Chapter 11
Chapter
Eleven
KYRE
She was right. The night was long and uncomfortable, but not because of the hours stuck in Tauren’s stiff-backed chair.
It was her.
She was the reason I couldn’t relax. The reason my ears stayed tuned to every shift and rustle outside. That my eyes remained sharp and open. That every muscle was primed and coiled, ready for any danger. Every hour was spent in constant vigilance.
Yet strangely, I didn’t mind. Not really.
Not when all I had to do was glance over and see her curled up just feet away. Her face was bathed in firelight, her features soft and slack when she finally succumbed to the pull of sleep.
Damn, she was beautiful.
That was no surprise. I’d seen her dozens of times before tonight in dreams. There, I’d memorized every line and curve of her body, from the delightful roundness of her cheeks when she smiled to the tempting plumpness of her lower lip.
I knew the silky feel of her long, chestnut hair between my fingers and the sweet sound that slipped from her mouth when I swept the stands to the side to kiss her neck. I knew the impossible softness of her skin. The taste of her passion. The addictive power of her desire.
I knew it all. I craved it all. And the temptation of sitting so close to the promise of ultimate pleasure was torture.
Every sliver of my soul screamed out to reach out and touch her. Pull her close. Kiss her hard. Take her and make her mine. Fully. Completely.
But I couldn’t.
I wouldn’t.
The Fates were cruel. I knew that now.
I’d been right by Tauren’s side when, as a young man just coming of age, they’d graced him with dreams of his true mate.
It wasn’t just a rite of passage; it was a biological necessity. A ferus could only successfully mate with someone the Fates bound them to, and as a line of man where male births vastly outnumbered female ones, the dreams that cemented that bond were a rare gift.
At least, they used to be.
For millennia, there was hardly any interaction between the ferus and kirre worlds.
Even before the construction of their ridiculous Wall, both kinds knew to keep their distance.
We had no love for their docile natures or use for their technology, while they instinctually feared our size and strength.
Any thought of bonding, or mating, or breeding with a kirre was laughable.
No one even considered the idea of the Fates tying an alpha to a creature so weak and fragile.
What good was a mate that could be crushed under your weight or broken by your touch?
Who in their right mind would want a woman who couldn’t survive the threats of the Wilds?
Who would need constant care and supervision?
But then things started to change. Generation after generation, birth rates fell. Families shrank from six or seven children to only one or two. For the first time ever, some mated couples were unable to conceive at all.
People began to realize that if this continued, the ferus wouldn’t survive more than a generation or two of this decline. After that, our kind would be wiped out.
Extinct.
Some prayed to the Fates for an answer. For deliverance.
And the Fates responded as they always did—in the form of a dream.
Tauren was the first alpha to dream of a kirre mate, but his visions of Hannah came at a great price. His father disowned him, tossed him out of the family home, removed him from the line of succession.
Some of us stood by Tauren during all this, refusing to allow the Lykaon and council to banish him from the pack completely. But as the years passed, tensions only grew stronger.
Slowly, the pack found itself splitting into two different factions—one that blamed the kirre and their rampant pollution for the problem, and the other that believed a merging of the two lines was mankind’s only hope.
By the time Hannah found her way to the Wilds, the strain between the two sides was enough to splinter the pack into pieces.
Neighbors turned against each other, Tauren’s father was murdered in an attempted coup, and Hannah was hunted through the forest like a wounded animal, barely escaping with her life.
After the dust from that terrible night settled, it was discovered that the criminal at the heart of the revolt had escaped, along with several of her most diehard followers—like Lash.
And they weren’t the only ones who left. Those who couldn’t stand the idea of living alongside kirre packed their bags and fled the village, looking to create their own.
But the move didn’t bring either side any real sense of peace. There was still plenty of tension between the new village and the old—disagreements over hunting grounds and borders, arguments about resources, even a few isolated brawls over drunken taunts and insults.
Of course, the outlaws were more than happy to stoke those flames of discontent.
From their cowardly hiding spots deep in the Wilds, they ran raids on one village and blamed the other.
They wiped out whole herds of prey to stir fears of scarcity.
And recently, they vowed to stalk and kill any kirre woman who came too close to the Wall.
And tonight, they’d taken their first victim.
Only Lash didn’t know he’d abducted the wrong kirre. The pretty blonde he’d snatched from right outside the Wall wasn’t the one who’d journeyed north because of the unrelenting pull of fate. She was just an unsuspecting bystander. An innocent who had no doubt met a horrible end.
Even among other alphas, Lash could be brutally violent. No one hated the kirre more. To him, they were weak, parasitic vermin, overtaking the world with their massive numbers. There was no way he would allow one to continue drawing breath in his presence for long.
But Sophia had refused to believe that.
