His Bite My Ruin

Chapter 2

Lila stumbled out of the abandoned warehouse as the first gray light of dawn bled across the sky. Every step sent fresh agony lancing through her body. The bite on the side of her neck burned like a branding iron, the red-and-black veins throbbing in time with her heartbeat. She kept one hand pressed over the wound, but the blood had mostly dried into a sticky crust that pulled at her skin with every movement.

The city was waking up around her — too loudly. Car horns blared like gunshots. The distant rumble of a garbage truck felt like an earthquake inside her skull. Even the smell of fresh bread from a bakery two blocks away made her stomach clench with a hunger that had nothing to do with food.

She needed to get home. Shower. Pretend none of this had happened.

Her tiny studio apartment was a twenty-minute walk away, but it felt like hours. By the time she reached the peeling green door of her building, her legs were shaking and sweat poured down her back despite the morning chill. She fumbled with her spare key — thank God she’d hidden one under the loose brick — and practically fell inside.

The moment the door clicked shut, Lila stripped off her ruined hoodie and jeans, leaving them in a wet heap on the floor. She stood in front of the cracked bathroom mirror, breathing hard.

“Oh God…”

The bite looked worse in the harsh fluorescent light. Two deep puncture wounds, ragged at the edges, sat just below her left ear. Around them, thick black veins spiderwebbed outward, pulsing faintly. The skin was an angry, inflamed red, hot to the touch. When she gently prodded the mark, a sharp spike of heat shot straight down her spine and pooled low in her belly. Her thighs pressed together involuntarily as an unwelcome throb settled between her legs.

“Stop,” she whispered, voice cracking. “This isn’t happening.”

She turned the shower as cold as it would go and stepped under the spray. The water should have been freezing. Instead it felt like warm silk sliding over hypersensitive skin. Every drop traced fiery paths across her breasts, her stomach, the curve of her hips. She bit her lip hard enough to draw blood, trying to focus on the pain rather than the confusing ache building inside her.

Images from the novels she used to read flashed unwanted through her mind — women writhing under full moons, bodies claimed by powerful wolves, heat cycles that turned rational people into slaves to instinct. She had laughed at those scenes back then, calling them ridiculous escapism. Now her own body was betraying her in ways that made those pages feel tame.

By the time she stepped out, her skin was flushed pink and her hands wouldn’t stop trembling. She bandaged the bite as best she could with the limited first-aid supplies she owned — gauze, tape, and a generous amount of antiseptic that stung like hell but did nothing to slow the spreading veins.

She had a shift at Benny’s Diner in three hours. No choice. If she missed it again, she’d be fired for sure.

Lila pulled on her only clean uniform — a faded black polo and jeans — and tried to cover the bandage with her hair. It wasn’t enough. The mark still burned visibly at the edge of her collar.

The walk to work was torture. Every scent assaulted her: exhaust fumes, rotting garbage, the sharp tang of someone’s cheap cologne from across the street. Her hearing picked up fragments of conversations she had no business hearing.

“…he’s cheating on her, I swear…”

“…rent’s going up again…”

A dog barked three blocks away and she flinched so hard she nearly tripped.

By the time she pushed open the diner door, her head was pounding and a low, constant growl seemed to vibrate in the back of her throat. She swallowed it down.

“Late again, Evergreen?” Benny called from behind the counter, his usual scowl deeper than normal. He was a burly man in his fifties who smelled like old grease and disappointment.

“Sorry,” Lila muttered, tying her apron with shaking fingers. “Won’t happen again.”

She lasted exactly forty-seven minutes.

The first sign of trouble came when she was refilling coffee for table six — a group of construction workers who liked to leer and leave lousy tips. One of them, a thick-necked man with a beer gut, reached out and grabbed her wrist as she poured.

“Hey sweetheart, you look like you could use a real man to warm you up. That neck looks nasty. Rough night?”

His touch was like fire on her skin — not the pleasant kind. Something inside her snapped.

Lila yanked her arm away so violently the coffee pot shattered on the floor. Hot liquid splashed across the man’s legs. He yelped and jumped back.

“What the hell is wrong with you, you crazy b***h?”

The growl she’d been fighting all morning tore free from her throat — deep, feral, and far too loud for a human. The entire diner went dead silent. Customers stared. A child at the corner booth started crying.

