Chapter 11: Beast in the Frost

<Cassandra>

The growl came again, closer this time, and I felt it deep in my bones. It felt like a low vibration that rattled straight through my chest and into the base of my spine.

Even the horse felt it too. She went rigid beneath us for exactly one heartbeat before all four hooves left the ground at once, screaming in a manner that really didn't sound like it should be possible from an animal that size.

"Whoa — whoa!" I gasped, my hands gripping the reins tightly as the horse made us tilt violently to one side.

"Hold on," Dominic said in his low and clipped tone, and his arm clamped around my waist like an iron band, pinning me against his chest while his other hand fought the reins. The horse bucked again, harder, and I felt every muscle in Dominic's body go taut with the effort of keeping us both upright.

"What is that?" I managed, my voice thinner than I wanted it to be.

He didn't answer, but his eyes had gone past me. They were fixed on the treeline, and I watched something dark and fast streak between two trunks in the distance, gone in the blink of an eye.

"Dominic… talk to me." I said, fear slowly creeping into my voice.

"I saw something." He brought the horse to a stop with a sharp pull, swung his leg over, and dropped to the ground in one fluid motion. "Take the reins. Stay on her back and whatever happens, do not move."

"You want me to just—"

"Cassandra." He said my name with such finality, that I guessed it was the same way he spoke to his squad right before they did exactly what he told them to. "Stay. Still."

I clamped my mouth shut and took the reins with hands that weren't entirely steady, but I held on regardless.

He moved forward slowly, and I watched as something in him began to shift. His eyes caught the morning light and turned a bright, molten yellow. His jaw lengthened just slightly, his teeth sharpening into wolf fangs, and a strange, colorless mist began curling off his skin like steam off a lake in winter.

He was just three steps further when his nose twitched, and his whole body went dangerously still in a way that made every hair on my arms stand on end.

Then it happened too fast for me to process.

A black, massive shape barreled out of the treeline and slammed into Dominic's side, sending him sprawling, and kept coming straight for me.

The horse screamed again, reared, and I lost the reins entirely as she bolted. I clung to her mane with both fists, my whole body jerking with every stride, right up until the black shape caught her broadside, slamming into her, and she went down hard, flinging me clear of the saddle.

I hit the ground and the air left my lungs in one violent rush.

'Get up. Get up, get up!'

I scrambled onto my knees, dirt and frost biting into my palms, and that was when I finally saw it properly.

It looked like a bear, if a bear had crawled directly out of a nightmare. Its fur was matted and black, patched with old wounds that had never healed right, one of its eyes was a ruined, milky mess. But it was the smell that hit me hardest — rotted and wrong, an aura so thick and black it felt like it was pressing down on my chest from the inside.

It snarled, baring teeth the length of my fingers, and raised one massive paw.

I didn't even have time to scream.

Something enormous slammed into the creature from the side just before its claws came down, close enough that I felt the wind of it against my cheek.

I spun, chest heaving, and found what had saved me.

A wolf. Golden-brown, nearly as large as the bear itself, with eyes that burned the exact same bright yellow I'd just watched bloom in Dominic's face.

'Oh.' My whole body went cold and hot at once. 'Oh, that's—'

"Dominic," I breathed.

The bear threw him off almost instantly, twice its own weight behind the motion, and I watched him roll clean through the frost-hardened dirt before finding his feet again. My heart climbed straight into my throat.

'Get up. Please get up.'

The bear barreled straight at him, but he managed to drop low just as the bear swiped again, letting the huge paw pass a hair above his head before he lunged and sank his teeth into its foreleg. The roar that followed shook snow loose from the branches above us, and the return blow caught him hard enough in the shoulder that I heard the crack of it from where I knelt.

"Dominic!" I didn't even realize I'd shouted his name until it was already out of my mouth.

He didn't so much as flinch toward the sound. If anything, his movement seemed to have sharpened, like the pain had simply been locked away somewhere to be dealt with later.

He circled the bear slowly, low to the ground, and I realized — even through the terror clawing up my spine — that he wasn't just fighting, he was assessing. He didn't jump in carelessly like before, or try to overpower the bear when he knew it was futile.