Instead, she’d bumbled her way through the Wall, ignoring every natural instinct of self-preservation, determined to save a woman who was already a corpse.
She refused to see reason. Refused to give up. She’d said rather die than quit—and even more baffling, she’d meant it.
And it wasn’t because she was particularly courageous. No, her fear had been on full display from the very beginning. The sharp scent of it, carrying through the night air, was what had led me to her in the first place.
Even before the first deafening report of that ridiculous gun, I’d breathed her in.
It wasn’t much, just a faint note of terror caught up in the wind, but something inside me had reacted instantly.
Before I knew what I was doing, I found myself running between the trees, crashing through sword ferns and scrub, moved by a force I couldn’t explain. A need I couldn’t deny.
I’d had no idea where I was going, no clue which direction I was headed. All I knew was that wherever it was, I had to get there—fast.
I didn’t care about the sharp sting of white-hot pain that stabbed into my chest when I’d burst into that clearing. Not even an avalanche could have stopped me from wrapping my arms around the woman standing there and shielding her body with mine.
But it wasn’t until I’d looked into those warm brown eyes that I’d realized who she was.
Sophia.
For months now, that was the name I roared as I sank into the heaven between her thighs. The hair I raked with my fingers when we kissed. The hips I held onto as she rode me with abandon.
Night after night, dreams of burying myself inside her drove me mad. I could feel her passion, taste her need, hear her cries for more, but every time, just as she began to shake and tremble around my shaft, my eyes would pop open, and the dream would end.
But it wasn’t frustration that kept me from telling anyone about these dreams—a few strokes of my palm took care of that easily enough.
It was hope.
Hope that Sophia wouldn’t come to the Wilds. Hope that she wouldn’t listen to her own dreams. That she’d stay far away from the threats that waited for her here.
Real threats that I might not be able to protect her from.
Every day, I saw the reality that Tauren and Hannah faced. I saw the constant worry in Tauren’s eyes. Months later, he still hadn’t left her side. Not even for an hour. There was no way he could take that kind of risk when men like Lash and murderers like Nelissa still walked the woods.
I understood all of this. I’d been there the night Hannah had nearly been killed. I’d helped wash the blood from her clothes.
So much blood.
More than any kirre could stand to lose.
And yet she’d survived.
But Hannah was a special woman. The first of her kind.
Maybe that was why the Fates had protected her, or maybe it was this strange, new “omega” nature that the Lore Keeper and Lykaon spoke about that helped her pull through. Either way, she was lucky to be alive.
Any other woman, kirre or ferus, would have surely perished—slow death, painful and terrifying.
That realization pushed me to make a vow.
If the Fates ever bound me to a kirre, I’d do everything in my power to keep her out of the Wilds.
Any other choice would’ve been selfish. It would’ve been prioritizing my own fleeting pleasure over the life of the one person I was born to protect, the mate I would lay down my life for. No, I was certain the best way I could protect the life of any future mate was by pushing her away.
It had seemed like a reasonable plan at the time.
Then, a few weeks later, my dreams of Sophia started, and I realized just how cruel the Fates’ sense of humor really was.
Just as visions of her haunted my dreams, thoughts of her stalked me through the day. Every moment apart from her was torture. Every second of longing like a fire raging in my blood. I couldn’t imagine how Tauren had endured this for seven full years.
Or how I was going to make it through a single one.
Of course, now I knew the Fates had no intention of making me wait that long.
They’d waited until I was unprepared, out on patrol, hunting for outlaws like Lash, to toss her in front of me.
And for a moment, the temptation was almost too much to take.
The look of surprise when she’d looked into my eyes, the spark of pure desire that shimmered just under the surface, clawed at something primal inside me. A part that wanted to claim her hard and fast, then and there.
But through sheer determination, I shoved the impulse back, focusing instead on my anger. I let the burning rage I felt at Lash for daring to threaten Sophia take over every part of me. Concentrating on that single violent emotion made it easier to push all lustful thoughts aside.
Easier but not easy.
Resisting the real Sophia proved a hell of a lot harder than ignoring her dream version.
In my dreams, we rarely talked. We fucked. Passionate and hard. Which was amazing, but didn’t tell me much about what kind of woman she was with her clothes on.
But tonight, I felt as if I’d seen every part of her. Every wild swing of every emotion. Fear. Panic. Relief. Determination. Resignation. The timid mouse and the stubborn bull. The sweet and the sour.
All of it.
And the horrible thing was I’d liked everything I’d seen.
She was a complex mess of contradictions. Fragile and painfully vulnerable, but somehow still unshakably loyal and brave.
The rare kind of person who would fight to the death for what she believed in.
Which was exactly why I needed to get her back over the Wall as soon as possible.