Chapter 2

My father used to say that waiting for the right mate wasn't sacrifice.

It was respect.

I grew up believing that with a conviction that bordered on religious. And I paid a price I didn't fully understand until it was too late to turn back.

My name is Dagon Drakhar. I am the Alpha of the Heart of Fire Pack, the oldest purebred Lycan lineage still alive on the continent. Our territory sits in the northern mountains, far from cities, far from humans, far from anything that doesn't belong to our world.

I am forty years old, six foot nine, with red hair my grandmother used to say was the mark of the most ancient Lycans, and pale gray eyes that turn almost white when the Lycan inside me rises close to the surface.

And until recently, I was a virgin.

Not for lack of opportunity. Any Alpha in my position received offers from the age of twenty. Females from other packs, human women who didn't know what I was but sensed something different about me, Lycans who wanted political alliances dressed up as desire. I turned them all down. Not with cruelty, but with a clarity that sometimes frightened more than cruelty would have.

It's not you.

Simple as that.

My father, Aldric Drakhar, was the most feared Alpha this pack had ever seen. Enormous, red-haired like me, with a presence that made wolves from other packs cross to the other side of the road. But with my mother, Seraphine, he was a completely different man.

Seraphine was human. Small, brunette, with an easy laugh and hands that smelled of the herbs from the garden she tended behind the house. She had no magic, no claws, none of what our kind typically valued in a partner. And my father loved her with an intensity I could only describe as absolute.

He never touched another woman.

Never wanted to.

Never needed to.

I was about twelve when I asked why he turned down every female who showed up at pack meetings. He looked at me for a moment as if deciding how to explain something to a child who didn't yet have the vocabulary to understand.

"When you find your mate," he said, "you'll understand that waiting isn't sacrifice. It's the only path that makes sense."

I held on to that.

My Beta, Lizandra, is the most loyal person I know and also the most practical. She tried a few times to convince me I was being irrational, that the pack needed an heir, that waiting for a destined mate was a beautiful idea in theory but irresponsible in practice.

"You don't need to fall in love, Dagon," she said once, wearing that expression of someone being very reasonable. "You just need continuity."

"The pack has continuity," I answered. "It has you, it has the warriors, it has the families. It doesn't need my child with a woman who isn't my mate."

She gave up after the third attempt.

I learned to ignore the comments from other Alphas at gatherings. The giant who won't touch anyone. I let them talk. I knew what I was waiting for.

The problem was that fate didn't warn me the wait would exact a different kind of price.

My mother died when I was twenty-two.

A witch killed her.

To this day I don't know the witch's name. I don't know if it was a contract hit ordered by some enemy or something personal I never uncovered. I know that my mother went to the market in the nearest town on an ordinary Tuesday morning and didn't come back.

We found her on the side of the road.

The spell was of lunar origin. It left characteristic marks — an internal burn that consumed from the inside out without leaving any external sign. She looked like she was sleeping.

My father got there before me.

I will never forget the sound he made when he saw her.

It wasn't crying. It was something that came from a place before crying, a place that has no human name and that I hope I never hear again in my life.

Aldric Drakhar survived his mate's death for eleven months. He continued carrying out his duties as Alpha because that was who he was, because the pack needed him and he knew it. But he faded slowly. Like a candle in a constant wind that nobody could shield.

The morning he didn't wake up, my grandfather, Torvan, was the first to enter the room. He called me in quietly. The two of us stood there in silence for a stretch of time I couldn't measure.

"He couldn't make it without her," my grandfather said finally.

I was twenty-three when I became Alpha.

I grew up fast. I was forced to. The pack needed someone who wasn't broken on the inside, and I was completely broken, but I learned not to let it show. My grandfather stood by me through everything. He is the only man in the world who truly knows me, who senses when I've hit my limit before I realize it myself. He's seventy-two, still stands straight as an oak, and is the only person who can look me in the eye and tell me I'm wrong without making me want to argue.

I built up the pack over years. Expanded territory, strengthened alliances, eliminated threats. I did what needed to be done.

And I kept waiting.

With one difference my father never had.

After my mother's death, the hatred for witches grew inside me like a root that runs too deep to pull out. I didn't try to remove it. I watered it without meaning to every time I remembered the internal burn, the lunar marks on her body, the morning my father didn't wake up because he couldn't endure what a witch had done.

I swore I would never willingly go near a witch.

It was a clear line. One of the few certainties I had beyond the waiting.

Until that week.

The rut of a purebred Alpha Lycan happens once in a lifetime. It's nothing like the common wolf's heat, which can be managed, controlled, ignored with enough discipline. For a Lycan of ancient lineage, it's the body recognizing that the mate exists somewhere in the world.

It is a total collapse.

Fever that won't break. Joint pain that turns into pure instinct. The need to find the mate becoming almost feral with every hour that passes without her.

My grandfather brought me to the hotel because it was the only place with walls thick enough to keep me from putting my hands on someone by accident. Lizandra waited outside, monitoring and standing by. My grandfather was the only person who entered the room, checked whether I was still conscious, left water, and walked out quickly.

"One more day," he said once, watching me with that mix of worry and resignation only he could pull off. "Hold on one more day."

I could barely answer.

I was on the floor because the bed had broken hours earlier. The room reeked of a Lycan in collapse. The claws wouldn't retract anymore, the eyes wouldn't stop glowing, and every minute was a battle against the instinct screaming at me to get out and search.

Search for what? I didn't know.

I only knew she existed somewhere.

And then the door opened.

Her scent entered before she did.

Fresh snow. Crystallized honey. Something sweet and cold that filled my lungs all at once and made the Lycan inside me stop completely — before exploding in a single direction.

I rose from the floor without deciding to.

My body moved before any thought could form.

And when she appeared in the doorway — small, red-haired, with wide blue eyes staring at me as if she'd stumbled into the wrong corner of the entire universe —

everything I had built over eighteen years vanished in less than a second.

Instinct drove through my chest like a bolt of lightning.

"Mate."

And then I noticed what she was wearing.

And what happened next was neither of our decision.

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