Faceless No More
Chapter Forty
Pollock
We turn toward the doorway just as another cry tears from her.
The sensation—that of heat festering beneath flesh and bone riles within me once more. Veins carry that feverish awakening to every extremity, and will make me dismantle the world if I have to in order to reach her.
The closer I get to her scent, the worse it gets. Because I desire to mark and mask it with my own, give no other the ability to find her as I have.
She is sunlight and wildflowers. Ripe winter berries in a desolate landscape to a starved soul. A source of nourishment when there is no other. A wild, rare rose nurtured by warmed earth. Full of life, vibrant and untamed.
And beneath it—
Something darker coils.
It bleeds through her pores and floods my senses until I can hardly separate myself from it.
Incense and ash. A bitter, sacred undertone wrapped in wheat fields and the smell of parchment. Sin braided with devotion. Guilt layered so thickly through her very being, it tastes like a copper halfpence on my tongue.
Fear pulses through her scent, frantically, but hunger weaves through it all. Raw, endless, and aching hunger.
So much so that it rides each breath, resides inside my lungs, and has overwhelmed the rest of my senses.
Frankly, I have come to know as well as my own.
Whatever change in my makeup that has occurred has also brought me to this location, and if I’m right, for this purpose.
For her.
It’s as if my will has been replaced with another's, an influential force that won’t be appeased otherwise.
I pushed it aside to speak with Orán first and have tried to keep myself anchored in reason and restraint. But hearing her pain and being this close has everything she is once again overtaking all else, rushing forward in a flood that I’m incapable of falling prey to.
As if to echo my thoughts, an animal growls low, voicing its displeasure.
Her mewling discomfort quickly follows.
A lace of fire races down my spine.
I reach out and catch Orán by his bicep, stopping him mid-step.
“Wait,” I murmur. “Do you hear that?”
I open my mind to hers, just enough to gauge if I can, and her thoughts pour forward.
They slam through the mental doorway in jagged fragments—candlelight and skin on skin, whispered prayers tangled with want.
Crosses. Scripture. Sanctimony fractured by longing.
Sins committed with a faceless man, others committed alone in the quiet dark, and all of it stitched together by shame that has never been allowed to breathe in the light.
She senses me there.
I know it the instant her awareness brushes against mine.
An unholy sound tears loose from her chest—a low, protesting growl that could be a warning or a want. I can’t yet tell which, only that it unfurls through my veins in answer.
There’s the squeak of the mattress.
A rustling sound.
The growl returns, deepens.
Orán lowers his arm slowly. We move into the hallway as one, each step more daunting than the next, as the vicious growl grows louder. There is a promise of violence and a clear warning to it that we do not heed.
“Prepare yourself, Brother,” he murmurs. “I left her bound to the bed, and she doesn’t sound pleased about it.”
I bar him from pressing forward for only a second, thrusting out my arm. “That is not the sound a woman makes when she’s angry.”
Confusion mars his features, but only for a split second before he grasps the situation. “It’s happening,” he says quietly. “Your face.” I don’t need him to elaborate.
I lift my hands and see it for myself. My nails lengthen, darkening, sharpening into claws that flex with instinct rather than thought. The heat has become a sweltering inner tempest, and magic that only myths and fiction speak of kindles into existence and spreads.
The man I am gets pushed back as the wolf presses forward toward the surface, impatient, insistent.
The White Witch doesn’t growl this time when she voices her discontent. She snarls.
I stride forward, unable to stop myself.
Orán is at my back immediately, fingers biting into my shoulder, his voice harsh in my ear as he hisses my name, commanding me to stop—to think—to remember myself.
I don’t.
I can’t.
We reach the doorway.
She’s crouched on the bed and is as beautiful as I remember and also more so.
No living words could breathe the ones necessary to articulate what I see.
She’s barefoot, gown torn open, fabric hanging in shreds from her body, revealing opalescent skin that catches the light, like red-stained moonstone.
One breast is exposed, her chest rising and falling too fast, too hard.
Her spine is bowed, shoulders rolled forward like a cornered and wary predator.
The bindings dangle in tatters from one wrist, shredded beyond recognition. Her fingers curl and uncurl, nails darkened and sharpened, spearing through sheets and mattress, tearing into fabric as if it were flesh.