The bear lunged left, and Dominic was already moving right, like he'd known exactly where it would go before it did, and in one motion he drove forward and closed his jaws around its throat, bearing the enormous body down into the dirt with everything he had.

It thrashed. Claws raked uselessly at his side, tearing fur and skin, and I pressed a hand hard against my own mouth to keep from making a sound that would only distract him.

Then, slowly, the huge body of the bear beneath him went still. And the forest suddenly became utterly silent.

Dominic threw his head back and let out a long, echoing howl that rattled straight through my chest, and I understood almost immediately that it was a sound of triumph so much as a warning to anything else listening in these woods.

Beneath him, the bear's body began to shimmer and shrink, its fur receding into pale, cold skin, until what lay lifeless in the frost wasn't a beast at all, but a man — huge, blonde, and built like something out of the old northern legends I'd only heard about in bedtime stories.

I stared at the body, my stomach turning slowly over on itself, and only looked away when I heard the sound of Dominic shifting back beside me.

'Oh my…' I gasped inwardly. 

I hadn't thought that far ahead. I hadn't thought, in the chaos of the last several minutes, about what exactly happened to a man's clothes when the rest of him turned into several hundred pounds of golden-brown wolf.

He was completely, and unmistakably naked, walking toward me across the frost, and I had never in my twenty-one years on the earth, seen a man without his clothes on. I discovered, rather urgently, that I had absolutely no idea what a person was supposed to do with their eyes in this situation.

'Look at his face. Just — look at his face.'

I looked at his collarbone instead, which felt like a reasonable compromise at the time.

"Are you hurt?" He crouched in front of me, and his hands found my shoulders, checking me over with a thoroughness that startled me more than the question did. The moment his skin touched mine, something sharp and electric shot straight through my chest, and the mark on my neck pulsed hard enough that I gasped.

"I—" My eyes stayed fixed somewhere around his throat, refusing very determinedly to travel any lower. "I'm fine. I think…"

"Cassandra." His voice came out rougher than I'd ever heard it. "Look at me. Are you hurt?"

"No," I said, far too fast, heat crawling up my neck and into my cheeks. "No, I'm — you're — uhhm…”

I couldn't bring myself to form an actual sentence, and the way he kept looking at me, with such concern in his gaze; I wanted the frozen ground to open up and swallow me right then.

Whatever he might have said next was cut off by the thunder of hooves, and Jasper came tearing around the bend a moment later, already half off his horse before it had fully stopped.

"Alpha. I heard the howl." He took one look at Dominic, then at my flushed face, and an understanding smile crept up his face.

He immediately dug a folded set of clothes out of his saddlebag and threw them at Dominic's chest without looking, “You should get dressed,” he said, and I busied myself very intensely with a loose thread on my sleeve until I heard the rustle of fabric being worn.

Dominic dressed quickly, then quickly told Jasper about what had just transpired a few minutes ago.

“Have the corpse transported back to the pack grounds, I'll have Hesper take a look at it and see if we can figure out more about him and why these damn shifters are getting so close to our territory.”

“Understood, Alpha.” Jasper gave a sharp bow, then pulled the reins of his horse, handing it to Dominic. 

Dominic helped me onto the horse before swinging up behind me himself. Neither of us spoke much on the ride back.

By the time the Manor's gates came into view, he'd already slid back into the version of himself I recognized.

“I can't stay, I have to meet with the council later. Shifters this close to Blackthorne territory is not a coincidence I can afford to ignore.”

I nodded, too stunned to speak. He'd never once discussed pack related things with me… or anything for that matter. 

He murmured a goodbye, and let the servants sweep me toward the east wing the second we crossed the threshold.

I let them lead me all the way to my chambers before I finally exhaled, and even then, my mind refused to settle on any one thing for longer than a few seconds — the smell of that creature, the crack of Dominic's shoulder taking a blow meant to open me up instead, the warmth of his hands checking me for wounds like it actually mattered to him whether I bled or not.

And underneath all of it, one single, useless thought kept circling back no matter how hard I tried to shove it away.

‘He was naked… and I couldn't stop looking.'