Fated To Ruin You

A sound tore through the night. An aggravating mixture of a howl and a scream sent a ripple of unease everyone that was gathered. The iron-heavy scent of blood was thick in the air, and very suffocating. And the clinic, which was usually a place of relative calm, was now a battlefield of its own.My hands were slick with blood as I pressed down on a gaping wound of an injured wolf as he wailed and trembled against the pain. The heat from the injured wolf beneath my hands was a stark contrast to the cold terror that coiled in my chest.Around me, chaos reigned. Wolves in their human forms and some in their beast forms filled every available space of the clinic, groans and snarls mixing with the sharp barks of healers shouting orders. The scent of antiseptics battled with the raw, primal stench of war.And we were at war. The Crescent Moon pack had finally made their move and they had caught us really off-guard.My heart pounded against my ribs, but it was not just from the overwhelming

I couldn’t breathe as the thick air was suffocating and pressing against my lungs. I was thrust right back into my nightmare and the entire world before me capsized.Right there in front of me was a burning man whose scent of scorched flesh clung to the back of my throat like hot acid.No. No, this isn’t real.His charred lips parted and my name slipped from between them like smoke, blowing over my face and snuffing out every bit of oxygen left. I gagged and shoved myself backward as my hands instinctively clawed at the floor as if I could scrape my way out of this nightmare. “Get away from me!” I screamed at the top of my voice even as it cracked under the weight of sheer terror. Sweat dripped down my forehead. “Please, please get away from me.”But rather than listen to my plea, Kael’s burning figure moved towards me, slowly in a deliberate taunting manner. I let out a piercing shriek as I curled in on myself, shaking violently. Around me, shrieking shouts, clattering of plates,

“Ashina!”The voice struck through my skull like lightning. I jerked back from Maya, with my heart slamming into my ribs as if trying to break free from my chest. My breath caught halfway at the aggression behind the growling at the door.Nothing about whoever was there meant something good.I didn’t even want to think about who it could possibly be, not when Maya slumped sideways with a groan, her eyelids fluttering. She was barely conscious now, and her body was twitching as if every nerve inside her had gone rogue.“What the hell…” I whispered, taking a shaky step back as my heart beat spiked up.Maya’s face twisted, contorting with pain. Her goody, drunken smile from earlier vanished and was replaced with something painful and almost terrified. Her brows pinched, and she clutched her stomach like it was tearing her apart from the inside out.“Maya?” I rasped, clenching and unclenching my fists as panic bubbled to the surface. The familiar urge to fix things, to make it stop, rose

I stared at the screen again. Once. Twice.The data hadn’t changed.No matter how many times I reran the test, recalibrated the analyzer, manually combed through the gene mapping—hell, even cross-referenced known infection progressions with outdated rogue strain databases—everything came back the same.Maya’s blood was wrong.Nothing made sense.Her genetic markers weren’t just mutated… they were foreign. Aggressively, violently foreign. This wasn’t any strain of werewolf I had ever documented. Her cells were rewriting themselves in real-time, tearing apart what she was, trying to rebuild her into something else.Something I didn’t understand.Tears stung my eyes. I blinked them away, but they clung stubbornly to my lashes. I couldn't afford to break now. Not when she was counting on me.I dug my fingers into my hair again and yanked at the ends, a sharp reminder to breathe. Thin

A low growl vibrated against the walls, rattling through the air like thunder before the storm, stealing my breath away.Maya’s skin was slick with sweat and her muscles flexed against the heavy restraints as if strained against them. Veins bulged at her neck and her jaw was so tight, it looked like it might crack from the pressure.I approached slowly, grabbing the last prepared vial of the sedate I had, in my trembling grip."Easy," I whispered, more to myself than to her.She snapped her head up instantly, and I froze, nearly tripping over myself.“Don’t,” she snarled, her voice rough like gravel. Her lips peeled back over clenched teeth and her eyes with the amber streaks now a constant present glowered at me. “Don’t come near me Ash, something’s wrong. I will hurt you.”I swallowed hard, trying to control my breathing in a way that would not destabilize her.“I know,” I murmured, inching forward calmly. “I just want to help, so you don’t hurt yourself or anyone else.”“I don’t ca