Chapter 2 Running From The past

I didn’t wait for him to speak. I didn’t even think.

I shoved him away with both hands, hard enough to make him stumble, and turned on my heel before the shock could fade from his face. I didn’t care what expression he wore, or whether he called after me, all I knew was that I needed to run.

My pulse thundered in my ears as I bolted toward the elevators. The building suddenly felt too small, too suffocating, the air thick with his scent, smoky cedar, and rain, and something ancient that made my skin prickle. My heart refused to slow. My mind screamed at me to get out. I jabbed the elevator button again and again, the light flickering red, but the doors stayed stubbornly shut.

When I dared a glance over my shoulder, I saw him moving toward me, long strides, broad shoulders tense beneath his dark coat, eyes fixed on me like I was something fragile he couldn’t afford to lose.

“Miss, wait!” His voice was deep, resonant, a command that vibrated straight through my bones.

No. I couldn’t hear him. Not him.

I turned, my breath ragged. The elevators were too slow, I could feel him coming closer, so I spun toward the stairwell and threw the door open, taking the steps two, three at a time. My legs burned, but adrenaline numbed the pain. The stairwell echoed with my footfalls and his voice calling my name, getting closer with every floor.

“Please wait!”

He sounded angry now. Or desperate. I couldn’t tell which.

I burst out into the lobby and didn’t stop running. Security shouted after me as I shoved through the glass doors, the city air slapping me across the face. Rain pelted down, cold and sharp, plastering my hair to my skin. I didn’t care. I needed distance. Space. Anything that didn’t smell like him.

The pavement was slick beneath my shoes as I sprinted toward the subway entrance. I could hear the faint echo of his footsteps behind me, he was following. The Alpha King himself was following me.

The irony was almost laughable, if my heart wasn’t tearing itself apart in my chest.

I’d dreamed of this moment before, not the meeting, but the confrontation. In those dreams, I was strong, composed, unflinching. I looked him in the eye and told him exactly what I thought of him. Told him that he’d ruined everything, that I’d watched my home burn because of him.

But the moment I saw him, really saw him, my body had betrayed me.

My pulse had recognized him before my mind did. My wolf — the fractured thing inside me — had gone still, like it had been waiting for this. And then came that pull, that unbearable warmth in my chest, spreading through me like wildfire.

I couldn’t accept it. I wouldn’t.

Not him. Not Darius Kade.

The man who murdered my father.

The man whose name made packs bow and shudder, whose word could start or end wars. The Alpha King — my greatest enemy, my curse.

I reached the subway entrance and tore down the stairs, almost slipping on the wet steps. The roar of an approaching train grew louder. Please, just let me make it.

The doors were still open when I reached the platform. I dove inside, half-falling against the nearest pole. My lungs burned, and I turned just in time to see him appear at the bottom of the steps.

For a heartbeat, our eyes met.

Even across the crowd, even through the rain and noise, I saw it — confusion, recognition, and something else. Something raw.

He started toward me. “Wait!”

The doors chimed.

“Please—” he began, but his voice was cut off as the doors slid shut. He slammed a hand against the glass just as the train jolted forward.

The image seared itself into my mind: Darius Kade, the most powerful Alpha alive, standing on a crowded subway platform, rain dripping down his face, looking at me like he’d just lost something he didn’t understand.

And me — heart hammering, chest tight, staring back like a trapped animal.

The train picked up speed, and he disappeared into the blur of the tunnel.

I sank into a seat, gripping the edge so hard my knuckles turned white. My heart was beating so fast it hurt. My thoughts were a jumble — flashes of the past colliding with the present.

My father’s blood on the floor. The fire. The screaming. His cold eyes watching everything burn.

I pressed my hands against my temples. “No,” I whispered to myself. “No, it can’t be him. It can’t.”

My reflection in the window looked pale, haunted. The rhythmic clatter of the wheels blurred into white noise.

What was that feeling?

Why did my chest ache as if something vital had been torn from it? Why did I feel… empty, lost, even though I’d escaped him?

Darius Kade.

The man who’d killed my father.

The man who’d burned our home to ash and forced me to live in hiding.

And yet, seeing him again had done something I couldn’t explain. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t hate. It was something worse. Something that clawed at the edge of my sanity.

I knew exactly what it was.

The bond.

I closed my eyes, fighting back the nausea that rose in my throat. The train rattled on, and somewhere between one stop and the next, I realized I had no idea where I was going.

The station name that blinked across the screen above the doors wasn’t mine. My stomach dropped. “Oh, for god’s sake.” I’d gotten on the wrong train. Perfect.

I rode two more stops before jumping off and transferring to the right line, every passing second stretching my nerves tighter. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was still close, that if I looked over my shoulder, I’d find those glacial eyes staring back at me through the crowd.

By the time I reached my neighborhood, the sky had darkened completely. The rain had softened into a mist, clinging to my hair and lashes. I wrapped my arms around myself and walked quickly down the cracked pavement, trying to ignore the flickering streetlights.

“Lyra!”

I flinched—but it wasn’t Darius’s voice.

When I looked up, Fred was waving at me from across the street, his hood up and a grocery bag in one hand. Relief flooded me so hard I almost laughed.

“Fred,” I breathed, jogging to meet him.

Fred is the kind of man whose warmth draws people in. His eyes are a striking gray-blue, sharp and perceptive felt like they always stared into my soul. There’s always a faint shadow of stubble on his face, making him look rugged, as usual he was dressed casually but neatly: dark jeans, leather jackets, and boots.

He grinned when he saw me. “Hey, stranger. You look like hell. Job interview gone bad?” he asked as he ran his hand through his soft ash blond hair, which was wet from the rain.

“You could say that,” I muttered. My pulse was still too fast, my hands too cold.

He gave me a sympathetic look. “Come on, let’s get you out of the rain.”

Fred was one of the few wolves I could tolerate being around. We’d met in college, back when I still thought I could live like everyone else. He was one of the few people who’d never treated me like an outsider. Most wolves avoided me the moment they sensed something off. Hybrids don’t smell right to them. They could smell it, the faint wrongness that clung to my blood, the echo of two natures that didn’t belong together.

Our scent is… wrong. Not entirely wolf, not entirely human, something in between, something that doesn’t settle. Some say we smell like decay, like blood that’s been spilled and forgotten.

Most wolves look at me and see nothing but an abomination. A half-breed. A broken thing.

And they’re not wrong.

Hybrids like me don’t shift. We don’t have an inner wolf, no voice whispering in our heads, no claws or fur to call our own. We can run, heal, sense—but we’re missing the soul of what makes them whole. We’re echoes of two worlds that were never meant to mix.

But I’m worse.

I’m not just half wolf. I’m half vampire.

A creature born of night and blood. The kind of hybrid even legends refuse to acknowledge. The kind that shouldn’t exist.

No one knows. Not Fred. Not anyone. I can’t tell them. Because if I did, even someone like him, a kind wolf, would turn on me.

I’m a product of a love that should have never existed, and my parents lost their lives because of it, my birth killed my mother and my father was executed.

It wasn’t rare for supernatural species to have humans because in most cases their spawn would turn out to be either human or vampire or werewolf it was rare for a cross. Even more so in my case as far as I’m concerned I may be the only one.

It was the curse of both worlds and the belonging of neither.

And now the man who’d made my life a nightmare, the Alpha King himself, had looked at me as though he knew. As though he felt it too.