“It’s not y-you, Ruarc.” Her voice broke. “It’s . . . it’s them.”
My head snapped around, took in her too-pale face, the nightmares swimming in her eyes. “Who?”
She shuddered and her throat worked as she attempted to swallow. To speak.
“Who?” I demanded. Was ready to fucking murder.
“The men who . . . who had me.”
The men who had her?
My world went black. She said something else but I couldn’t hear it over the roar rattling in my skull.
Rage licked up my chest. Wrapped around my heart. Burned.
Took all my effort to keep my body still. To not explode out of my skin and rip the room to shreds in my fury. They hurt her. Did something to her. Something that scarred her.
A loud, furious snarl.
Mine.
A roar.
Still mine.
My jaw clenched too tight to speak. Fangs had already descended, my beast howling for blood while fury blazed through us both.
Several seconds passed. I growled. Snarled. And when words finally became possible, they were warbled. Distorted. Murderous. “What. Happened.”
I couldn’t look at her. If she cried, I’d lose it. If the agony in her voice showed on her pale face, I’d shed my human skin and go on a rampage unlike anything this world had seen since the Beast of Gévaudan.
“They would—” Her voice broke again, a soft sob escaping.
The rage I felt in that moment flayed skin from muscle and stripped tendons and tissue from bones. It left nothing untouched, nothing alive. It burnt through me, maiming and destroying and annihilating, until all that was left was a smoking carcass and a few, brittle bones.
If I turned to her, if I showed her how close to the edge I was . . .
She’d run screaming from the room.
“Tell me.” It was a command. Harsh and brutal and with edges that cut.
But not as deeply, not as thoroughly as I’d cut the fuckers who’d hurt her.
Tonight… Tonight someone would die.
—THE FERAL SOULS TRILOGY: BOOK 1
by Erica Woods
Full book available via Amazon.
