Semua Bab I Stole His Mark: Bab 1 - Bab 10

My world began and ended in stone.The servant quarters were carved into the cliffside beneath the Hollow—a maze of narrow passages lit by oil lamps and smelling of damp linen and cooked roots. I slept on a cot barely wide enough for my hips, bathed in cold water from the shared basin, and spent my days cleaning blood that wasn’t mine from floors that weren’t sacred to me.We rose before the sun. Always.I woke to the sound of buckets scraping and feet shuffling. No one spoke much. Most of us were half-bloods, some too old to shift, others never able to. We didn’t ask questions. We didn’t linger.Mistress Tessa’s voice cut through the dim hallway. "Get the stones ready. The priestesses want everything purified again."I didn’t need reminding.The scent of blood had soaked into my hands. No matter how hard I scrubbed, it was still there—beneath my nails, in the cracks of my palms. The Luna Trials had turned the sacred arena into a battlefield, and it was our job to erase the evidence.

I didn’t speak of what I saw in the forest.Not to Elara, not to the other girls in the washroom who gossiped about whose blood stained the arena next, and certainly not to Mistress Tessa, who would’ve slapped the visions from my mouth. Some things, once spoken aloud, become too real. Too dangerous.So I buried the memory beneath soap suds and silence.But the burn on my palm wouldn’t fade.Every night, I rubbed at it beneath the covers, tracing the shape of her fingers where they’d seared into me. The pain was gone—but something had taken root beneath the skin. A hum. A pull. A secret I hadn’t been ready to carry.And with it came the dreams.Hot, fevered things that tangled my limbs in the sheets and left me gasping into the dark. Always him—the Alpha. His hands rough on my hips, his mouth against my throat, his voice like thunder in my ear whispering things I wasn’t supposed to want. I woke each time with aching thighs and the shameful heat of longing.I didn’t understand why. I ba

The night he said my name in the woods, I didn’t sleep.Not because I was afraid. Not even because I was burning with confusion.Because he followed me into my dreams.This time, it wasn’t me reaching for him.It was him.He stood in the shadows of my mind, half-formed by moonlight, his voice low and rough like gravel. "Why do you keep coming here?" he asked, as if I were the one invading his sleep.I wanted to answer. My lips parted. But the words never came. He stepped closer. His scent wrapped around me—pine and smoke and something dark and ancient.He reached for me.And I woke, trembling, drenched in sweat, his voice still echoing in my head.Why do you keep coming here?But it wasn’t me chasing the dreams anymore.It was him.When morning came, I still felt the imprint of his voice inside me. I moved like someone haunted, my limbs heavy with sleeplessness, my skin tingling with the echo of a touch that had never happened. The air felt too sharp. My clothes too tight. Everything

Caelan sat alone in the war room, the last of the torches guttering against stone walls etched in ancient command. The flames danced low, casting long shadows across maps marked with bloodlines, borders, and battles. Plans for the Hollow's future were laid out before him, but they may as well have been blank parchment.Because he couldn’t see past her.Not past the servant girl who’d crawled beneath his skin like a fever. Not past the dreams that left him waking in sweat and silence. Not past the pull that made every moment without her feel like pressure building beneath his ribs.They saw her.Every time he blinked, he saw Ilia’s face tilted up to his. The scent of her still clung to his skin, wild and warm, like something that didn’t belong in the Hollow—and maybe never had.His hands flexed on the table.She wasn’t just in his dreams anymore. She was under his skin."You’re brooding again."The voice came from the door. Caelan didn’t look up.Derrin, his Beta. His closest friend. H

The cellar air still clung to my skin like a warning long after I’d left Derrin behind. His footsteps never followed, and yet I swore I could still hear them—echoing down my spine.I didn’t return to the kitchen. Couldn’t. I wandered instead, the basket of herbs forgotten on some shadowed stairwell step, my hands too shaky to carry anything at all.By the time I reached the servants’ wing, the sun had already begun to set, bleeding gold and scarlet through the narrow windows high above. I slipped into the small alcove that served as my quarters—a tucked-away corner of the laundry storeroom with a thin blanket, a straw-filled pillow, and not much else.I pressed my palms to my eyes and exhaled.What was that?The tune. Derrin’s face. The hunger in it.And then—the void. Like something had taken him, used him, and dropped him empty.My skin still burned with the memory of how close he’d gotten.But more than that...It wasn’t Derrin I feared.It was myself.Because deep in the marrow of