Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
MAGNUS
The forest was a blur of silver and charcoal, a jagged landscape of shadows.
I tore through with a violence that made the earth groan under my paws.
My heart was a frantic drum, a rhythm of pure, unadulterated instinct.
Every muscle in my body was coiled tight, a spring wound until it was screaming to snap.
I was running from her.
Nell was too close, sleeping in a room on the opposite side of my wing in the manor.
My parents had started building additions to the modest mansion after my sister was born.
We each got our own wing with room enough for a family to grow in each.
Though we were wolves, my parents expected each of us to sprout wings and fly beyond the den.
But a wolf's nature was pack. We would always return home because that is where we were strongest.
Now temptation was in my stronghold. Nell's vanilla scent was in the kitchen.
In the hall. On the banister leading down the stairs to the guest quarters.
Her sweet scent had been clawing at the back of my throat all evening, a persistent, maddening itch that no amount of scotch or expensive cigars could soothe.
My feet had carried me to the threshold of her door. Claws pricked at the beds of my fingertips to rip the wood off the frame rather than bother with the knob to get to her. To pin her to the bed, rip her clothes off, and bury my cock balls deep inside that warm heat.
I'd backed up a step, tugging at my tie as I went.
The fabric came away in shreds. My pants fared little better as I kicked out of them after stepping out into the cool night air.
Bare feet became paws. Fingertips became claws.
The low groan of desire became a howl of frustration as I let the wolf have my body.
I took off into the night, trying to put distance between me and that sweet scent.
I hadn't realized how hard I'd been if I was about to fuck a woman who was not my fiancée in my parents' house.
I pushed harder. My paws hit the damp mulch with a rhythmic thud-thud-thud, the sound of a predator trying to outrun his own shadow.
I didn't want to think about the Lobo marriage.
I just wanted to be a beast. I wanted to howl until the only thing left was the moon and the hunger.
The moon had nothing to do with the shift.
That was the lie the storybooks told — that wolves ran because the moon pulled them, that something celestial and romantic yanked at our instincts like a puppeteer working strings.
The moon was just light. Cold borrowed light that illuminated without warming, that showed you where you were going without caring whether you arrived. What made a wolf run was the hunt.
My paws hit the damp mulch and found their rhythm; the four-beat thunder of a predator at full extension.
The estate fell away behind me. The manicured lawns gave way to the rougher ground of the old woods at the property's edge, ground that had never been landscaped because my father understood that a pack needed somewhere wild to be wild in.
The trees closed in over me. Here the moonlight came through in pieces, broken by the canopy into shifting silver patches that moved across the forest floor as the branches moved overhead.
My eyes adjusted without effort. The wolf's vision turned the dark into shades of gray and silver and the warm amber signatures of living things.
A rabbit thirty yards to the left, its heartbeat a rapid flutter I could hear clearly.
A deer further out, moving slowly, unaware.
The cold signature of a stream cutting through the low ground ahead.
Wolves hunted for three things. Food. Safety. A mate.
Safety was secured. The estate's perimeter held. The enforcers were in position. The pack was intact.
A mate had been chosen for me over a decade ago, the choice made so early that the wolf had never once been given the opportunity to lift its nose to the wind and decide for itself.
So I hunted for food.
I hit the stream at a full run and cleared it in one stride, paws landing on the far bank without breaking rhythm.
The deer heard me now. I felt the moment its awareness shifted, the change in the air when prey registered predator, the ancient call and response of a dynamic that predated every pack alliance and arranged marriage and political calculation that had ever been made.
Out here there was only the ground and the dark and the cold borrowed light overhead. The deer broke into a run sixty yards ahead of me. The wolf dropped into the focused, total silence of the hunt.
I ran.
I ran because I was a wolf, and wolves hunted, and the hunt was the one thing left that no one had arranged for me.
The deer did not get far.
An hour later, I padded back onto the manicured lawn. I'd washed the blood from my body in the cold stream. My belly was full. My hunger slackened after the kill. The sweet scent of vanilla changed all of that in an instant.
Nell stood by the stone fountain, her silhouette framed by the pale, cold light of the moon. She was in a simple, thin slip that clung to her curves. Her hair was down and spilling over her shoulders like a dark waterfall.
She didn’t startle when the wolf approached. She didn't scream or clutch a hand to her chest. She simply turned her head. Her hazel eyes tracked my movement with a calm that was more unsettling than fear.
“Is that you, Magnus?”
I stopped ten feet away from her and let it happen.
The shift back was never elegant. There was nothing cinematic about it — no smooth ripple of skin, no graceful unfurling.
It was bone and cartilage grinding against the resistance of two natures that never fully agreed with each other.
My spine cracked, a sound like a branch snapping, as the vertebrae realigned from the horizontal to the vertical.
My shoulders followed. The joints popped in rapid succession.
The muscle mass redistributed with a heat that always felt like being plunged into scalding water.
The fur receded in patches. The dark bristles pulled back into skin that was flushed and oversensitive in the cold air.
My hands were last. The knuckles cracked back into their human configuration. The claws retracted slowly, as though the wolf didn't want to give the man back control.
I straightened on two legs. Steam rose off my skin in the cold night air. The whole thing took maybe ninety seconds. It felt longer. It always felt longer when someone was watching.
Nell hadn't moved. Hadn't flinched. Her chin was level, her eyes steady. When it was finished and I was standing fully human in the moonlight, she exhaled once through her nose. That was all.
I made no effort to cover myself. I watched her eyes drop, tracing the lines of my chest, the scars on my shoulders, and finally settling on the heavy weight between my thighs.
"I'm surprised you didn't run screaming." My voice was more growl than anything.
"I've seen some stuff in my days. Now that I know this is possible—the shifting — I'm good."
I took a step toward her. Warm vanilla hit my tongue. Not perfume. Not lotion. The actual bean, split and dark and rich, the way it smelled in my mother's kitchen when she baked, except warmer, layered with something underneath it that was purely Nell. "What are you doing out here?"
“I’m a night owl. I’ve always done my best thinking when the rest of the world is pretending to be good. My grandmother used to say The moon pulls the truth out of people.”
I didn't say anything. I took a step closer. The heat between us was a physical thing, an invisible current that made the air feel thick.
"Are you going to tell me it's not safe for me to be out?"
"You're entirely safe here in this den of wolves, Ms. Odhiambo."
"Call me, Nell. We're partners now, aren't we?"
"Business partners," I corrected.
A ghost of a smile touched her lips. It was a sharp, intelligent thing. "I imagine there's a bit of paperwork before it's official."
I moved closer, the scent of her vanilla spiking as I entered her personal space. "A long, thick stack of it."
I was still naked, my body a map of violence and ancient bloodlines. Nell stood there in a thin slip of cloth that hid nothing. Not a delicious curve. Not a lush mound. Not the sweet heat coming from between the thighs she was even now pressing together.
"You should know that I don't mix business and pleasure, Magnus."
I was crowding her space now. She had to tilt her head back to peer up at me.
She would be revising that rule for me. Just this once.
And then I would likely have to heed my father's advice and my brother's interference.
I couldn't be in the same office as Nell Odhiambo.
Not with the sweet tooth I was developing.
"So, I say we get the pleasure part of our relationship out of the way before we sign a contract."
It was all the consent I needed. My hand tangled in the dark mass of her hair as I tilted her head back. Her skin was cool, a sharp contrast to the furnace of my own. When I pressed my mouth to hers, it wasn't a kiss—it was a reclamation.