Elara's POV
The city was so calm and quiet the next day, embracing its secrets close. I opened my eyes entangled in my sheets, the whisper of cedar and rain brushing against me like a memory… a phantom memory that made my heart ache.
I looked around, he was gone. No sound. No note. Nothing was left behind. Just the crushing silence of my apartment and the lingering impression on the pillow next to mine.
I felt the emptiness louder than it had ever been. Had it all been a dream? A desperate fantasy spun from some loneliness and fear? I asked myself.
I moved then, lifting myself up from the bed, the memory of his strong hands on my waist and the feeling of a faint soreness in my muscles, all confirmed it was real.
A flush of confusion and warmth spread through me. I lifted my hands up to my face, tracing my lips with my fingers, still feeling the heavy pressure of his lips on mine.
In my pool of bitterness and happiness together, I questioned myself again. What had I done? I'd kissed a stranger, a man who spoke of wolves and whose eyes glowed like that of a predator.
A killer. A monster. I was losing my mind at this point.
At my desk a few hours later, the new file that came from my editor felt like a lead weight. He dropped it without uttering a single word, not even a sound. His face, a mask of unadulterated contempt.
"Another body. Down by the river. A woman. Last night." He finally said.
Last night.
The words were a heavy punch to my ears.
The time between the thunder strike and the heavy scream. The heavy darkness when his lips were pressuring mine, when his hands were running in my hair. The time when Lucian Drax had slipped away from my bed without any sound.
My heart stopped at a point, my thoughts scrambled, nausea twisting my stomach. Was it him? Had he left my arms to go hunting last night?
The thought was a sharp and cruel blade. I felt used. Foolish. The pitiful human who fell for the monster's charm. I was everything, not just Marek, but almost everyone had said I was, a lamb who'd willingly walked into the den.
I could no longer breathe in the newsroom anymore. The clatter of keyboards felt like accusations to my ears. I grabbed my coat in anger and ran, not caring about the stares and the whispers of the people around.
I didn't stop until I stood in the alley beside The Glass Den, the afternoon sun busy doing little to warm the deep shadows. The bar was closed, silent. It felt so calm like a grave yard.
I found him there, his form half-eaten by the gloom, leaning against the wet brick wall. His shoulders shook, not from the cold, but from some inner, violent struggle.
A low, pained growl rumbled in his chest, a sound that should have sent me a race. It was the sound from my dreams, the sound of the river killings given a voice.
"Lucian," I whispered, my voice breaking. My heart ached for the pain in his posture, even as my mind screamed killer, I felt my anger suddenly gone.
"Don't come close, Elara." His voice was ragged, torn from a raw throat. He didn't turn. "I'm not safe. Not for you. Not even for anyone."
"Tell me what's wrong with you!" I pleaded, taking a hesitant step closer. The scent of him, cedar and rain, was now mixed with something wild and weird, something metallic.
"The body… last night… was it you?"
He turned to me, and the streetlight caught his face. My lungs tightened and my breath faltered. Dark, web-like veins crawled beneath the pale skin of his temples and neck.
His eyes were not silver. They were a blazing, furious gold, the pupils slitted. His canines seemed sharper and longer. The beautiful, terrible monster was looking right at me, and he was in agony. In an unbearable, undefined pain.
"You, see?" he snarled, the sound layered with a guttural resonance, chilling in its inhumanity "This is what I am. This is what I become. A slave to the moon. A weapon. A working tool. A servant."
My body stiffened in terror, though a desperate urge to run away thundered in my head. But my feet were glued to the spot.
This wasn't the controlled predator from the bar. This was a creature at war with itself, and I was standing right on the battlefield.
"I'm not scared of you," I denied, my voice trembling so badly the words almost didn't form but I had to be bold, clever and even more at this time.
He let out a demonic laugh, cracked and empty, void of joy or mirth. "You should be. You're a fool if you're not. Look at me, Elara! Really look!"
"Then make me, make me be afraid of you!" I challenged, the words leaving my mouth before I could stop them. It was a dare. A test. For him, or for me, I didn't know.
He pushed off the wall and stepped into the weak light. He was a perfect, horrifying blend of man and nightmare.
He was a pure definition of power; the air quivered with a force so tangible it seemed to pulse around us.
And yet, when his wild, gold eyes finally met mine, all I saw was the tormented man from the dark bar, the one who had looked at me like I was the only thing that mattered in the world.
"Say your name," he commanded, his voice a rough, desperate plea, as if the sound of it was a lifeline thrown into a stormy sea.
"Elara."
The impact of my name was immediate, striking without warning. The tension in his powerful frame reduced. The wild, predatory glare in his eyes softened, the gold flickering like a dying ember. The beast within him became still, soothed just only by the simple sound of my name on my own lips.
For one perfect, silent moment, we were just a man and a woman in a rainy alley, connected by something too profound for words.
Then, as if he was exhausted from holding back, he was gone, he disappeared within a twinkle of an eye. A blur of motion, a whisper of displaced air, and he vanished into the deeper shadows of the alley, leaving me alone with the drumming rain and the echo of my name, a word that now felt like a spell to him.
That night, I didn't write anything about patterns or victims. I sat at my small table, in my room that was filled with darkness, having a single candle for company, and wrote just one line in my notebook, a memory I can't seem to erase, a truth I could no longer deny, a truth that filled me with both terror and a strange, unshakable peace:
The wolf knows my name, and I think he loves it.