Her eyes glow—piercing white swallowed by blown-out black pupils, luminous and other. There is no confusion in them. Only awareness. Challenge.
The sound she makes is not human.
It’s rage personified.
A clear warning to stay back, or she will attack.
Instinct overrides reason. The world narrows, edges warping, until she is all I see. I breathe her in as a wolf. As a creature much like the one I see in her, I meet that threat with one of my own.
The sound that tears from me is one not of this world’s making and can’t be restricted to this space. It tunnels through all that surrounds us and shakes the very ground beneath my feet.
Violent. Possessive. Dominant.
Untethered and dangerous.
Skin tightens, then shifts. Thick, coarse hair breaks through follicles in a hot ripple down my frame. My jaw restructures, then, pain as sharp teeth tear through gums. Muscles reform and harden. Bone reshapes. The beast within me rises fully, no longer pacified to remain a shadow beneath my skin.
I am a man, but also not.
I step toward something in between beast and man.
She snarls.
Lips peel back from elongated teeth, eyes blazing as she slices through the last of the bindings and rises slowly higher on the mattress, body coiled and ready to strike. She is all feral grace and fury, power vibrating just beneath her skin.
“Pollock.” Orán's voice is threaded with unease. “Don’t. She knows not what she does.”
I lift a hand without breaking my stare. “She knows,” I say, voice pitched low. “And she’s terrified. But she knows what I am to her. This is her fighting the claim I intend to place on her.”
I push the truth into her mind, firm and unyielding.
Don’t you, little one? You know what I am to you?
She is hunger.
Heat.
She is—
With brutal certainty, I share the words with her.
Mo anam. Mo cara.
My soul. My mate.
Mo thúis ocus mo dered
My beginning and my end.
“Until we are nothing, no more, and God has no further need of us. Even in that end, and in whatever form I take, I will remember you.”
Anam-cheangailte
Soul bound.
The rightness of it vibrates through my bones, ancient and undeniable, as though the world itself exhales in agreement. This is fate, and in it, she is my divine right.
“Which makes you my Mo ómega. And I your—”
She lunges.
Instinct takes over.
I catch her midair by the waist and throat as she slams into me with bone-jarring force.
We crash into the wall hard enough to rattle the room.
Her strength shocks even me. She fights like something born of fury and wrath—claws raking.
They sink in deep. Her own elongated teeth snap inches from my throat.
I spin, driving her back, caging her against a bookshelf. Wood creaks and then gives way as books cascade down around us. I pin her there, body pressed tight, letting the Alpha rise further, answering her violence with my own—measured, controlled, just enough to make her still.
“Challenge me again and you’ll regret—”
She snarls in defiance, lifting a clawed hand.
I catch it and slam it back against the wood, caging her fully now. For a single heartbeat, she stills, surrenders.
I lean in to fill my lungs with her. She is everything wild between shorelines. Nature and its seasons wrapped into one being. All she is and has ever been carries a spark inside her and has helped to become an entity unlike any other.
And she is mine.
Fated so by destiny.
My nose brushes along her neck. She violently shivers. I do it again. It’s a mere ghostly touch, yet it draws a great gasp from her parted lips.
Near her ear, I murmur, voice low and deadly soft. “You are mine, little wolf goddess. Mine to fight beside. Mine to challenge. Mine to stand with when the world ends. There is no longer a need to face your days of hunger alone. Those sins you dream of… they will be mine as well. Shared—”
As a vicious snarl rips from her, she shoves me with impossible force, sending me flying back into a nearby dresser. Wood splinters as it collapses beneath my weight.
Orán is moving instantly.
He reaches for her, and she whirls, striking blindly. Her claws rake across his chest, four deep slashes opening at once, blood blooming vivid and fast. He stumbles back but remains upright, hands flying to his chest, coming away slick with blood.
He lowers them slowly. Golden light ignites around his fingers. They curl, and suddenly, vines tear up through the floorboards, splintering wood. The window shatters. Branches tunnel in. Vines and branches begin to sneak toward her.
“Eridessa,” Orán coaxes. “Listen to me. You’re safe here, safe with us. We’re not here to hurt you.”
She doesn’t listen. Doesn’t calm.
Her head cocks unnaturally toward the night beyond the window. She draws in one deep breath, eyes burning as she bares her teeth in one final snarl, then she bolts.