10. The Primal Rise

I watched, frozen in a cocktail of terror and awe, as the man I had married began to come apart.

    The transformation wasn’t the fluid, graceful shift I had seen in the bedroom. This was a violent, bone-snapping reconstruction of a soul. Girard’s spine arched so far back I heard the vertebrae pop like gunfire. His skin darkened, his muscles swelling with an unnatural, silver-flecked power that tore his clothes into rags.

    The sound that left his throat wasn’t a growl. It was a roar that carried the weight of a thousand years of ancestral rage.

    “Girard?” I whispered, though I knew he couldn’t hear me.

    The thing standing in the center of the tower was no longer my husband. It was the Apex. A mountain of black fur and serrated bone, standing nearly eight feet tall. Its eyes were not amber or gold; they were voids of pure, electrical white. The air around him smelled of ozone and ancient earth.

    The heavy oak door finally gave way with a splintering crash. My father’s men rushed in, their silver-tipped rifles raised, their faces masked in tactical gear. They had come prepared for a wolf. They were not prepared for a god of carnage.

    The Apex didn’t move; he simply happened.

    One moment the mercenaries were there, and the next, they were being tossed against the stone walls like ragdolls. The Apex moved with a speed that defied physics—a blur of shadow that left a trail of crimson in its wake. He didn’t use claws alone; he used the very stone of the tower, the sheer force of his presence shattering their bones before he even touched them.

    I huddled against the far wall, my hands over my ears as the room was painted red. Through our link, I didn’t feel Girard anymore. I felt a vast, cold wilderness. A hunger so deep it threatened to swallow me whole.

    Then, Marcel Monet stepped through the ruins of the door.

    He looked at the beast, his eyes wide with a mixture of terror and scientific greed. “Incredible,” he whispered, even as his hand shook while reaching for a high-tech sonic disruptor. “The biological potential… it’s limitless.”

    The Apex turned. He sensed the source of the Monet bloodline—the blood that ran through my father, and through me. He let out a roar that shattered the glass of the high windows, the sound waves hitting me like a physical blow.

    He prowled toward Marcel, his claws clicking on the bloody floor. Marcel tried to activate the disruptor, but with one swipe, the Apex crushed the device into scrap metal. The beast leaned down, his snout inches from my father’s face, a low, terrifying rumble vibrating through the entire tower.

    “Wait!” I screamed, finding my voice.

    The Apex paused. He didn’t turn his head, but his ears twitched toward me.

    “Don’t kill him,” I said, stepping into the light, my heart hammering. “He wants to see what a monster looks like? Let him live in the cage he built for you. Let him see his empire fall from behind bars.”

    The beast let out a huffing sound, a strange, distorted echo of Girard’s laughter. He gripped Marcel by the throat and, with a casual flick of his wrist, threw him into one of the silver-flecked cages at the back of the room. The iron bars groaned as the Apex twisted them shut, sealing Marcel Monet inside his own greed.

    Then, the Apex turned toward me.

    He moved toward me, slow and deliberate. I felt the heat radiating off him, the sheer, primal power that could crush my skull with a single thought. He backed me against the stone wall, his massive form blocking out the world.

    He leaned down, his snout brushing the crook of my neck. I closed my eyes, waiting for the bite. Instead, I felt a rough, sandpaper tongue lick the mark on my neck—the mark Girard had left.

    A wave of intense, soul-deep exhaustion hit the link. The Apex groaned, his body beginning to shrink and contort. The fur receded, the bones snapped back, and within seconds, Girard lay naked and unconscious at my feet, his skin as cold as ice.

    I collapsed beside him, pulling his head into my lap. I looked at my father, who was screaming and cursing behind the bars, and then at the broken man in my arms.

    But as the first haunting howls of the pack echoed from the cliffs outside, I realized they weren’t howling for their Alpha. They were howling for blood. And they were coming for the woman they blamed for his fall.