The crimson cape streamed behind her as she crossed the meadow, her boots breaking through the crusted snow with sharp, crystalline cracks that echoed off the surrounding pines. The Blood Moon’s light hit her full force in the clearing—no canopy, no shadow, no cover—and she imagined how she must look from above. A single point of red moving across a white field, bright and defiant and impossible to miss.
Good.
Let him see her. Let the court see, if they were watching from the fortress walls. Let them see the human who crossed open ground under a Blood Moon with her head up and her stride sure and the Alpha King’s hunt thundering at her back.
She was halfway across when she heard him.
Not through the bond—through her ears. The explosive crack of snow erupting under massive weight as something cleared the tree line behind her at a velocity that human bodies didn’t achieve. She felt the impact through the frozen ground, felt it shudder up through her boots, and the sound that followed wasn’t a growl or a snarl but something deeper. Something that bypassed her eardrums and resonated directly in her sternum. A low, rolling thunder that saidfound you, caught you, mine.
Elsa’s legs burned. Her lungs screamed. The cold air sliced at her throat with every gasping breath.
She didn’t slow down.
Behind her—closing, closing, the distance evaporating with terrifying speed—she could hear him. Each stride eating ground in great, powerful lunges that made the snow explode in his wake. The bond was a roar now, a white-hot wire ofwant-need-claimthat obliterated every other sensation.
She could feel his breath. Not literally—not yet—but through the bond, the heat of it, the way each exhale carried her name in a language older than words.
Three seconds. Maybe less.
Elsa did something the navigator in her had never done before.
She stopped calculating.
He hit her like a wall of muscle and fur and moonlight.
The impact drove the air from her lungs as his body collided with hers from behind, arms closing around her midsection with a force that lifted her off her feet. They went down together—a controlled fall, barely, his weight twisting at the last instant to take the brunt of the landing on his side before rolling her beneath him in the snow.
Cold erupted around her—against her back, her arms, her legs—and then heat.Hisheat. A wall of it, pressing her into the drift with a weight that should have been crushing but somehow felt like gravity finally working the way it was supposed to.
His muzzle found her throat.
Fangs pressed against the skin where her pulse hammered, not biting, not breaking—justthere. Holding. The pressure was precise, deliberate, a predator’s instinct fulfilled: jaws on the throat, prey pinned, the chase complete.
A sound vibrated through her chest. Low. Deep. A frequency that she felt more than heard, rolling through her ribcage and settling into her bones. It wasn’t a growl. Wasn’t a purr. Something between. Something that carried meaning beyond language—possession and relief and the stunned, tremblingwonder of a beast that had finally closed its paws around the one thing in the world it couldn’t survive losing.
Mine.
The word pulsed through the bond so strongly that she couldn’t tell if it came from him or from her.
Elsa lay in the snow beneath the Alpha King of the Yzefrxyl, her breath coming in shattered gasps, his weight pinning her to the frozen earth, his fangs gentle—impossibly, terrifyingly gentle—against the most vulnerable part of her body. Above them, the Blood Moon filled the sky like a wound torn in the fabric of the night.
She should be afraid.
She was. In the deep, animal part of her brain that recognized predator dynamics and screameddanger, danger, danger—she was terrified. His body covered hers completely, blotting out the moonlight, his breath hot against her neck and his muscles locked rigid with the effort of holding himself back. Through the bond, the feralness was a living thing, barely contained, the beast straining against the last thin thread of Sylas’s control with a desperation that made the connection between them vibrate.
But the fear had become something else.
Just like the Sabers said it would.
Elsa brought her hands up—slowly, carefully, the way you’d move near something wild and wounded—and pressed her palms against his chest. Through the layers of thick fur, she felt his heart. Hammering. Violent. A rhythm nothing like the steady beat she’d fallen asleep against last night. This heart was running full tilt, driven by the same blood-moon frenzy that had turned his eyes from cyan to something darker, something ancient and hungry and absolutely focused on her.
He was shaking.
This massive, lethal, battle-scarred king—trembling against her like she was the first creature in the world to touch him.
The Sabers were right about that part, too.
“Sylas.” His name came out rough, stripped raw by cold and exertion. She didn’t recognize her own voice.