12

Those contorted bones were not merely the result of human actions, they were shaped by the heaviest kind of witchcraft.

I slapped him once, sharply. His eyes fluttered open, dazed, slow to focus, then they met mine. Behind the haze, I saw recognition and something worse. 

Shame.

“Prince Ravok…” His voice cracked. “They did not stop. Days… maybe weeks. We lost...”

“do not speak,” I said, gripping his shoulder, grounding him.

“There are more,” he whispered. “Further in…”

I looked around again. Silver embedded in skin. Bones twisted at unnatural angles. Fangs pulled out. Fingers crushed. I stood slowly, fists clenched at my sides. “Humans will pay for this,” I looked at Arnon again, and for the first time that night, I did not feel the weight of the crown. I felt the weight of war. “And for the rest of humanity with them.”

The war was not against witches. They were the oldest evil of the land. The war was against humans... humans who sold their souls to witches in exchange for power strong enough to stand against wolves.

I ripped open their cages one by one. Some ran, some collapsed. 

I descended into the dark. The lower chambers felt like a tomb, no light. No sound but the thudding of my heartbeat. 

I followed the scent of blood until it vanished into something worse... something sweet like rotting flowers.

Then I heard a voice. "Ravok..."

I froze, cause the final door at the end of the corridor was different. No markings, locks, silver or protective glyphs. As if whoever had built this place wanted to forget it existed.

"You feel it," the voice murmured. "You came because you couldn’t stay away."

My feet moved before I realized it, drawn toward the sealed door at the end of the corridor. The air thickened with each step, like something alive pressing against my chest.

"Humans locked me away because I was too strong for any of them to control," the voice continued intimate. "But you…" A pause. A smile spreading in the dark. "I could hear your heart, even from miles away."

My fingers hovered over the handle.

"Oh, prince of war." the voice purred. "King of vengeance, I’ve been waiting for you."

My fingers curled around the cold handle and I opened the door, but the room was empty, or so I thought.

No chains. 

No body. 

Only a cloud of dark mist hovering in the center, swirling unnaturally, pulsing like it had a heartbeat of its own. 

Two eyes snapped open in the dark, burning red like they had always known I’d come. “I watched you long before this moment,” the voice rasped,. “And now that you’ve opened the door…” A pulse of air hit my chest. “…you belong to me.”

The mist did not just touch me, it launched itself into me, ramming through my chest. I choked, the air tearing out of my lungs as if my own breath had turned to smoke. It was inside me before I could fight it, sliding past skin and bone.

I collapsed, knees smashing against the wet stone floor. 

My ribs snapped, one after another, and I could hear them breaking, feel the jagged ends grinding together as if my own body was being shattered from the inside out.

Then came the mind-shredding pressure. I screamed, a sound that scraped my throat bloody.

I tried to claw at my own skin, to rip it out of me, but my arms wouldn’t listen. They just bent and spasmed.

And then I felt the settling. Something monstrous coiled itself deep in my soul, curling into my bones like I had been hollow all along, just waiting to be filled.

Sorvane.

**

Ravok POV

Present Day

Walking into the auction was like stepping into the rotting core of everything I despised in my five hundred years of walking this earth. The room was vast, and the air was saturated with perfume, sweat, and the musky stench of wolves trying too hard to mask the animal beneath their skin. 

Conversations hummed, all of them eager to sink their teeth into tonight’s “merchandise.”

I slipped into a seat at the back, my black mask hiding every feature. No one here knew who I was: the Alpha King. 

Romeo had forced me to come, to pick up a few human slaves to “warm my bed.” I hated humans for what they did to me centuries ago, but the curse that coils inside me like barbed wire doesn’t care about hate. 

It wants. 

It feeds.

And no matter how much I try to fight it, Sorvane always wins. The demon’s voice curled in my mind. “You see them, do not you? Soft, warm…”

I clenched my jaw, ignoring him, but my gaze drifted anyway, to the front, where the humans were lined up on a raised platform. 

“Your eyes look dangerous in that mask,” a voice purred beside me.

I turned slightly, catching the faint outline of a woman, a werewolf, from her scent. She leaned in, her gown a whisper of black silk that clung to every curve. 

Her lips were blood-red, painted like she wanted someone to tear them apart. “You sit there like you own everyone in this room,” she murmured, tilting her head just enough for the perfume at her throat to slither into my senses. “Do you?”

I stared at her for a long moment.

She smiled, thinking I was playing some dangerous game. But the truth was worse. I wasn’t thinking about her. I was thinking about how easily I could take her throat in my hand and feel the life bleed out of her. 

Not because I wanted to, but because Sorvane craved it. “Take her. Break her."

Humans. Wolves. It did not matter. They were all fuel. And tonight, I would feed, because the beast inside me never lets me sleep unless I do.

The mask hid my expression, but I felt my lips twitch into something that wasn’t quite a smile. 

After the war, I was never the same. There was a sickness in me, a hunger that no blood or feast could ever quiet. It gnawed from the inside, coiling tighter each night until I thought I’d go mad.

I remember the first time I touched a woman after the bloodshed. She was young, radiant, unaware of the monster I’d become. I took her to my bed, thinking I could feel something normal again. That maybe if I buried the beast inside me under sweat, I would remember what it was like to be just a man. 

But the moment I was inside her, I felt Sorvane’s claws sinking deeper. She gasped, but it wasn’t pleasure, and her body went rigid, then limp, even as I was still moving inside her. When it was over, she was dead.

And gods help me, I felt fed. 

I stared at her lifeless body, and I did not know if I should vomit or scream, but Sorvane purred.

“Maybe it’s the curse. Maybe the moon goddess is annoyed with you,” Romeo, my Beta, had said the first time it happened.

But I did not believe him. I tried again, with a warrior she-wolf strong enough to handle me. And she died, too.

When I tried to resist, to stop feeding this... thing inside me, I learned the price. The pain came under my ribs, until I thought my heart would rip out of my chest. A punishment for denying Sorvane what he craved.

That was when I understood he wasn’t just a curse.

He was me.