King of Scars

Maya’s POV

The roar of the enormous black wolf sent the snow piled on top of the pine trees crashing down all at once, covering us in a white curtain. I remained pressed against the tree trunk, my breath caught in my throat and my eyes fixed on the scene before me. In less than two seconds, the massive beast pinned Hunter’s tracker to the frozen ground. A sickening, dry crack of breaking bones echoed through the clearing, followed by an agonized groan. The other two Silver Moon wolves didn’t wait to suffer the same fate. They let out shrieks of pure terror, tucked their tails between their legs, and vanished at full speed into the heart of the blizzard, abandoning their leader to a certain death.

The black wolf didn’t chase them. He exhaled a cloud of hot vapor from his bloodstained muzzle and slowly turned his gigantic head toward me. His eyes were storm gray, so intense and sharp that I felt as though they were stripping my soul bare in the middle of the forest.

The beast began walking toward me. With each slow, heavy step, his massive body stretched and shifted, bones cracking as the dark fur shrank away until he returned to his human form. Before me stood a massive man with incredibly broad shoulders and taut muscles that looked as though they had been carved from black stone. His bare chest, exposed to the storm as though the cold meant nothing to him, was covered in deep claw scars that spoke of a hundred battles fought to the death. His dark hair was tousled by the wind, and his square jaw was set with relentless hostility.

He was Supreme Alpha Lawrence. The Lycan King of Blood Moon. A monster the midwives used to tell us about to frighten us when we were little girls.

“Don’t move,” he ordered, his deep, rough, overwhelmingly dominant voice vibrating through the air with such mystical force that my curvy body trembled completely.

Lawrence stopped about a meter in front of me. His size was intimidating; I barely reached his chest. He stretched out one enormous hand, roughened by steel, and grabbed my chin roughly, forcing me to lift my head and look him straight in the eyes. His fingers burned like fire against my frozen skin, sending a strange electric jolt racing straight down my spine. His grip hurt, but I refused to lower my gaze.

He leaned closer, bringing his face near mine. His nose brushed the line of my jaw as he inhaled deeply, scenting me. I could smell the commanding scent of his skin: a thick mixture of pine, bitter tobacco, and the fresh blood of the tracker he had just killed. His inner wolf let out a low growl, a sound of primitive possessiveness that echoed inside my own chest, but Lawrence frowned sharply and shoved my face away, as though he blamed himself for enjoying the scent of my mystical vanilla.

“You smell like Silver Moon’s garbage,” he hissed, looking me up and down with a distrust that made the hairs on my arms stand on end. “Your thighs are covered in mud, and your clothes are soaked with their filthy water. What is a border she-wolf doing wandering through my sacred lands in the middle of a snowstorm? Speak.”

I tried to take a step forward, but the accumulated exhaustion, the brutal cold that had left my fingers numb, and the pain from Hunter’s broken bond all caught up with me at once. My sturdy legs gave out beneath me. I staggered forward, completely losing my balance.

I expected to slam into the frozen ground, but Lawrence’s massive arms reacted on pure instinct. He caught me before I fell, pulling my curvy body against his bare, sweat-slick chest. The contrast between his brutal warmth and my frozen skin drew a muffled gasp from my lips. My hands, weakened by hypothermia, rested against his broad, scarred shoulders, and for one second, the world seemed to stop in the middle of the blizzard. I could hear the powerful, racing heartbeat of his Lycan heart against my ear.

“Let me go…” I managed to mumble, my voice broken by the fever that was beginning to consume me, forcing my pride to remain standing. “I’m not a spy… The Alpha of Silver Moon rejected me… I left.”

Lawrence stared at me, his gray eyes shining with a haze of doubt and a strange possessive intensity as he assessed the weight of my hips and the softness of my body in his arms. But the King of Blood Moon was not a man who allowed himself to be ruled by compassion. To him, a stranger on his border was an immediate threat.

“I’ll decide that myself at my palace, woman,” he declared coldly.

Without the slightest effort, he lifted me into his arms in a bridal carry against his Herculean chest. He strode through the deep snow toward the edge of the main road, where three military carriages made of black stone, escorted by armed warriors, waited for us in silence.

Lawrence approached the rearmost carriage, the one used to transport prisoners of war. He pulled open the heavy iron door with a dull screech and roughly placed me on the cold wooden bench, paying no attention to my weakened condition.

“Stay here and don’t try anything foolish if you value your life,” he warned, turning his back to me as he prepared to shut the door.

I pushed myself upright as best I could, clutching my mother’s silver medallion tightly against my chest, and fixed him with a gaze filled with unbroken human dignity.

“I’d rather freeze to death in your cell, Lycan King, than return to the pack that humiliated me,” I shouted with the little strength I had left.

Lawrence stopped dead in his tracks. He slowly turned around, looking at me through the iron bars with a dark, unreadable expression, then slammed the door shut, locking me inside the dim military carriage as the wheels began rolling toward the heart of the Blood Moon Empire.