Chapter 4
Kess
My heat is building faster than it ever has before, faster than a forest fire spreading with the wind and just as destructive.
With the building heat, my senses heighten, bringing the world around me into sharp focus. The smell of the forest gets stronger: earth and moss and decaying things, and underneath it all something wild, something that makes the predator part of my brain sit up and take notice.
My scent is changing too. It's still wrong, not like the sweet omega scent that's meant to soothe alphas. Blood and rage and burning cedar, all of it growing stronger by the moment. The kind of scent that makes an alpha angry instead of pacified.
Let him smell it when he arrives.
Let him know what kind of omega they sent him. The feral kind. The wild omega.
The sun has moved even lower now. The sky has turned a deep, dark red, fading to a rich purple at the edges. There are minutes until it's completely dark—minutes until he arrives.
The ache that comes with the heat grows more intense. Slick is starting to gather between my thighs—just a little, not much yet, but enough that I can feel it.
It's humiliating to know that my body does that, that it betrays me by preparing for an alpha I don't even want.
I grit my teeth and ride it out. The full rage-heat won't hit until the sun sets, and usually that's when I black out. I have a few precious minutes where I'll be conscious and strong, and those are the minutes I plan to use to kill him.
Until then, I just have to breathe and wait through it.
Deep breaths in through my nose. I hold the air in my chest, try to let my pulse slow. Breathe out slowly through my mouth.
My hands clench into fists, fingernails biting into my palms. The iron cuffs around my wrists have grown warm—whether from my body heat or the altar's dark magic, I can't tell. Everything is getting warmer. The fever crawls under my skin like something alive, something trying to claw its way out.
But I'm still here. Still conscious. Still in control.
I just have to stay present a little longer.
A little—
The temperature drops.
Not gradually, like the cooling of evening. Suddenly. Violently. Like someone ripped open a door to the coldest winter night.
The air itself changes—gets heavier, thicker, charged with something that makes the hair on my arms stand up even through the heat-fever burning under my skin.
He's close.
I can feel it like a pressure building behind my eyes, like the grove itself is holding its breath. Like the whole forest knows what's coming and has gone silent in fear.
My heart kicks against my ribs. The ache in my belly twists into something sharper, something with teeth. Not the full heat yet, but close. So close. My body responding to the nearness of an alpha before I can even see or smell him.
The sky darkens.
Not with sunset. With wings.
The sound comes first—a rush of air, heavy and rhythmic, like the breathing of some enormous beast. Like the world itself has lungs and is drawing breath.
Then the shadow falls across the grove, blotting out what's left of the dying light.
The temperature plunges further as something massive passes between me and the sky.
He's here.
The Beast King has arrived.
I crane my neck against the altar stone, looking up through the canopy, and see him circling overhead.
A shape darker than the darkening sky, so huge my mind struggles to make sense of it.
Each beat of his wings sends tremors through the air that I feel against my skin like the bass note of a war drum.
The ancient trees surrounding the grove bow and sway in the backdraft, branches groaning, leaves torn free and sent spiraling into the darkness.
The heat in my belly coils tighter, a snake preparing to strike.
Hold on. Stay conscious. Stay ready.
My fingers twitch toward my hair, toward the knife hidden there. Ready to grab it the moment he gets close enough to kill.
He descends.
The dragon drops from the sky like a falling star—like a god coming down to collect his due. Wings tucked tight against his body, plummeting straight down, and for one wild moment I think he's going to crash directly into me.
Then he spreads his wings at the last second and lands at the edge of the grove with a sound like thunder meeting earthquake.
The ground bucks beneath me. The moss ripples outward in waves.
The warm stone altar vibrates with the force of his impact, and I feel it in my teeth, my bones, the base of my skull.
Then he unfolds.
Wings spread wide—so wide they span half the grove, leathery membrane stretched between bones as thick as the oldest oaks.
What's left of the dying sunlight filters through them, backlit gold and crimson, and I can see the intricate vein structure like stained glass windows.
Like something holy, if holiness were made of skin and violence.
His body is massive. Longer than any building in my village.
Scaled in black so dark it seems to drink the light, to swallow it whole.
