Claimed by the Beast. Saranna DeWylde

      He didn’t speak; all he did was watch her.

      “You should know that if the cameras stop recording, there’ll be an F-16 here in five minutes to drop a payload that will destroy anything in a twenty-mile radius.”

      “Good to know. I can run faster than that carrying both you and Bethany.”

      “So much talk and no action. I believe nothing you say, dog.” Her face was like stone.

      “Believe this.” Konstantin flooded her with his desire. It was a gift for mates to feel each other’s bliss, but he’d had enough of being called a dog.

      Only, he gave her more than his pleasure. He gave her his pain, too.

      Memories erupted that were poisonous and black, filling her mind’s eye with images he didn’t want in his own head, let alone in hers.

      “Dog!” They snarled as they kicked him, stabbed him with silver pins. “Beast! Devil!” As they’d dragged him and his mother, his father and his brother out into the freezing darkness toward four pyres. But dog was what seemed to stick. They’d chanted it, some sick spell as his mother was violated, then burned as a witch for trafficking with the devil to change her skin.

      “I didn’t know,” she whispered. Daphne put her shaking hand back to the glass. “I didn’t...” The flood continued to crash over her, and no matter what he did, he couldn’t pull it back.

      Because that wasn’t the worst—that wasn’t the most horrible. What he didn’t want her to know was that when they had searched the cellar, the townspeople had found what they’d been looking for. Henri La Croix was the legendary Beast of Gevaudan—the horror from which most mortal werewolf lore sprang. The animal that slaughtered women and children walked among them as a man.

      The Aeternali had taken him, exorcised the madness from his blood in ways more horrible than even the Inquisition could imagine.

      They had called him “dog.”

      And yet, he did not want her to feel this. He would suffer the Aeternali a million times over if it would keep her from experiencing it for even one second. He’d failed as a protector. This was his punishment for using their connection against her. Perhaps his father’s madness was still in his blood, after all.

      Konstantin tried to close the connection, but she fought him, opening herself to all of his memories. “Let go, Daphne.”

      “No.”

      “Now,” he growled, his beast angry.

      “I said no.” She stood her ground, devouring everything that poured out of him.

      The memories combined with his failure and her pain were all too much, and the beast exploded from his skin—one minute he was a man, the next he was a predator that could crush her between his jaws. Her fear was fetid and tasted of death. She didn’t look at him, and she shook with terror, but she refused to back down.

      With his animal brain in the forefront, he didn’t communicate the same way. Their link should have been broken, but it wasn’t. She was there, inside his head with the animal, and he couldn’t protect her.

      The animal didn’t want the cure, didn’t care about the cure, only wanted to taste his mate—run with her beneath clear skies and mount her on soft summer grasses. Drill into her until her cries shattered the moon.

      Tasting her—yes. That sweet salt of her on his long tongue, the give of tender flesh beneath his teeth as he released the wolf that lived under her delicate skin with his bite.

      “Please don’t,” she whispered.

      The beast was drunk on the scent of her, the intimacy of being inside her head. Konstantin fought for mastery and regained his human shape.

      He didn’t want her to be afraid of him, but Konstantin was afraid of himself.

      “Daphne,” he said softly.

      The movement of her head as she turned to look up at him was like a glacier, slow and infinitesimal. He turned the topic of conversation back to what was safe, back to the pleasure he could bring her, rather than the things in the dark. “Before the Beast of Gevaudan, there was a Greek island where fathers would offer up their firstborn daughters to appease the appetites of the beasts.”

      “You’re just trying to scare me now.” Her voice was hoarse, choked.