Chapter 2
Lorelei
He answered by spreading my thighs wider, settling between them with his full weight. I felt him fumble with his belt, heard the rasp of a zipper, and then—
God. The first press of him against my entrance was overwhelming. Thick, hot, demanding. I wasn't ready—hadn't been touched like this in my entire existence—but my body opened for him anyway, slick with a wetness I didn't understand, driven by instincts that overrode pain and fear.
He pushed in. Not gently. One brutal thrust that split me open and tore a scream from my throat. The pain was blinding, white-hot, as if I were being torn in half. But underneath it, something else—a pleasure so intense it bordered on agony, a rightness that made my entire body sing even as it wept.
He didn't wait for me to adjust. Couldn't, probably, with his Alpha instincts riding him this hard. He pulled back and slammed in again, setting a punishing rhythm that had me clawing at his shoulders, his back, anything I could reach. Each thrust drove him deeper, stretched me wider, until I could feel him everywhere—in my chest, my throat, behind my eyes.
The pheromones hit me in waves with each movement. I could feel them flooding my system, thick and intoxicating, rewriting something fundamental in my biology. My legs wrapped tighter around his waist, heels digging into his ass to pull him deeper, and I heard myself making sounds I'd never made before—desperate, animalistic, begging.
"More," I gasped. "Please, more—"
He growled—actually growled—and shifted the angle, hitting something inside me that made stars explode behind my eyelids. I came apart, screaming, my body convulsing around him as pleasure ripped through me like lightning. But he didn't stop. Kept pounding into me through the aftershocks, chasing his own release with single-minded intensity.
I lost count of how many times I came. Lost track of everything except the relentless rhythm, the overwhelming fullness, the scent of him drowning out everything else. At some point I blacked out, only to wake to him still moving inside me, still hard, still desperate. The pain had faded to a dull ache, replaced by a pleasure so acute it was almost unbearable.
I can feel his pheromones flooding into my body like a torrent...
Finally—finally—I felt him stiffen above me, felt the heat of his release flooding my insides as he buried himself to the hilt with a roar that shook the walls. The sensation triggered something deep inside me, something that felt like breaking and binding all at once.
The scale over my heart loosened.
I felt it slip free, sliding down between our sweat-slicked bodies to rest in my palm. The chromatic heart-scale—proof of what we'd just done, of the bond that now chained me to this stranger forever.
When the chromatic heart-scale fell from my chest and slipped into my palm, the fatal mating bond was complete.
He collapsed on top of me, his weight crushing but oddly comforting. I could feel his heart hammering against my chest, his breath hot and ragged against my neck. My own body felt wrung out, used up, fundamentally changed.
I closed my fist around the scale as darkness claimed me, its edges cutting into my palm.
I'm alive.
Everything else could wait.
Victor
Wrong. Everything felt wrong.
I woke disoriented, head pounding like someone had taken a sledgehammer to my skull, body aching in ways that had nothing to do with the raid I'd finished hours ago. The ceiling unfamiliar.
4:17 AM.
I sat up slowly, every muscle protesting, and took in the room with growing dread. Penthouse suite. My clothes scattered across the floor like evidence at a crime scene. Blood on the sheets—not much, but enough to make my gut twist. And beside me, buried under blankets, a figure with silver-white hair spilling across the pillow.
Fuck.
My stomach dropped straight through the floor. I'd slept with someone. Obviously. The evidence was everywhere—the rumpled sheets, the faint smell of sex still hanging in the air, the scratches I could now feel stinging across my back. But I couldn't remember a single goddamn second of it. The last clear memory I had was finishing the raid on that siren trafficking ring, sending the smugglers to detention. After that... nothing. My memory stops at "finishing the raid, driving back"...
A complete void where the past six hours should have been.
This couldn't be happening. I was Victor Sterling, Supreme Commander of the Lycan Defense Bureau. I couldn't afford scandals, couldn't afford blackouts, couldn't afford to wake up in strange hotels with strangers I'd apparently fucked without remembering a damn thing about it.
As Supreme Commander of the Lycan Defense Bureau, I cannot be involved in any scandal. I must leave immediately.
My hands were shaking as I slid out of bed, moving with the silent precision that years of military training had drilled into me. Every instinct screamed at me to stay, to wake them up, to demand answers—but the rational part of my brain, the part that had kept me alive and in power for this long, knew that was the worst possible move. The room was dark except for city lights filtering through the windows, and in that dim glow, I couldn't make out their face—just that cascade of silver-white hair that seemed to glow against the pillows. The room has the curtains drawn, only the dim bedside lamp... I can only see a head of messy silver-white hair emerging from the blanket's edge.
Christ. What the hell had I done?
I grabbed my wallet with trembling fingers, pulled out every bill inside—thirty thousand yuan in hundreds. This is the only "compensation" I can think of. It was pathetic, insulting even, but it was all I could offer. Some kind of acknowledgment that even if I couldn't remember it, I bore responsibility for whatever had happened here. I placed it carefully on the nightstand, arranging the bills with more care than they deserved, my fingers clumsy with a mixture of panic and something else I couldn't name.
Getting dressed was a disaster. The buttons on my shirt refused to cooperate, my fingers too unsteady to thread them properly. My belt hung loose because I couldn't seem to remember how the damn buckle worked. I put on my clothes quickly, not even buttoning my shirt properly. I looked like shit—like exactly what I was, a man fleeing the scene of his own fuck-up.
One last glance at the bed. At that silver hair catching the faint light. Still couldn't see the face clearly. Part of me wanted to cross back, to pull the blanket down, to see who I'd—
No. Better not to know. Better to leave it as a blank space, a mistake I could bury and forget.
I forced myself to move, crossing to the door on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else. My hand was on the handle when I paused, forehead dropping against the cool metal, trying to get my breathing under control. The door closes softly.
My memory of this night is still completely blank.
Nothing. The void remained absolute, and the not-knowing was eating me alive.
