Chapter 82 Chapter 0082
•DANTE•
I have had a terrible headache since morning, but I tried so hard for it not to show while I was moving between patients.
But by 2 p.m., I was standing at my office window staring at the car park below, trying to breathe through the pressure building behind my temples.
The ring on my finger felt like it was tightening.
I looked down at it before picking up my coat and leaving.
Arsela opened the door before I knocked.
"You look terrible," she said.
"I need another ring," I replied.
She stepped back and let me in. We sat across from each other at the narrow table where we had sat eighteen years ago.
She looked at my hand. Then at my face.
"Show me," she said.
I pulled the ring off.
The lycan surged immediately, violent and impatient. I felt my jaw tighten and my hands begin to change at the knuckles before I forced it back and pushed the ring on again.
Arsela shook her head. "Another ring won't work."
"It has to," I replied.
She shook her head. "When I made that ring for you eighteen years ago, your lycan was newly awakened. The enchantment was strong enough because it hadn't yet grown into its full strength." She folded her hands on the table. "Lycans develop over time regardless of suppression. Yours has been developing beneath that ring for eighteen years with no outlet. What you are carrying now is not the same creature I contained when you were eighteen."
"Then make a stronger enchantment," I insisted. Everything was on the line. I couldn't lose Cassandra and Alena.
"There is no enchantment strong enough for what you carry now. Not one that would be safe. The magical pressure required to suppress a fully matured lycan of your strength would damage your mind first, then your body." She paused. "I won't do that to you."
I pushed back from the table and stood up. "Then what am I supposed to do?"
"Let it out," she replied. "Controlled releases before the full moon. You shift, you run, you give the lycan space under your direction before it takes direction away from you entirely."
"And if I lose control out there?"
"You won't," she replied. "You are not the eighteen-year-old who knocked over a candle. You have eighteen years of discipline behind you. The lycan is part of you, Dante. Fighting it completely is what makes it dangerous."
I put my coat back on and walked out of her cabin.
The forest was an hour away from the hospital.
It was a dense stretch of old trees that thinned out near the eastern river. I had known about it since we moved here, but I had never gone in.
I went in now.
I found a clearing deep enough that the road noise disappeared entirely. I stood in the center of it, looked up at the sky through the canopy, and took off the ring.
The shift was immediate. Bones reshaped, senses exploded outward, and then it was done. I could hear every leaf, every insect, every small animal for a radius that made the human version of myself seem half-blind.
I ran.
The forest moved past me in long fluid strides that covered ground with an ease I had no reference point for.
The lycan knew exactly what it was doing. It always had. I was the one who had spent eighteen years refusing to acknowledge it.
I was following the sound of the river toward the eastern edge of the forest when I heard them.
Five people. Moving through the trees from the north in a loose formation. They were tracking something.
I stopped.
I caught their scent a second later.
Werewolf hunters or rogues. But they were hunting for something and if they saw me, a war would erupt.
But one of them saw me first. I heard the sharp intake of breath and the immediate sound of equipment being readied.
"Lycan," one of them muttered. "Kill it!"
They spread out immediately, cutting off angles, and covering a retreat.
They had come into this forest to kill something. But I was faster than all five of them and I knew it before any of them had finished deciding how to approach.
What followed was quick.
I moved through them and cut off their throats before they could shift into their wolves. All five of them lay beside each other, headless.
When it was done, the forest was quiet again. I stood still and breathed.
The kill felt good.
That thought arrived without guilt and without apology, and I stood with it for a moment before I was ready to move again.
I shifted back at the edge of the trees and walked to my car with the ring back on my finger.
Something had settled inside me that had not been settled in eighteen years.
Arsela had said the lycan was part of me.
For eighteen years I had treated the lycan as a separate thing. Something dangerous that lived inside me despite everything else I was.
Something to be hidden behind a silver ring and a quiet careful life.
But running through those trees a few hours ago, I had felt more like myself than I had since I was eighteen years old.
Cassandra arrived home forty minutes after I did.
I heard her key in the lock, her bag dropping in the hallway, and the sound of her checking on Alena before she came to find me.
When she appeared in the bedroom doorway, she looked tired in the way she always did after a long shift.
She started to say something about dinner.
I crossed the room and kissed her before she finished.
She made a small sound of surprise and then her hands found the front of my shirt and she stopped talking.
She pulled back and looked at my face. She could tell something was different. I could see it in the way she was looking at me, trying to read what had changed.
"Dante," she murmured. "What happened? Are you okay?"
I kissed her again, and whatever question she had been forming disappeared.
I had spent eighteen years containing what I was, but tonight I stopped.
I ripped off her shirt and picked her up. She moaned between our kisses as I lay her down on the edge of the bed.
She looked at me as I ripped off my shirt and watched as I freed my dick from my pants.
I leaned down and licked her pussy before I straightened up and entered her slowly.
She moaned as her walls opened up to accommodate me. And I groaned, already feeling her heat threatening to get me to finish before I could thrust deeper.