Chapter 3

Elara Vance's POV:

Night fell, but sleep refused to come. I tossed and turned on the lumpy mattress, a strange, suffocating heat blooming deep within me. It started as a low simmer in my belly and spread like wildfire through my veins, making my skin prickle with an agonizing sensitivity.

It was my first Heat. The sudden, undeniable proximity to my fated mate had awakened a primal, biological clock within me, and my body was now screaming for something my heart couldn't bear. A deep, gnawing emptiness opened up inside me, a carnal craving for my Alpha's touch.

My wolf paced restlessly in the back of my mind, her mournful howls a constant litany of need, calling for the very man who despised me. I curled into a tight ball, digging my nails into the flesh of my arms, trying to anchor myself with pain against the rising tide of shameful desire.

The door crashed open again. The stench of whiskey and the familiar, heartbreaking scent of Ryker flooded the small room. He stumbled in, his tie loosened, his eyes hazed with alcohol but sharpening with cruel focus when they landed on me.

"The Elders," he slurred, his voice a mockery of respect. "Such caring guardians. They felt it was their duty to remind me of my... obligation. To help my mate through her Heat."

My blood ran cold. The Elders. They had orchestrated this. They had sent him.

I caught another scent clinging to him, faint beneath the alcohol. Nora's floral perfume. The combination made me want to retch.

I struggled to sit up, pulling the thin blanket over my feverish body. "Get out," I rasped. "I don't need-"

"Don't need?" he cut me off with a cruel laugh, striding to the bed and ripping the blanket away. "Your body tells a different story."

The sweet, cloying scent of my own arousal filled the air, a pheromonal beacon that was an irresistible lure to any unmated male, let alone the Alpha who was my other half. I saw his nostrils flare, his breathing deepening. His own wolf was responding, clawing at the edges of his drunken control.

He leaned over me, planting his hands on either side of my body, caging me. "Isn't this what you wanted all along?" he whispered, his words poisoned with contempt. "To end up in my bed? To get my mark and seal your position as Luna?"

"No... not like this," I choked out, the first tear finally breaking free, tracing a hot path through the sweat on my temple.

My body arched toward him, a humiliating, involuntary response to his proximity. My mind, my very soul, screamed in protest. The conflict was a tearing, brutal agony.

He ignored my tears, his hand moving to the simple cotton of my nightgown and ripping it from collar to hem. He didn't kiss me. He lowered his head to the sensitive skin of my neck, where a mate's mark should be, and inhaled deeply, greedily. The act sent a jolt of pure electricity through me, a mix of terror and unwilling excitement.

"You smell," he murmured against my ear, his voice a rough growl, "like a lie waiting to be picked."

There was no tenderness. No prelude. Only a punishing, violating invasion.

A pain so sharp it felt like my bones were breaking ripped a strangled cry from my throat. It was my first time, a moment I had been taught to cherish, and it was being stolen from me in the most brutal, degrading way imaginable.

I felt him tense for a second at the point of entry, a brief, surprised stiffness, but it was gone as quickly as it came, dismissed by the haze of alcohol and rage. He began to move within me, each thrust an angry, punishing strike meant to hurt, to degrade, to vent his own powerlessness.

I bit down on my lip, the coppery taste of blood filling my mouth. I would not scream. I would not cry out. It was a rule I'd learned as an Omega whelp: never give your tormentors the satisfaction of your tears. It only makes them crueler.

At the peak of his own frenzied release, as my body convulsed in a broken symphony of pain and forced pleasure, he sank his teeth into my neck.

*The mark.*

A searing, supernatural energy flooded me as the bond was forged in fire and agony. He had claimed me. And in doing so, he had shattered what was left of my soul.