CHAPTER THREE

Chapter Three

Elias

Ronan wasn’t the only one unsettled after the council meeting.

Elias had known the alpha for over a hundred years, and in all that time, he’d never seen him come undone like that — not even when the curse first took hold and the beast threatened to rip through his skin night after night.

But this…?

This was different.

Not rage. Not pain. Something deeper. Hungrier. Something that whispered of surrender in a man who only knew how to dominate.

And that scared Elias more than any enemy at their borders.

---

By nightfall, Elias sat in the war room alone, lit only by the flickering glow of a single reading lamp and the blue cast of his laptop screen. He’d tracked countless threats in his time — rogue packs, witch clans, corrupted shamans.

But tonight, he was searching for a woman.

Talia Elowen.

That was the name Ronan had dropped almost reluctantly — after the meeting. It wasn’t her real name, Elias assumed. Dominatrices rarely operated under them.

Still, it was a start.

He ran the name through every encrypted paranormal database he had access to. Then human ones. Then the gray in-between: blogs, forums, whispered client testimonies buried in online shadows.

She didn’t advertise.

She didn’t need to.

What he found instead were stories.

Men, powerful ones — who’d come out of her sessions like they’d been remade. One even claimed his PTSD vanished. Another had stopped turning feral on full moons. A vampire had confessed that she made him forget bloodlust for the first time in three centuries.

None of them described sex.

They described transcendence.

One quote chilled Elias to the bone:

“She didn’t tie me up. She freed me from something I didn’t know I was enslaved to. I thought I’d walk away broken. Instead, I walked away on my knees and whole.”

Elias sat back slowly, heart thudding.

There was no way this woman was fully human.

If she was… she wasn’t just human anymore.

He leaned forward again, clicking through client trails until he found the underground club she was rumored to work out of. An elite, by-invite-only dungeon known as Velvet Nocturne, hidden behind a jazz bar in the city.

Elias narrowed his eyes.

The owner was fae-blooded. Which meant there were protections in place. Glamours. Wards. No one got in without passing tests of intent and secrecy.

He could get through them, of course. But it wouldn’t be subtle.

Still, Ronan’s words haunted him.

“She didn’t settle it. She claimed it.”

Whatever power this woman wielded whether divine, inherited, or something even older it had reached into the soul of a cursed alpha and quieted the chaos inside him.

That made her either a miracle…

…or a threat.

Elias stood, locked the laptop, and grabbed his jacket. He had to see her for himself.

And if the Moon Goddess had anything to do with this woman’s bloodline, they needed to know now before Ronan lost more than control.

Before he lost himself.

The jazz bar was unassuming. Brick-fronted, tucked into a narrow alley, its sign barely legible under the city grime. Elias wouldn’t have looked at it twice except the air around it shimmered with glamour.

Velvet Nocturne didn’t welcome outsiders.

It invited them if it wanted to.

He stepped inside anyway.

Music curled through the dark air like smoke: low, slow, and sinful. A woman’s voice crooned from a corner stage, her notes rich enough to melt bones. The room was full but hushed all murmurs and eye contact, every guest too polished to be anything but wealthy, bored, and dangerous.

Elias moved through the bar with predator’s grace. One heartbeat at a time. One breath. One lie.

He reached the back hallway and found the door.

There was no handle.

Just a mirror.

His reflection stared back shoulder-length hair pulled into a half-tie, broad frame wrapped in a black coat, wolf eyes glittering gold beneath the surface.

Then the mirror pulsed.

“State your intent,” said a voice from nowhere and everywhere.

Elias met his own gaze. “To observe.”

A beat.

“Not enough.”

He hesitated. Then, truthfully: “To protect.”

The mirror flashed white.

The door opened.

---

Velvet Nocturne wasn’t a dungeon.

It was a church.

The hallway led into a vast underground chamber carved out of stone and shadow. Candles flickered in wall sconces, their wax pooling like blood. There were no screams, no cries — just silence. Sacred and heavy.

Rooms lined the walls, each marked with symbols Elias only half-recognized ancient languages, some fae, some celestial.

In the center of the space stood a raised platform like an altar. Velvet, black as void, covered the floor. From it rose a throne.

Not ornate.

Not dramatic.

Just leather. Cold and waiting.

And then...

She entered.

Not from a doorway.

She simply was.

Talia.

The moment Elias laid eyes on her, he knew why Ronan had faltered.

She moved like gravity answered to her, clad in black that clung like a second skin. Her boots struck the floor in deliberate, commanding beats. Her hair was dark silk. Her gaze — cool, unreadable, assessing.

And worse aware.

She saw him instantly.

Not as a man.

As a wolf hiding in a crowd.

She walked past guests who knelt just from her presence. She didn’t touch them. She didn’t need to.

When she reached the platform, she sat.

Slowly. Deliberately.

Then looked at Elias and said, “You’re not here to kneel. You’re here to spy.”

His pulse kicked.

She smiled. Not cruelly. Not kindly.

Like a queen surveying an insect with curiosity.

“I don’t like liars,” she murmured, voice a blade in velvet. “But I do love the smell of guilt. It wraps around a man like a collar.”

Elias said nothing.

Couldn’t.

He felt her in his bones. Not magical not overtly but commanding. As if the Moon Goddess had poured a sliver of her divine will into this mortal and told her to break every man she touched.

“Who sent you?” she asked.

He straightened. “No one.”

Lie.

She raised a brow.

“You’re Ronan’s,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.

He flinched before he could stop himself.

Something flickered in her eyes. Understanding… and something colder.

“You shouldn’t have come, wolf.” She rose, every inch of her slow and devastating. “Your alpha tasted divinity. And once a man has knelt for the divine… nothing else will satisfy him.”

Then she stepped off the platform.

And the shadows swallowed her whole.

---

Elias stood in the quiet she left behind, chest heaving.

He wasn’t afraid.

He was warned.

And now, for the first time, he realized: maybe Ronan’s curse hadn’t found its end.

Maybe it had just found its keeper.