Her vision tunneled. The man’s scent — sweat, cheap aftershave, and underlying fear — made her mouth water in the worst possible way. For one terrifying second she imagined sinking her teeth into his throat and tasting—

No.

Lila backed away, hands raised. “I—I’m sorry. I don’t feel well.”

Benny stormed out from the kitchen, face purple with rage. “You’re done, Evergreen. Get the hell out of my diner and don’t come back. You’re fired!”

The words barely registered. She was already ripping off her apron and bolting for the door, the bell jingling wildly behind her.

Outside, the sunlight felt like needles in her eyes. She leaned against the brick wall of the building, chest heaving, trying to breathe through the rising panic. Her uniform shirt clung to her sweat-slicked skin. The bite mark pulsed hotter than ever, the black veins now visibly crawling a little higher toward her jaw.

She had no job. No money for rent. And whatever was happening to her body was getting worse by the hour.

Lila walked home in a daze, avoiding people as much as possible. Every stranger’s scent made her nostrils flare. Every loud sound made her want to snarl. By the time she reached her apartment, she was trembling with exhaustion and something darker — a restless, itching energy under her skin that made her want to run, to hunt, to break free.

She barely made it inside before collapsing onto her threadbare couch. The fever was climbing again. Sweat beaded on her forehead. She tore off her shirt and pressed a cold cloth to the bite, but the relief lasted only seconds.

Unwanted flashes hit her — not memories exactly, but sensations. The feeling of powerful jaws closing on her neck. The shadow of a taller figure watching from the darkness. Golden eyes that seemed to burn straight through her.

“Who are you?” she whispered into the empty room. “What did you do to me?”

No answer came.

Night fell faster than it should have. Or maybe time was slipping away from her. Lila curled up on the couch, knees drawn to her chest, fighting wave after wave of cramps that twisted her insides. The aching heat between her thighs had returned stronger, making her shift restlessly. She hated how her body responded — n*****s tight and sensitive, skin hypersensitive to the rough fabric of the couch, every breath carrying the faint trace of that strange masculine scent she couldn’t scrub away.

At some point she must have dozed off, because the nightmares came hard and vivid.

She was running through moonlit woods that somehow overlapped with Eldridge City’s alleys. A massive wolf chased her, red eyes glowing with bloodlust. But behind it, always just out of sight, moved another presence — taller, human, radiating raw power. When the wolf finally caught her, instead of tearing her apart, it pinned her down and bit her again, deeper this time. Pleasure and pain blurred until she couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. She woke up gasping, sheets tangled around her legs, a low whine escaping her throat.

The bite mark was bleeding again. Fresh crimson trickled down her neck onto the pillow.

Lila sat up, chest heaving. She needed answers. Real ones. Not the fantasy nonsense from her old paperbacks.

Her laptop was on the coffee table. With shaking hands she opened it and typed with one finger while the other pressed gauze to her neck.

“what happens if a wolf bites a human”

“real werewolf attacks”

“symptoms after animal bite fever veins”

The search results were useless — medical sites talking about rabies, conspiracy forums full of crazies, and fanfiction sites that made her old novels look tame.

She was about to close the tab when a new wave of fire surged through her. This one was different. Stronger. Her back arched off the couch as every muscle seized. A scream tore from her throat, but it came out as something between a cry and a howl.

Bones shifted under her skin — not breaking, not yet, but threatening to. Her fingernails lengthened slightly, sharpening at the tips. She stared at them in horror, tears streaming down her face.

“I can’t… I can’t do this…”

The hunger was worse now. Not for food. For something she didn’t understand. For the hunt. For release. For the shadow that had watched her get bitten and done nothing to stop it — or maybe had caused it.

Lila dragged herself to the bathroom and stared at her reflection again. Her eyes weren’t fully human anymore. Flecks of amber glowed in the brown irises. The black veins had spread further, framing the bite like a dark, possessive collar.

She was changing.

And whatever had bitten her — whoever that unknown Alpha was — had condemned her to this living hell.

Outside her window, the moon hung low and fat in the sky, even though it wasn’t full yet.

Lila pressed her forehead to the cool glass and whispered the only thing she could think of.

“Please… make it stop.”

But deep down, in the growing darkness inside her, a new voice answered — faint, feral, and hungry.

It’s only just beginning.