He wasn’t going to let her reach the crest.
Sylas dropped lower, abandoning the trail in favor of the gully that ran parallel to the ridgeline. Rock and frozen mud muffled his footfalls. The trees pressed close, branches scraping against his shoulders as he moved, and he let them—let the forest close around him the way it had when he was young and learning to hunt Fallen in the deep timber. Before the crown. Before the politics. When he was just fangs and instinct and the uncomplicated joy of the chase.
The gully smelled of frozen earth and old stone and the mineral bite of groundwater running somewhere far below. His claws found purchase on the iced-over rock, each grip silent, each movement deliberate. The beast wanted to roar—to announce itself, to hear her gasp of recognition when she realized how close he’d gotten. But this was the part of the hunt that required the predator’s patience. The final approach. The narrowing of distance between intent and contact.
Above him, he heard her breathing change. Shorter. More controlled. She’d stopped running and started climbing. Reading the ridge the way she’d read asteroid fields from her navigator’s chair—calculating risk, weighing options, making decisions that would keep her alive for another thirty seconds, another minute, another heartbeat.
Through the bond, he felt her.
Not the specifics—the Blood Moon made the connection run feral, stripping away the nuance of thoughts and leaving only raw sensation. But he could feel her heartbeat, rapid and strong. The burn in her muscles as she climbed. The cold biting at her cheeks, her fingers, the exposed skin of her throat where the Frosted Tears glistened. And beneath it all, threaded through the fear and the exertion, something that made the beast in him rumble with satisfaction.
Exhilaration.
She was terrified. And she was alive with it.
The wild, electric thrill of running through a crimson forest with a monster on her heels—not because she’d been forced, not because she had no choice, but because she’d looked the beast in the eye and told him to come get her.
Still not running from me. Running toward something.
The gully curved. He cut upslope at an angle, claws digging into the frozen earth, hauling himself through a gap in the rock face that put him above her position. Below and to the left, through a break in the trees, he caught movement.
Red.
The crimson cape snapped behind her as she drove up the ridgeline, a bright wound against the white landscape. Her breath came in visible bursts, and the silver chains in her hair caught the Blood Moon’s light like scattered sparks. She moved with purpose—not stumbling, not flailing, but picking her path with the precision of someone who’d spent years reading terrain from the nav console of a starship.
She was close enough to hear if he growled. Close enough that one burst of speed would close the gap.
But he held.
Not because the ritual demanded it. Not because the king in him wanted to give her a fair chance. Because the beast wanted more. Wanted to watch her run, wanted to feel the chase stretchand burn and build until every nerve in his body screamed for the moment of impact.
She paused at a rocky outcrop, one hand braced against the stone, and turned to scan the tree line below. Searching for him. Her eyes swept the shadows, the moon-washed snow, the dark spaces between the pines where anything could be hiding.
She didn’t look up.
Sylas crouched above her, ten feet of vertical rock and silence between them, and watched the Blood Moon paint her face in shades of war. Her pulse hammered against the Frosted Tears at her throat—he could see it, smell it, taste the adrenaline in the air between them.
Beautiful. Fierce. Mine.
She turned and ran again, cresting the ridge, disappearing over the far side in a flash of crimson that branded itself behind his eyelids.
The beast surged.
Sylas descended from the outcrop in a controlled slide of claw and muscle, hitting the ridgeline at full speed. The snow erupted beneath him, and the forest blurred as something deeper than thought took over—something that ran on instinct and starlight and the scent of a female who smelled like everything he’d die to protect.
He could hear her now. The ragged rhythm of her breathing. The crunch of her boots breaking through the crusted snow. The wild drumbeat of her heart, matching the cadence of his own.
Through the bond, she felt him closing. He knew because the spike of fear-thrill that flooded back through the connection was sharp enough to make his vision blur at the edges. She wasn’t stopping. Wasn’t slowing. If anything, the awareness of him at her back drove her faster, harder, pushing her human body past its limits with a stubborn refusal to make this easy.
The trees thinned. The ridge gave way to a long slope that spilled into a clearing—a frozen meadow ringed by ancient pines, the snow unbroken and glittering under the Blood Moon’s enormous red eye. Open ground. No cover. If she crossed it, she’d be exposed.
She didn’t hesitate. She burst from the tree line and ran straight into the open, the crimson cape streaming behind her like a battle standard, her silhouette sharp and defiant against the white expanse.
Brave. Reckless. Perfect.
Sylas cleared the trees three seconds behind her.
Through the trees at the clearing’s edge, through the silver-red light of the Blood Moon, through the crystalline air that carried her scent to him like a prayer—a flash of crimson against white snow.