Chapter 3 What I Never Felt Before

~LEILANI RAVENWOOD~

My heart pounded hard in my chest at the set of eyes that now watched me in a predatory manner-piercing and stripping me bare before him. The hall fell completely silent and everyone's gaze turned to me too.

A man referred to as 'the Cursed', and one meant to exist in myths only, had walked in and called me interesting. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't trembling with fear.

What happened next was fast and striking.

One moment his eyes were on mine across the hall. The next he was gone from where he stood and the air behind me shifted.

A hand gripped my chin, firmly and unyielding, forcing my head back until I had no choice but to face the ceiling. My back met something solid and warm and I didn't need to see him to know who it was. The mark on my back already knew. It burned the moment he touched me, a deep electric heat that had no business feeling like anything other than pain and yet it did.

"Let go of me." I twisted against his hold, but it felt like pushing against a wall.

His fingers were ice cold against my jaw and the contact sent heat straight through me.The mark burned hotter. I couldn't tell if it was agony or something worse.

"You reek of ancient blood." His voice came from directly behind me, low and unhurried, like a man making an observation about the weather.

Before I could speak, his other hand found the back of my dress. The fabric tore like paper as he pulled at it. Cold air hit my back all at once at my exposed skin. The only thing that stopped the dress from falling entirely were my own hands clutching it at the front.

"And you bear the mark of the goddess."

His fingers grazed the crescents on my back.

The mark detonated.

Pain and heat and something electric seized my spine and forced the breath from my lungs all at once. I cried out before I could stop myself. He pulled away instantly, as though burned, and shoved me forward hard.

I fell to the ground.

"Leilani." My father's voice cracked as he rushed toward me. I clutched the ruined fabric tighter, my jaw locked from the embarrassment.

Then a growl rolled through the hall. Resonant and laced with an authority that made every instinct I had go very still.

Chaos erupted through the hall as Sebastian began to shift. I had never seen anything like it. His frame stretched, bones cracking audibly in the horrified silence, his form expanding into something that had no business existing in the same room as the rest of us. He rose to his full height and what stood there was not a werewolf.

It was older and more monstrous than that.

Wrong in a way I had no words for. An embodiment of something ancient and wrathful that the world had clearly hoped was gone. The hall drowned in fear. I could smell it on everyone around me. I could smell it on myself.

When he spoke again his voice carried two registers at once. One human. One most certainly not.

"I brushed it off when I heard whispers of the prophecy." The words moved through the walls. "But it seems the goddess isn't done playing her games with me."

His gaze swept across the trembling crowd.

"I, Sebastian Kol, one of the very First Bloods, have awoken." Each word landed like a stone dropped from a great height. "Spread the word. Swear your allegiance to me as your high king. Or be met with suffering and death."

The hall visibly shook with fear.

Then his eyes came back to me.

"Your daughter bears the sacred mark." He said to my father. Not loudly. He didn't need to be loud. "She carries a prophecy that binds her fate to mine. You must have known that." A pause. "Surrender her to me on the night after the Fevered Moon."

My father stepped forward. "I will not..."

"Or I will come for her myself." Sebastian continued, like my father hadn't spoken at all. "And when I do, there will be nothing left of your lands but ash and the memory of what they were."

His eyes held mine one moment longer. And in that single moment, something shifted deep in my chest. Something nameless and unwelcome and horribly certain.

Then he turned and dissolved into the shadows as though he had never been solid at all, leaving behind only the sound of my racing heart.

The night after the Fevered Moon was two nights away.

**********

I didn't sleep.

I lay in the dark of my room with the sheets twisted around me and his voice turning over and over in my head like something that had taken up permanent residence without asking permission.

'Surrender her.'

'Or I will come for her myself.'

Eventually exhaustion won.

I shouldn't have let it.

**********

The cold came first. Licking against every inch of my skin, merciless and intimate all at once, raising goosebumps along my bare flesh.

I became aware of myself in pieces.

