But she didn’t.
Because somewhere between the Luna room and this frozen ridge, the meaning of the chase had shifted inside her. This wasn’t evasion. Wasn’t survival. This was the hunt that would define everything—her place in his world, her standing before his court, the foundation of whatever they were building together. And the crimson cape was part of that. Her battle standard. Her declaration that she wasn’t hiding. She wasrunning—hard and fast and smart, exactly as he’d demanded—and she wanted him to see every second of it.
Let the names carved in the ceremonial halls include a human who made the Alpha King earn every step.
The bond tightened.
He’d found her real trail. She knew it the way she knew her own pulse—a spike of savage satisfaction surging through the connection, the predator recognizing its prey’s cleverness and dismissing it in the same breath. Her decoy trail hadn’t bought her more than minutes. He’d read her false breadcrumbs and discarded them, homing in on the thermal signature her body left in the frozen air, the faint trail of warmth and life that no amount of misdirection could erase.
Faster.
Elsa crested a rocky outcrop and paused for three desperate seconds—hand braced against cold stone, chest heaving, legs trembling. The Blood Moon hung directly overhead, so close it seemed to press against the treetops, its red light washing the world in a crimson tide. Below and behind her, the forest stretched in shadow and silence.
She scanned the tree line. Searching for movement. For the shift of a shadow that didn’t belong. For the gleam of cyan eyes in the dark.
Nothing.
Which was worse than something. Because it meant he was being patient. Stalking rather than charging. Closing thedistance with the deliberate precision of a predator that knew its prey had nowhere left to go.
The awareness of him pressed closer—a physical weight against her senses, like the atmospheric pressure dropping before a storm. Through the bond, the feralness had sharpened to a point, honed and focused entirely on her. Every particle of that vast, terrifying intelligence narrowed to a single purpose.
Thrilling.
The word surfaced unbidden, and Elsa couldn’t push it back down. Because alongside the fear—real, visceral, animal fear that tightened her muscles and flooded her veins with adrenaline—something else had taken root. Something that matched the Blood Moon’s pull with its own fierce, electric gravity.
She was being hunted by the most dangerous thing on this planet. A king who had killed his own father, who had ruled through blood and strategy and the kind of calculated violence that kept an entire civilization in line. And tonight, all of that—every ounce of that lethal focus—was aimed ather. Not as a threat. Not as a political maneuver. As the object of something so consuming that a king had stripped away his crown and become a beast just to chase her through the snow.
He wants me. All of that terrifying, beautiful, monstrous power, and he’s using every scrap of it to reach me.
Terrifying and thrilling in equal measure. The twin sensations braided together inside her chest until she couldn’t separate them, couldn’t tell where fear ended and exhilaration began. Her heart hammered—for him, against him, toward him.
She ran.
The ridge gave way to a long slope that spilled toward open ground below—a frozen meadow ringed by ancient pines, the snow unbroken and glittering under the Blood Moon’s vast red eye. Open terrain. No cover. A navigator’s nightmare.
Elsa hesitated at the tree line, one hand gripping a low branch, breath coming in ragged clouds. Every tactical instinct told her to stay in the trees. Stick to cover. Work the terrain. Going into the open was suicide when the thing pursuing you was faster, stronger, and built to hunt in the dark.
But the trees were his territory. He’d grown up in these forests, hunted Fallen through this exact timber, knew every ravine and ridge and shadow. In the trees, she was playing his game.
The meadow was different. Open ground meant she could see him coming. Could choose her angle, pick her moment, use the space to—
To what? Outrun something that covers three of your strides in one?
She almost laughed. The absurdity of it—a human navigator charting escape routes from a wolf king under a Blood Moon on an alien world she’d crash-landed on. If theStardancer’screw could see her now.
A sound reached her from the forest behind. Not a growl. Not footsteps. Something lower—a vibration that traveled through the ground itself, through the soles of her boots, up through her bones. The kind of sound a body made when it displaced enough air to shift the pressure in a confined space.
He was close.
Close enough that the bond blazed like a signal fire, flooding her awareness with the raw, unfiltered intensity of what he felt. Hunger. Anticipation. The aching, desperate need to close the remaining distance andhave. The predator wasn’t thinking anymore. Wasn’t calculating. The part of him that planned and strategized and wore a king’s restraint had been drowned by the Blood Moon’s tide, and what remained was pure, savage intent.
And love.
That was the part that caught her off guard. Buried beneath the feralness, beneath the predator’s drive, something burned that had nothing to do with instinct. Sylas, the male—not the beast, not the king—was still in there. Still terrified of hurting her. Still holding on to the thinning thread of control with everything he had, becauseshewas on the other end of it, and he would rather shatter than let go too soon.
Elsa released the branch.
She burst from the tree line and ran straight into the open.