Chapter 3: The Beasts

The first thing I noticed was the smell of blood already in the sand.

Not fresh. Old. Soaked so deep into the arena floor that no amount of raking could get it out. I stood there in the tunnel with the other five women, chains at our ankles now instead of rope, and I understood before anyone told me a single thing that whatever was about to happen here had happened many times before.

“This isn’t a selection ceremony,”

The burned woman whispered beside me. Her voice had lost whatever steadiness it had left.

“This is a show.”

She was right. I could hear it before I could see it a roar of sound above us, thousands of voices, layered together into something that didn’t sound human at all. When the gate finally ground open and they pushed us out into the light, I understood why.

The arena was enormous. Stone rings climbed higher than any building I’d ever seen in Elaria, and every single row was full. Werewolves, thousands of them, packed shoulder to shoulder, some already on their feet, some banging fists against the railings, all of them looking down at us like we were the finest entertainment they’d seen in months.

Because we were.

I felt something in my chest curl up and go very small. This wasn’t a line of women being inspected and chosen. This was a crowd waiting for a performance, and we were the performers, whether we understood the rules or not.

“Where’s the prince?”

Someone asked, and I found myself scanning the platform above the arena floor without meaning to a raised dais draped in black and silver, empty chairs, one seat set slightly apart from the rest, occupied by a man I couldn’t make out clearly from this distance. Dark hair. Still as stone. Watching.

I didn’t have time to look longer than that.

The horn sounded, and the far gates tore open.

I don’t know what I expected. Guards, maybe. Some kind of ceremony, however cruel. I didn’t expect the sound that came first a low, guttural snarl, echoing off stone, followed by the crowd’s roar climbing even higher, hungrier now, like they knew exactly what was coming and couldn’t wait for it.

Beasts. Not werewolves. Something else, something wilder, hunched and starving-looking, eyes flat and black, teeth already bared as they poured into the arena.

Screaming started immediately. Real screaming, not the crowd’s the women around me, scattering in every direction across the sand, and I ran too, because every part of my body told me to run, because staying still was death and running was the only thing that felt like a choice.

I didn’t get far.

I heard the fall before I understood what it meant a cry, sharp and close, and I turned without thinking and saw the youngest girl from the wagon on the ground, her ankle twisted beneath her, one of the beasts already turning toward her with its head low and its shoulders coiled.

“Please!”

Her voice cracked apart.

“Help me!”

I could have kept running. I want to be honest about that, because I’ve thought about that moment more times than I can count since, and the truth is uglier than any story would want it to be. For one full second, my legs were already carrying me the other way. Survival is a very loud voice. It doesn’t care about anyone but you.

But I stopped.

I don’t know why. Maybe because I’d spent three years watching someone I loved die by inches while I stood by feeling powerless to do anything at all, and I couldn’t stand there and watch it happen to someone else too. Maybe I just didn’t think fast enough to be the coward my body wanted me to be.

I turned around.

I grabbed a shard of broken chain off the sand I don’t even remember deciding to pick it up and I threw myself between the girl and the beast just as it lunged.

It hit me like a wall of muscle and heat, and pain exploded across my shoulder where its claws caught me, but I didn’t let go of the chain. I swung it, screaming, more from terror than any plan, and it caught the creature across the side of its face hard enough to make it recoil.

I had no power. No claws, no strength beyond what fear and desperation could squeeze out of an ordinary human body. I knew, somewhere underneath the panic, that this wasn’t a fight I could win. I fought anyway.

The beast gathered itself again, lower this time, angrier, and I understood with total clarity that the next attack was going to be the last thing I ever felt.

Above the arena, everything had gone quiet.

I didn’t know that then. I couldn’t have known it I was on the ground, blood running warm down my arm, staring at a monster about to kill me. But later, when people described that moment to me, they all said the same thing: the crowd had gone silent all at once, like something had reached inside every throat in that arena and closed it shut.

Because Lucas had moved.

He didn’t walk to the platform’s edge. He didn’t call for guards. One moment he was seated, unreadable, watching the way he watched everything, and the next, something tore loose inside him, some final thread of control snapping clean through, and Ragnar took the rest.

I heard it before I saw it. A sound that didn’t belong to any human throat, low and splitting the air, and then he was over the railing, already changing as he fell, bones and shadow rearranging themselves midair into something huge and dark and impossibly fast.

The beast in front of me never saw it coming.

One instant it was crouched to kill me. The next, something enormous slammed into it from the side with a force that threw sand and blood twenty feet in every direction, and the creature that had been about to end my life simply stopped existing.

I lay there, gasping, my ears ringing, and looked up at what had saved me.

He was massive. Black fur, streaked through with something that caught the torchlight like silver. His shoulders alone were wider than I was tall. He stood over me with his head low, every muscle coiled, still snarling toward the retreating beasts like he wanted an excuse to tear apart something else.

I was afraid.

But I couldn’t look away from him, this thing that had come out of nowhere and destroyed a monster in half a second, this creature every story I’d ever heard called a nightmare given teeth.

Slowly too slowly, like he was fighting something inside himself the wolf turned his head and looked down at me.

His eyes weren’t black, like the beasts’. They were gold. Burning, focused, locked onto my face with an intensity that made my heart stop dead in my chest.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t have moved if I’d tried.

Something passed behind those eyes. Recognition. Hunger. Something I had no name for and no defense against.

And somewhere inside that enormous, terrifying creature, a voice that wasn’t a voice at all, older than language, said the only word that mattered.

Mate.