Prologue - Offerings
Blood dripped from black fur. Thick and wet. His chest heaving from exhaustion as he stood over the remains of the pack he tracked down. Two wolves lay shivering and badly wounded next to the massacred members of their former pack.
Thor kept one or two alive each time he came across the shattered remains of his father’s pack. Rogue wolves scattered all over the woods, so Bane could hide among them. He wasn’t here so the two Rogues—if they survived their injuries—would live to tell the tale of his fury.
He could feel the darkness stir inside his chest. It made him feel powerful. Invincible. It was moments like these—those of violence and death—that made him feel something other than the pain of losing his mate.
The day Elarina took her last breath was the day he lost his lifelong battle against the deeply rooted forces inside him. He lost to the Darkness. It was feeding off him, and he was feeding off the violence he left in his wake.
Revenge was all he could think about. He wanted Bane to bleed. To scream in agony. Thor wanted him to suffer like he had. His father sealed his fate when he marched into Seraphim City to take what wasn’t his. He would pay for it once Thor could find him.
Meanwhile, he would destroy every Rogue who dared to stand in his way. Every single one of them. He didn’t care about their pleas to spare their lives. Some even dared to claim Bane forced them to go along with his plans. Pathetic.
Eyes a color between red and gold snapped up as he caught movement in the distance. He growled, lowering his body, his hind legs tense, ready to pounce on the remaining wolves and end their lives.
The figure stopped at the sound. Slender arms wrapped around her barely covered body. A female. Her skin dirty. Long red hair clinging to her scalp like she hadn’t washed in a long time. She was shaking violently as her eyes wandered over the battlefield. A graveyard, really.
Thorian watched as another came out of a shabby building that looked like someone had halfheartedly erected it in the middle of this sorry excuse for a village.
The two women stood there for a moment before they took each other’s hands. Standing in silence, but relieved to find their tormentors dead.
Rogues kept women like animals. Their only purpose was to bear children—boys to grow the pack and girls to be raped and tortured. Thor could see the bruises on their bodies even from a distance. But he didn’t feel anything. He just watched and decided to let them live. He probably wasn’t doing them a favor with all the damage done to their minds, but why should he do anything for them?
Two or three of them were pregnant. Some had little children with them. Girls, mostly. It took them a moment to gather. The sound of babies crying grew louder. He didn’t like the sound. It was annoying and a gruesome reminder of what Bane had taken from him.
He stood, and his howl made all the women scream. Except the one that came out of the shed first. Her red hair stood out against the melting snow.
“Run!” she said to the other women, and after a moment of hesitation, they listened. All of them scurrying away. He could chase them. End their miserable existence after all.
But something else kept him in place. Not all of them ran away. One woman, with almost floor-length black hair, stood rooted in place, her eyes fixed on him. She tilted her head back, her arms spread as if she was embracing her end.
“You came for me,” she said, tilting her head back and inhaling the stench of death. She smiled. Surely, she had lost her mind after years of being kept by the Rogues. Trauma could do that to a person.
With slow, deliberate steps, Thor moved closer. The black wolf didn’t care about the bodies lying on the ground. He just walked over them as if the earth he was walking on belonged to him. He had claimed it. This piece of land was his to do with as he pleased.
He almost expected the woman to run, but when he got close enough to kill her, she sank to her knees, her head bowed in a submissive manner.
“Thank you for saving me, master.”
He stopped, tilting his massive head to the side as he took the woman in. There was something about her. Something that drew him closer. She didn’t smell of anything he recognized. It wasn’t his soul that wanted her. Not like he needed Elarina after she touched him and sealed the bond between them. It was different, yet close enough for him to hesitate.
She lifted her hands, palms up as if to offer him an invisible gift. He growled at her when nothing happened.
“I have been waiting for you, Nightshadow,” she said, unafraid of him. And that’s when he saw the thin webs of black that vaporized from her fingers. Little, misty tendrils that wanted to connect with the darkness inside of him.
Power. That was what she was offering, and his darkness gladly took it.
