CHAPTER ONE: Dream of the Beast
The floor was slick beneath her feet—blood or water, she couldn’t tell. The hallway twisted in impossible ways, its walls breathing, its ceiling veined like skin.
Each breath echoed wrong.
Behind her, something chewed—slow and wet. Not eating, but savoring.
She ran.
But the air dragged against her limbs like molasses. Her locs lashed in a current that wasn’t wind.
A whisper rose from the dark, everywhere and nowhere:
“Daughter of the ruin… he comes for your bones.”
Then—click. Heels on tile.
She froze.
It was her mother’s walk.
A voice followed, cold and acid-laced.
“You were always meant to be eaten, Nadine.
What else are girls good for?”
A clawed hand clamped onto her shoulder.
She turned.
And saw herself.
Its eyes milky with hunger, its jaw unhinged, its mouth stretched impossibly wide.
Inside that gaping maw—fur, fangs, fire.
—
She woke with a gasp. Heart galloping. Sheets soaked.
Moonlight sliced through the glass walls of her penthouse, forty-two floors above Washington, D.C. The city blinked beneath her like a dying constellation.
Black marble. Cold furniture. Silence.
She sat up. Her locs clung to her neck, soaked in sweat. Beside her, her mate, Patricio, slept, unbothered.
“Same f*****g dream,” she muttered, reaching for the water.
Her hand trembled.
In the window, her reflection stared back—naked, alert, and watching.
A black tattoo marked her chest: a thorn-crowned sigil carved like a warning.
Scars kissed her ribs. One long one split her back—deep, old, and twenty years healed.
She touched it.
The past answered like smoke slipping beneath the door.
—
I’m Nadine.
Daughter of a monster.
Raised by something worse.
Her father—an Alpha, the true kind, not some bar brawler with ego issues. He was the kind who split gods with his hands and smiled while doing it.
He left, not because of her, but because he couldn’t stand her mother.
She married a predator after, letting him inside, letting him rule.
He didn’t sneak; he was invited.
And her mother? She knew. Every scream, every slap, every time he crept down the hallway—she knew.
And she smiled. But I learned. I adapted.
I turned my skin into armor, my voice into a weapon.
I’m not just his daughter; I’m something sharper.
And no man or monster touches me again, not without permission.
—
She rose from the bed. Moonlight painted her body in silver lines.
Something throbbed deep in her chest.
A hum. A warning.
The kind of hunger that came before the shift.
She stared into the night. Her reflection stared back.
And in the quiet, the thought came:
It’s starting again.
