Each second felt like an eternity.
Finally, the third horn blast split the night, and the last chain of civilization snapped inside him.
Sylas drew one last breath of her lingering scent—Frosted Tears and human warmth and everything he’d never known he wanted—and let the beast loose.
He let out a growly howl, matching the loud bone-deep intensity of the hunt’s horns.
And then he ran.
38
Sylas
The world collapsed to scent and snow and the hammering of his own pulse.
Sylas hit the tree line at a dead sprint, the frozen ground cracking beneath his weight, every stride eating distance in a way no human body could match. The Blood Moon overhead washed the forest in crimson, turning the snow to rust and the shadows to something thick and living. His breath steamed in the cold, but he didn’t feel it. Didn’t feel anything except the singular, consuming drive that had replaced every civilized thought in his head.
Find her.
The Frosted Tears hit him first—a shimmering trail of scent that wound between the pines like a golden thread, so vivid in his heightened state that he could almost see it glowing against the snow. Mixed beneath the oil’s sweetness, her own scent. Salt and warmth and the sharp bright note of adrenaline. She was afraid.
Good.
Fear made prey unpredictable. Fear made the chase worth having.
He followed the trail where it cut along the base of a ridge, her bootprints pressed clean and deliberate into fresh powder. She’d started fast—he could read that in the depth and spacing of her strides. Not panicked, though. Controlled. A runner who knew she couldn’t outpace what hunted her, so she was thinking instead.
That’s it. Show me.
The trail split at a frozen creek bed. One set of prints drove straight through the ice-crusted shallows, leaving dark wet smears on the rocks beyond. The other veered sharply east, into a dense stand of frost-heavy pines where the canopy blocked the moonlight.
Sylas paused. The beast snarled at the delay, claws raking furrows in the frozen ground, but the king—what remained of him—held still and read the terrain.
The creek crossing was too clean. Too obvious. She’d left those prints intentionally, made sure they were deep enough to catch attention. Then she’d backtracked. Stepped in her own footprints to the point where the trail split and slipped east under the canopy, using the low-hanging branches to mask her path.
His navigator, charting an escape route through hostile territory. Using the land the way she’d once used star maps—reading angles, predicting trajectories, calculating her best odds against something faster and stronger and built to hunt in the dark.
Pride cut through the feral haze, sharp and unexpected. She was making him work for it.
Exactly as I demanded.
Sylas turned east.
Under the canopy, her scent grew fainter—diffused by the pine resin and the sharp mineral tang of the mountain. She’d been clever about it. He could smell where she’d pressed her hands against tree trunks to steady herself, transferring the Frosted Tears oil onto bark, creating false contact points that would pull a less experienced tracker in circles. Three trees. Four. Each one a breadcrumb leading in a slightly different direction.
But the oil was on her skin, not just her hands. And the heat of her body left a signature in the cold air that lingered long after she passed—a faint thermal ribbon that the Blood Moon’s power made visible to his predator’s senses. Warmth against the cold. Life against the stillness.
He could track her with his eyes closed.
Something in his chest cracked open—a sound that wasn’t sound, a sensation that had no name in any language he knew. The Blood Moon’s power surged through him in waves now, tidal and relentless, eroding the barriers between the king and the creature that lived beneath the king’s skin. His vision had shifted fully into the predator’s spectrum—heat signatures bloomed against the cold like ink in water, and the forest revealed itself in layers of scent and sound that no daylight eyes could perceive. A snowharebuncowering beneath a deadfall forty yards south. Ashimmerhawkbanking overhead, silent wings cutting the frozen air. The faint residual warmth of Elsa’s handprint on a branch she’d gripped two minutes ago.
He’d hunted Fallen in these forests. Tracked rogue warriors and feral beasts and the kind of enemies that fought back with teeth of their own. Those hunts had been duty. Grim work, necessary and joyless.
This was nothing like those hunts.
This was sacred. Every stride, every breath, every pulse of the Blood Moon overhead was pulling him closer to the momenthis ancestors had built temples to honor. The moment when the beast and the bond and the blood aligned, and a king proved himself worthy of the mate Lux had chosen for him.
The forest thickened as the terrain climbed. She’d chosen the ridge—smart. Higher ground gave her sightlines, let her watch for his approach. If she reached the crest, she’d be able to see the moonlit snowfield beyond and plan her next move before he closed the gap.