THE LAST BREEDER, CLAIMED BY FOUR

EDAL

The smell of burned flesh always came first, Smoke and charred skin. It filled my nose, my throat, my lungs. I couldn't breathe or scream.

I was nine years old again, hiding under the kitchen table, watching my mother's body break itself apart.

Her spine curved backward first with a loud, wet crack that echoed off the walls. Then her fingers stretched into claws, nails blackening and curving into hooks. Hair sprouted from her arms, her face, her neck … dark and thick and wrong, covering the woman who used to braid my hair.

“Mom?” I whispered.

Her head snapped toward me. Her eyes … those warm brown eyes that read me bedtime stories … were gone. Replaced by bloodshot, hungry, feral orbs that locked onto me like I was the only thing in the world worth eating.

Her mouth opened wider than a human mouth should open. Her jaw unhinged. Her teeth … those perfect white teeth she brushed every night … grew into needles, into fangs, dripping with saliva.

“Run, baby. Don't let me—”

Her voice cut off. Whatever was left of her died in that moment. She lunged forward at me

I woke up screaming.

“Edal. Edal, look at me.” Rylan's hand was on my face, rough and calloused, pulling my gaze away from the darkness.

“You were screaming again.”

“She was going to eat me.” My voice came out shredded, raw, barely human.

“Her teeth were right there, Rylan. Right at my fucking throat. I could feel her breath on my neck. I could smell her … she smelled like burning meat, like the world ending, like—”

“She didn't.” His thumb wiped sweat from my temple. Then tears. I didn't realize I was crying.

“She didn't, Edal. You're here. You're in our room. You're with me.”

I hated how much I needed to hear that. I hated how my body stopped shaking the second his arms wrapped around me, pulling me flat against his bare chest, his heartbeat steady and warm against my cheek.

It’s been Two years since he found me.

Fifteen years ago, the solar flares fried the world. One afternoon, the sky turned orange, every screen went black, and people started screaming.

Then the screaming turned into howling. The radiation woke up a dormant gene … the LYCAN-1 gene … in half the population. Turned them into werewolves during rage or fear. Half the people you knew became monsters overnight.

My mother was one of them.

The war between humans and wolves lasted thirteen years. It ended two years ago, but peace was just a nicer word for surrender.

Wolves needed human women to carry their young … wolf-wolf pregnancies always died. So humans were reduced to three categories: breeders kept in camps, chained to beds, forced to spread their legs, collaborators free but second-class, trading loyalty for food and protection, or resistance fighters militias that killed wolves whenever they could.

I was nineteen when a wolf raiding party killed everyone I knew. My settlement burned. My friends died screaming. I hid in a ditch for three days, eating mud, waiting to die.

Rylan found me.

He was an Alpha … leader of a pack of a hundred wolves. Most Alphas would have thrown me into a breeding camp, chained me to a bed, used me until my body gave out. That's what Alphas did. That's what the world had become.

But Rylan looked at me I was dirty, starving, half-dead and something in his grey eyes softened.

“You're coming with me,” he said.

He gave me a room with a lock. Warm blankets. Hot food every night. He never touched me without asking.

He taught me to read maps, to shoot a crossbow, to track deer through the ruins of the old world. He held me after nightmares … because he had them too, because his father had turned feral during the Burning, slaughtered an entire human settlement while trapped inside his own body, screaming for someone to kill him.

Rylan carried the same curse. Sometimes he blacked out. Woke up with blood on his hands. Wolves under his command were found dead.

He never hurt me…I fell in love with him anyway.

“You're thinking too loud,” he murmured against my hair.

“You're breathing too loud.”

His hand slid down my back, under my shirt, his palm flat against my spine.

“Let me distract you.”

“From the nightmare or from the fact that you won't tell me what's in that fucking chest?”

He didn't answer. He never answered. He just kissed my neck … slowly… his teeth grazing my pulse point.

His other hand slid between my thighs, palm flat against my heat, and I hated how my body responded instantly.

How I arched into his touch like a starving woman being offered bread.

“You're wet,” he said. Stroking his finger against my clit.

“You haven't fucked me in two weeks Rylan… Of course I'm wet. Now shut up and fuck Me”