Chapter 1: Ruins of Desire
The air in the moonlit ruins was cold, and it smelled of wet stone and dead leaves. Barnaby’s nose twitched, sorting through a thousand lesser scents. He shouldn’t be here. The old temple grounds were forbidden, everyone said so, whispering about cursed earth and sleeping magic. But the brambles here grew the plumpest blackberries, and Bunby’s nieces had begged for a pie.
His foraging sack was half-full when the new scent hit him.
It rolled through the clearing like a physical wave—musky, hot, layered with the pungent tang of male rut and something medicinal, bitter. Wolfsbane. His rabbit instincts screamed predator, danger, run. Every fiber in his small frame tensed to bolt. But beneath the aggression was another note: pain. A feverish, sour warmth that spoke of sickness.
He crept forward, ears straining.
A massive form was sprawled across the broken altar stone, one arm dangling over the side. A man. No—a shifter. The sheer size of him, the breadth of shoulder under a torn linen shirt, spoke of a potent primal form. Lion, maybe. Or bear. Moonlight caught the sharp angle of a jaw clenched tight, the sheen of sweat on a neck corded with strain.
Barnaby hesitated, one foot on a loose stone. He should leave. Get a warden. This was above his paygrade.
A low groan shattered the silence, a sound of pure animal agony. The man convulsed, his head lolling to the side, revealing a face of brutal, aristocratic beauty now twisted in torment. Something inside Barnaby’s chest, the part that couldn’t ignore a wounded creature, gave a sharp tug.
“Hey,” he whispered, voice swallowed by the ruins.
No response. He inched closer.
“Mister? You’re… you’re in the forbidden stretch. Are you okay?”
Up close, the scent was overwhelming. It wasn’t just illness. It was a heat-cycle, a rut gone wrong, poisoned maybe. The wolfsbane. It could send a shifter’s biology into a lethal frenzy.
Barnaby reached out a trembling hand, meaning to check the stranger’s forehead.
Iron-hard fingers snapped around his wrist.
Barnaby yelped as he was yanked forward, off his feet. The world spun. His back hit the cold, engraved marble of the altar, the breath knocking out of him. The massive body was over him, pinning him, a furnace of muscle and madness. Wild, gold-flecked eyes stared down, but they saw nothing, recognized nothing. Only need.
“Please,” Barnaby gasped, shoving against a chest that felt like carved rock. “You’re sick. Let me go, I can get help—”
A ragged growl was his only answer. The man buried his face against Barnaby’s throat, a harsh inhale that shook his entire frame. The touch, despite the terror, sent a jolt straight through Barnaby’s core. His own body, traitorously, responded to the raw dominance, the pheromones flooding the air. A dizzying, dangerous warmth pooled in his belly.
“No,” Barnaby breathed, a weak protest.
The man’s hand clamped on his hip, holding him still. There was no gentleness. It was a claim. Barnaby’s thoughts fragmented into sensory overload: the scrape of rough linen, the shocking heat of skin, the crushing weight that was also, inexplicably, a shelter. His fear spiraled into something else, something breathless and electrifying. He hated it. He arched into it.
“Stop,” he whimpered, turning his face away.
A whisper against his ear, raw and guttural. “Mine.”
The word wasn’t for him. It was for the night, for the moon, for the fever dream. But it sealed something. Barnaby’s resistance shattered. The world narrowed to the cold stone beneath him and the incendiary heat above. When the man—the lion—took him, it was with a desperate, brutal urgency that felt less like violence and more like drowning. Bunby clung to him, nails digging into muscle, his own quiet cries lost in the symphony of grunts and the rustle of dying leaves.
It was over as suddenly as it began.
The crushing weight slackened. The feverish heat ebbed, leaving a sticky chill. Leo Rex, King of the Shifters, unconscious once more, slumped heavily upon him, his breath evening into a deep, exhausted rhythm.
Barnaby lay trapped, heart hammering against his ribs. The pain began to register, a deep, throbbing ache. The scent of their joining, of rut and rabbit and royal musk, hung thick in the air. Shame washed over him, hot and immediate, followed by a wave of stunned disbelief.
He wiggled out from under the colossal body, his movements shaky and sore. He scrambled to his feet, pulling his clothes on with trembling hands. He had to run. He had to forget this. The man would never know; he’d been lost to the poison.
But as Barnaby turned to flee, the moonlight shifted, glinting off a heavy signet ring on the stranger’s limp hand. A crest. A lion’s head encircled by thorns.
Barnaby’s blood went cold. He knew that seal. Everyone did.
He stumbled back, tripping over a root, and ran. He ran until the brambles tore his clothes and his lungs burned, the half-full sack of blackberries abandoned in the dirt.
He didn’t stop until he locked the door of his tiny burrow-home behind him. He slid to the floor, hugging his knees, trying to silence the roar in his ears. It was just a terrible, random mistake. A secret he would bury.
Weeks later, the nausea started. The sensitivity to smell. The deep, unshakeable fatigue.
And the gentle, fluttering kicks, first one, then two, then three, beginning low in his belly.