CHAPTER 1: The First Wolf Walks Among Stone

Oxford had been on my list for some time, after Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, and London, not to mention the brief Atlantic detour to Harvard and Yale. Each university promised something new, yet they all collapsed into the same shape in the end. Stone walls, clever mouths, sharp ambition dressed up as brilliance. Centuries passed. The pattern did not change.

What else was there to do when a body remained fixed between twenty and twenty-five, and four hundred years stretched too wide for any honest profession? No one entrusted real authority to a woman who looked scarcely out of girlhood. Respect curdled into condescension. Responsibility evaporated into polite dismissal. Lecture halls and meaningless jobs became my refuge, places where age was measured in footnotes and citations rather than faces.

The curse had seen to that.

In the seventeenth century, when they dragged me before the firelight, they called me an abomination. What they never said aloud was why they were truly afraid.

I was a wolf then. Not feral, not savage, but old, powerful, bound to the Moon long before packs learned to bare their teeth at one another. Others had killed witches. Not mine. Not with my blessing. I had condemned it. I had tried to stop it. When the covens demanded justice, I stepped forward alone and offered myself in exchange. Responsibility is a heavy thing when you are born to lead.

They took my surrender and spat on it.

They said the blood on the earth was mine to answer for. That power, unchecked, must be punished. So they did not stop at me. They slaughtered my pack in the dark, one by one, while I was held helpless under their spells, forced to listen as bonds snapped and voices vanished from my mind. Revenge dressed up as balance. Cowardice masked as justice.

Then they turned back to me. They twisted what I was. Bound my wolf into silence. Cursed my body to endure when all others would fade.

Lust became my chain, immortality my cage.

I was left to walk through centuries alone, surrounded by obsession, without a pack, without protection, without anyone to stand between me and the hunger I inspired.

They called it punishment. I called it survival.

And what a body it was. Cursed or blessed, the distinction had long since blurred. I was not blind to it. The weight of my breasts, the curve of my waist, the shape of my arse—men stared, women stared. I knew precisely why. My mouth betrayed me most of all, lips too full, too soft, as though fashioned for begging or being bitten, claimed.

For years I had tried to hide it. Loose clothes that fell like shadows over my frame. Long hair draped across my shoulders, half-covering my face. Spectacles perched carefully, no trace of make-up to draw attention. I became someone dull in appearance, an exercise in invisibility. And yet it was never enough. The curse did not care for fabrics or angles or muted tones. It was the scent I could not mask, the pull of my presence even when I tried to vanish, the way the air seemed to shift around me, subtle but undeniable. I could hide my body, obscure my face, soften my gaze, but I could not hide what I was.

Sometimes the mirror startled me. I looked like a story torn from the pages of a fable that should never have survived its own ending. I loathed it. Loathed how my very existence pulled at others without consent or mercy. I had never learned seduction. I had never needed to. My body spoke fluently without my permission. Still, I endured. Because what else was there?

Oxford was meant to be a distraction. Another sharpening of the mind. Another attempt to convince myself I was more than a body shaped by punishment and myth. I wore the mask of the aloof, clever student among mortals who could not possibly guess how little their lives brushed against the truth of mine.

That was when Julian Grantham became unavoidable.

He had been a presence even before this year. Careless smile. Startling blue eyes. The sort of beauty that made girls stupid and boys deferential. Cricket champion. Golden boy. Oxford suited him far too well. At first, it was harmless. Vanity wrapped in charm, arrogance cushioned by youth.

Then something shifted.

Whispers followed him down corridors. Complaints surfaced, some formal, others buried under shame. Laughter died when he approached. His humour sharpened into something barbed. He mocked, dismissed, sneered. Always smiling. Always pretending it was only a joke. He needed them small.

And of course, he noticed me.

I knew why, even as I pretended otherwise. It was not only that I never flinched, or that I met his gaze when others looked away. It was that he wanted me, and he hated that I would not play along. He masked it with provocation, with biting remarks and that infuriating smirk that never reached his eyes. But I saw it clearly. Hunger, twisted into challenge.

The more I ignored him, the worse he became. His attention sharpened, his blue eyes tracking me with infuriating persistence. He wanted a reaction. He wanted proof that I could be rattled. I gave him rejection instead, clean and unyielding, again and again. It only fed him.

The only time I had seen him soften was when he was anchored to a girlfriend, a year ago. Then he steadied. His arrogance dulled, as if borrowed restraint had been lent to him. When she left, humiliated him, something fractured. Since then, his beauty had curdled, swagger hardening into cruelty.

I had known men like him across centuries. Different clothes. Diffrent times. Same rot. Insecurity masked as dominance. Power used as camouflage for fear. The pattern was tedious in its predictability.

Julian Grantham did not frighten me. Nothing did, not anymore. But arrogance of his kind had a way of becoming dangerous when it sensed resistance. And something older than reason stirred faintly beneath my skin, restless in a way it had not been for far too long.

Oxford had never been neutral ground.

Neither had I.

Even as I walked the stone corridors, keeping my eyes carefully lowered, a faint current ran beneath my skin, subtle but insistent. The air thickened around me, scent sharpening, instincts flickering like coals in the dark. My pulse measured not just a human heartbeat, but something older, something vast, aware, waiting. The moon brushed at the edges of my consciousness, a whispering presence I could never silence. For a moment, the wolf I had buried for centuries lifted her head, alert, patient, curious. No one could see it. No one could feel it—but she was always there, beneath the quiet, beneath the restraint, and she was watching.