. Not once. It was the kind of thing her coursemates found mildly irritating and her professors found quietly impressive and Page herself never thought about at all, because discipline wasn't something she performed , it was just how she was built. Her mother had done that. Quiet, deliberate Miriam, third mate of Alpha Kanton and the most loved of all of them, not because she was the most beautiful , though she was ,but because she was the only one who never wanted anything from him except his respect. Miriam had raised Page alone for most of her childhood, in the soft hours between her father's visits, teaching her that a woman who needed no one to carry her was a woman no one could put down. Page had taken that and ran with it. Literally. She was twenty minutes early to Economic Law on a Tuesday morning when she first noticed him. Not him specifically , she wasn't the type to notice men specifically, not in that sideways, distracted way that Manda did, tracking every broad shoulder that walked into a room. She noticed the shift in the room. The way a cluster of girls near the door suddenly straightened. The way a conversation two rows ahead of her dropped in volume and changed in tone, becoming performative, aware of an audience. Page had looked up from her notes just to identify the disturbance, the way you'd look up at a loud noise and that was when she saw him walk in. Tall. Dark. The kind of unhurriedness that wasn't slowness but confidence in a person who had never once rushed to be somewhere because every room adjusted itself to him rather than the other way around. He wore a fitted black shirt and he smelled ,even from across the room, even in the way that scent sometimes reached you before you understood why like something forested. Dark wood and cold air and something underneath she couldn't name. Page had looked back at her notes. Not your business. You have a paper to finish. But she'd been aware of him the entire class. That low awareness at the edge of her concentration, like a sound you can't quite identify present, insistent, impossible to fully ignore. It annoyed her. She didn't get distracted. She didn't know his name yet. She didn't know that his wolf had been awake and restless since the moment he walked into that room. She didn't know that when he sat down three rows to her right he had scanned the room the way his kind always did cataloguing, measuring, settling, and that his eyes had paused on her for just a half second longer than everything else. She didn't know any of it. She just knew that, when class ended and she packed her bag and walked out into the warm campus afternoon, something felt different about the day in a way she couldn't explain and didn't have the time to examine. Page didn't believe in signs. But something that lived deeper than belief had lifted its head.