The room was stone and shadow.No candles. No fire. Just moonlight spilling in through a narrow window like the eye of something ancient.... watching. Waiting. The door had locked behind her with a click that settled into her spine like a second heartbeat. Jasmine didn’t call for help. Didn’t test the handle. She knew what this was.Her breath bloomed white in the cold air.The bed was made of furs. Soft, thick, piled high atop rough wood. No sheets. No modesty. The scent of wolves lingered in the fibers... feral, warm, masculine. Jasmine stood at the center of it all, arms loose at her sides, heart thudding in a slow, rising rhythm.It was starting.The letter they had never written, the prophecy they never dared speak aloud, the shift that came not in teeth and claws but in sweat and ache.Her first heat.Not the fluttering lust she’d conjured for show. Not the control she used like silk gloves.This... this was fire beneath the skin. It rose up her thighs like a fever. Coiled behin
The hall where the pack gathered was nothing like the opulence of the House of Solace. There were no velvet drapes, no mirrored ceilings, no honeyed perfume clinging to the air. Here, the walls were stone and rough timber, the hearths spitting with flames that cast long shadows over iron fixtures. But the men inside still lounged like kings, still held their drinks with slow arrogance and watched her like they deserved to devour her.Jasmine walked through the smoke and warmth, and the world narrowed to the sway of her hips and the flick of her gaze. She wore black. Not mourning-black, not submission-black. Her gown was midnight silk, slit to her hip, with sheer panels that shimmered like water. No jewelry. No paint. Just lips the color of bruised plums and a mouth that moved like a prayer half-spoken.She didn’t need more than that.She never had.The table in the center of the room had been cleared, chairs drawn into a wide circle like the inner court of some ancient judgment. Dozen
The walls were older in this wing of the stronghold. Stone layered over stone, blackened in some places with old fire, smoothed in others by the brush of bodies long dead. The floor clicked beneath Jasmine’s heels... polished, echoing, deliberate. Everything in Blackfang was too deliberate.She walked like the click of her steps meant something.And maybe they did.Her dress was midnight blue and slit up the side, scandalously high. It swayed with every step like it had been poured onto her skin instead of sewn. The bodice pressed tight against her ribs, her breasts half-swallowed in silk and suggestion. No jewelry. No scent. Just her.No one had told her what to wear for the Council’s convening. But she had learned long ago… if men want you clothed in fear, show up in skin instead.She had painted her lips the same wine-red as the blood she’d once tasted on her tongue after biting back a scream. She didn’t scream anymore.At the doors, two guards stepped aside. One wouldn’t meet her
The moon hung heavy in the Blackfang sky, swollen and silver, casting everything in that haunting shade of bone-pale blue. It dripped across the stone halls like water, pooling on the flagstones, bleeding into shadows that moved a little too deliberately.Jasmine sat at the edge of her chamber’s windowsill, one bare foot curled beneath her, the other swinging lazily into the night. The wind teased the hem of her slip, playing with it like a lover, brushing it along the line of her thigh. Her body hummed with a restlessness she couldn't shake. Not even after the bath. Not even after the wine. Not even after the endless silence of the room that had once felt like a cage and now just felt like a warning.Below, the courtyard stood empty. No training tonight. No posturing. Just stillness and that thick, quiet hunger that always came before something changed.She felt him before she heard him.The scent struck first.Pine. Musk. Leather. And something sharper beneath it... something that a