The scales overlap like armor forged by a mad god, each one easily the size of my spread hand, and they shimmer with undertones of gold when he moves—subtle, almost invisible, like embers buried deep beneath ash.
Four legs, each ending in claws the length of swords. They dig into the earth as he settles his weight, carving furrows through moss and soil like a farmer's plow through spring mud.
But it's his head that holds me frozen.
The dragon's skull is a study in terrible elegance.
Long snout, powerful jaws, teeth visible even with his mouth closed—each one a bone-white dagger meant for shearing flesh from bone.
Two horns curve back from his skull, massive and ridged, black shot through with veins of gold like precious ore.
Smaller horns frame his jaw like a crown. Like a warning.
And his eyes.
Golden. Not metaphorically—actually gold, liquid and molten, like someone poured melted metal into his eye sockets and it learned to see. The pupils are vertical slits so black they look like tears in the fabric of reality. Ancient beyond measuring. Intelligent beyond what any beast should possess.
Fixed on me.
Every cell in my body screams at once—a chorus of conflicting orders that nearly tears me apart.
Run.
Fight.
Submit.
Never.
The dragon stares at me.
I stare back.
He takes a step forward. For something so massive, the movement is surprisingly graceful—liquid and predatory, like watching a cat stalk prey. One clawed foot, then another, eating up the distance between us with strides that make the earth tremble.
Twenty feet away.
Fifteen.
His nostrils flare—twin caverns large enough to swallow my head whole—and he draws in a long, deep breath. Scenting me. The sound is like wind rushing through a canyon, resonant and low enough that I feel it vibrating in my chest.
Scenting my building heat.
Scenting my rage.
Scenting my wrongness.
A sound rumbles up from deep in his chest. Not quite a growl. Not quite a purr. Something between them, something that has no name in human language. It vibrates through the ground, through the altar, through the iron chains, through me.
Recognition.
Ten feet away now.
His head is larger than my entire body. His breath washes over me—hot as a forge, smelling of smoke and char and something ancient. Something that was old when my grandmother's grandmother was young.
And underneath all of that: his scent.
Smoke. Stone. Winter wind cutting across frozen peaks. Pine forests and woodsmoke and something wild beneath it all, something my body recognizes even though my mind doesn't, something that reaches into the deepest part of me and says alpha-apex-MATE.
The heat that's been building—building slow, building manageable, building controllable—
—detonates.
One second I'm breathing through the discomfort, managing the fever, holding on to consciousness with both hands.
The next, red washes over my vision like blood poured across glass and fury erupts in my chest like a volcano breaking through the earth's crust.
The rage hits so hard I scream.
Not in fear. In pure feral fury. The sound tears out of my throat without my permission, raw and animal.
My body arches off the altar, spine bowing, pulling against the chains with strength I didn't know I possessed. The iron groans in protest. The bolts holding the rings to the stone shift—just a fraction, but they move.
The fever spikes from uncomfortable to unbearable. My skin is on fire, burning from the inside out. Slick floods between my thighs, and I hate it, hate my treacherous body for wanting this monster, hate that I'm wet and aching for him while every conscious thought screams to tear out his throat.
The rage and the need tangle together until I can't tell them apart. Two snakes eating each other's tails, consuming and becoming consumed.
My vision is fully red now. Everything sharp and clear and painted in shades of violence. I can see every scale on his massive body, could count them if I wanted. Can see exactly where I need to strike to draw blood—the eyes, the throat, the softer scales under his jaw where the armor thins.
The dragon rumbles again and lowers his enormous head until those molten gold eyes are level with mine, maybe three feet away. Close enough that I can feel the heat radiating off his scales. Close enough to see my own reflection in those liquid gold irises—small, chained, burning with fury.
This close, I can see the individual scales on his snout, each one a tiny shield. Can see the flecks of darker gold in his eyes, like sparks frozen in amber. Can see scars—old wounds that healed wrong, leaving silver lines through the black scales like rivers on a map.
Three hundred years of violence written on his body.
Three hundred years of curse.
This close, I can also see something else. Something I didn't expect to find in the eyes of a monster.
Exhaustion.
He's so tired.