CHAPTER 2.

Ravenna’s POV.

I woke up knowing, before I opened my eyes, that wherever I was, I had not been brought there kindly.

My arms ached first. A deep pulling ache from my shoulders down to my wrists, and when I tried to move, nothing responded correctly. My hands were bound above me, rope cutting into my skin, my weight suspended from something fixed overhead. The position had my shoulders pulled tight, the strain building the longer I was aware of it.

I opened my eyes.

The room was dim, lit by a single bulb that cast more shadow than light. Cold stone walls. A bare floor. And men, four of them, spread around the room with the unhurried posture of people who had been waiting and didn’t mind the wait.

None of them were pack.

The same wrong quality from the woods. The same unfamiliar scent.

Rogues.

“You’re awake,” one of them said, stepping closer. He looked at me in a way that made me want to put more distance between us. “Good. We were starting to get bored.”

“Let me go,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. “I haven’t done anything to you. I don’t know why I’m here.”

He smiled like the statement amused him. “Lucas Blackthorn paid for you. Said he needed you gone.”

I held very still with the name for a moment.

Lucas.

Not an accident. Not random rogues looking for easy prey in the woods. He had arranged this. Had paid for it in advance. The same week he proposed to me, maybe the same day, maybe the night before while I was still lying awake with his ring on my finger believing everything he had said.

“You’re lying,” I said.

“He paid us days ago,” another said from the far wall, arms crossed, voice bored. “Told us to wait for the right moment.”

I looked up at the rope. Tested it. It didn’t move.

“I can pay you more than he did,” I said. “Let me go and I’ll get you more than whatever he offered.”

None of them moved toward the door.

The first one came closer, holding a silver goblet. The liquid inside caught the faint light and I turned my face away, pressing my lips together, but two hands gripped my jaw from behind and forced my head back. I clenched my teeth. Most of it went down anyway, thick and bitter, coating my throat before I could stop it.

I coughed. Pulled against the rope. Neither helped.

“What was that?”

“Something to make you easier to manage,” he said, stepping back.

I kept my breathing even. Focused on the rope above me and the angles of the room, looking for anything I could use. The door. The distance between each man. Whether any of them had their back to me.

Then it started.

Not pain. Something worse.

A warmth that began in my chest and spread outward in a slow, deliberate wave that had nothing to do with temperature. My heartbeat shifted. My thoughts started losing their edges. I knew what this was. I had heard it whispered among older women in the pack. Compounds meant to override the body’s own signals. Used because a person stripped of their own instincts was easier to control.

Knowing what it was didn’t help me stop it.

“No,” I said, more to myself than the room. I pulled against the rope and used the pain of it as an anchor, focusing on the burn at my wrists, trying to stay inside my own head. “No.”

The heat kept building.

“She’s reacting,” someone said.

I shut my eyes.

The door opened.

Not a knock. Not a voice. The door simply opened with a force that made everything in the room rearrange itself around the fact of it. I felt the change before I saw him, the shift in attention among the men around me, the way bodies stiffened.

A figure filled the doorway.

Tall. Still. Not rushing.

“Who are you?” one of the rogues barked, already moving.

He didn’t answer.

What followed was brief and entirely one-sided. He moved through them with the kind of efficiency that came not from anger but from competence, like this was a calculation he had already completed before he walked in. One after another, no wasted motion. The sounds blurred together and then the room went quiet.

He turned toward me.

I couldn’t make my thoughts form a complete sentence. The drug was still moving through my system and his scent reached me before he did, clean, like rain, like deep forest, something old and steady underneath it, and it wrapped around me in a way that cut through the heat better than pain had.

He cut me down.

The moment the rope released, my legs gave out. He caught me, one arm around my back, and I didn’t think. I just held on, my fingers closing around his shirt, pressing closer to the thing that smelled like something steady when everything else was spinning.

“You’re safe,” he said. Low. Even.

He tried to pull back.

I tightened my grip. “Please,” I said, the word breaking apart in my throat. “Please don’t go. I can’t stop it. I don’t know how to make it stop.”

His body went completely still.

I felt him hold himself in place through what felt like deliberate effort, a physical act of resistance, and I understood somewhere beneath the drug and the fear that I was asking something of him that he was trying very hard not to give.

“You don’t know what you’re asking,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I still can’t stop it.”

A silence stretched between us.

Then his arms came around me, firmer. Whatever he had been holding back gave way not all at once but like something he could no longer keep in place, and the cold and the fear and the rope burns on my wrists all pulled back beneath the weight of him being there.

The last thing I heard before everything slipped was his voice, low and rough, pressed close against my ear.

“You’re going to hate me for this.”

And then the dark.