The mist clung to the stones like a second skin, curling low around Jasmine’s ankles, soaking into the hem of her tunic. It was dawn, though the sun had yet to rise over the sharp black pines encircling the Blackfang training yard. The stones beneath her feet were slick with dew, ancient and grooved by centuries of combat... blood, claws, teeth, sweat.This was no place for softness. But that morning, Jasmine was all silk and tension.She stood alone, barefoot, spine straight, every inch of her honed and alert. Her breath misted into the cold air, slow and even. Her tunic clung to her, the light fabric wet against her thighs from the damp. Beneath it, her body remembered the dream from the night before—the ache of it, the phantom of heat still pulsing low in her belly.Roger was late.Deliberately.She knew it the way a woman knows a man's intention from the sound of his silence.When he came, it wasn’t a footstep she heard but the shift in the air. A presence thickening the space beh
She didn’t dream that night.Sleep refused to come after surrender. Jasmine lay tangled in velvet sheets that still smelled of heat and skin and the wet earth where he had taken her. Her body thrummed, low and coiled like a harp still quivering from the strike.Roger had left her aching.Not with pain. Not even with pleasure. But with something worse... the ghost of him, the heavy absence of teeth never quite biting. The promise of ruin that hadn’t yet come. Her thighs still burned where his mouth had lingered. Her skin smelled of pine and sweat and sex.And Jasmine knew the pack would smell it too.Morning in Blackfang was brutal in its stillness. Mist clung to the barracks and stone arches like silk dressing a corpse. Wolves sparred in silence, fists cracking against bone, the clang of steel and barked commands echoing off the valley walls.Jasmine sat before the fire, naked beneath a black robe, her legs crossed, her fingers dipped in oil. She smoothed it along her thighs slowly, s
The forest opened like a secret.Thick branches arched above Jasmine, their leaves trembling in the soft hush of morning. Mist clung to the earth, curling around her ankles as she walked barefoot along the hidden path, guided only by scent and instinct and something deeper... something feral... thrumming beneath her skin.A low rush of sound met her ears before she saw it.Water.And then the trees parted.There, carved into the bones of the land, was a pool fed by a high fall... a silver sheet of liquid tumbling from jagged stone into a basin the color of dark glass. Steam rose from it, curling up like smoke from an altar. The air was warm here. Wetter. Heavier.Jasmine stepped forward without hesitation.She let her robe slip from her shoulders, the silk whispering down her skin in a slow cascade. It pooled at her feet like blood. Beneath, she wore nothing.Not even shame.Her body was flush from the moon fever, skin hypersensitive, nipples already tight in the humid air. She moved
The moon hadn’t changed.It still rose pale and full, still spilled silver across the forests like an open throat, still bathed Blackfang in that eerie glow that turned everything beautiful and brutal at once.But something inside Jasmine had changed.She felt it first in her skin.It started with heat... subtle, creeping. A flush over her collarbones when she dipped into the basin that morning. Then deeper, a bloom between her thighs that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with ache.By midday, the ache had turned to tension.And by evening, tension to tremble.She stood at the edge of the Blackfang compound’s overlook, bare feet sinking into moss, her robe falling open just enough to catch the wind, letting it kiss the fever off her chest. Her eyes searched the horizon, but nothing grounded her. The trees danced. The mist moved. Her blood throbbed with a rhythm she didn’t recognize.The fever wasn’t in her mind. It was in her bones.Elora had once described it like d
The room was nothing like the others in Blackfang.No velvet. No firelight. No seduction laced in wine or shadows.This chamber was stone and bone. Cold in the walls. Ancient in the scent. Carvings spiraled over every surface... glyphs etched in claw and blood. The center held a shallow pit, the floor covered in thick white ash that pulsed faintly, like it remembered heat.Jasmine stood at the edge of it, barefoot again, a thin tunic clinging to her curves like fog. Her breath fogged in front of her.Behind her, Roger’s voice cut through the stillness.“Remove it.”She didn’t turn.The tension between them had become a third presence... an entity with breath and teeth.“Is this part of the lesson?” she asked, her voice all smoke and silk.“No,” Roger said. “It’s part of the ritual.”Slowly, Jasmine tugged the tunic over her head. Her skin prickled in the cold, nipples tightening, the scars along her spine catching the torchlight. She didn’t cover herself. Didn’t hide.Roger stepped fo