There was a huge rock beneath me, rough and cold against my spine and thighs. The Fevered Moon hung in the sky above with a reddish hue. Every breath I took felt too loud in the quiet of the night.

Then the rest of it hit me.

I looked down.

I was bare, sprawled helplessly on the massive rock and clad in nothing but a thin scrap of underwear that clung uselessly to my waist, doing nothing to protect me from the cold or the exposure. My nipples hardened instantly against the chill, the sensation sharpening my awareness of every inch of my own skin in a way that made me feel more naked.

Then I tried to move.

The bite of cold metal around my wrists and ankles stopped me immediately. I was chained. My hands pulled above my head to iron spikes driven into the rock, and my ankles bound as well, forcing my legs apart.

I pulled harder, but they went nowhere.

Panic rose fast and vicious in me. I twisted, searching for anything, a face, a way out, and I found nothing except stone, sky and silence pressing in from every direction.

Then his voice came.

"The Fevered Moon doesn't touch you."

Low. Quiet. Like something that had been watching long enough to already know the answer.

"Does it, little wolf."

Not a question.

Every muscle in my body locked, a mix of terror and unwelcome heat flooding my veins instantly. I knew that voice. One encounter was apparently all it took for it to carve itself somewhere it didn't belong.

I twisted my head, straining to catch a glimpse of him, but he remained out of my sight. Like a predator lurking in the shadows, watching his prey. Only his voice told of his presence.

I could feel something stirring in me at the thought that he was seeing me in that position. Bare and almost naked. He was right. The Fevered Moon had never affected me once. I had never felt arousal. But ever since he touched me back at the meeting, it felt as though something had been awakened. I could feel my core throbbing, heat coiling low in my stomach in a place it had never reached before.

"You've been thinking of me. Haven't you, little wolf?"

His words slid over my skin like cold fingers. I tugged uselessly at the chains, trying to break free, but the metal clanged uselessly against the stone. It made my breasts bounce slightly, drawing my awareness to every inch of my exposed skin. The rough granite scraped against me as I shifted, the friction igniting sparks of unwanted sensation.

"This isn't real." My voice came out steadier than I felt. It couldn't be. I didn't remember anything that could have led to this. All I remembered was lying on my bed, struggling to sleep.

It had to be a dream. Yet it felt real.

"Perharps. But what you're feeling says otherwise." He said. "I can sense the purity of your body. You've known no man's touch. Yet at this very moment, your body calls for me. It aches for me to claim every virgin inch of you."

I gasped, mortified heat flooding my face at the truth of it. My thin underwear had become soaked and slick and my core pulsed with a forbidden need. No man, no beast, had ever laid a hand on me, let alone stirred this kind of fire.

"You've wondered why." He continued. "For years. Through every Fevered Moon. Through every attempt with your betrothed. Through every moment your body stayed cold when it was supposed to burn."

How did he know about Rowan? How did he know so much?

"Now you're burning." He said simply. "And I haven't even touched you. Yet."

The truth of it was unbearable. Because he was right. My skin was on fire. Electric. Every inch of me lit up in a way that no man or beast had ever managed. Yet he had done it with nothing but his presence and the sound of his voice. I was aroused. I could feel the heat pooling at my core and my hips bucked off the stone in a desperate search for friction I couldn't find.

"Damn the goddess for intertwining our fates." His voice was low and certain. "You belong to me now. Your mind and your body. And I always take what is mine."

"I already hate you." The words came out fierce yet they contradicted everything my body was feeling.

"Say it again." Quiet. Unbothered. "If it helps."

Of course, it wouldn't.

He felt closer now, like he was whispering just above my ear, yet still out of sight.

"One more night for your father to surrender you to me. Else his lands will burn and his people will drown in blood and screams. And I shall hunt you down myself and have you chained in chains far thicker than these."

His words held more than a threat.

They held promise.

The chains loosened. The stone melted to softness beneath me. My eyes snapped open and I was met with my room's interior, sheets tangled around my sweat dampened body, the Fevered Moon still bleeding red outside my window.

It had been a dream.

But the fire still burning beneath my skin was very much real.