Chapter 1 - The Grip of the WolfMy pulse hammered against his scarred fingers like a trapped bird.
For eighty-nine days, Dominic Vale had been a ghost tangled in medical wiring. Now, his hand—heavy, calloused, and radiating dangerous heat—was locked around my wrist with a terrifying, vice-like strength. The monitors were no longer beeping in their predictable, soothing cadence; they were screaming a frantic, high-pitched symphony of chaos.
His eyes, dark as midnight over the Boston harbor, burned into mine. They weren't the clouded, unfocused eyes of someone just waking from a deep sleep. They were sharp, calculating, and instantly lethal.
“Don’t let her leave,” he rasped again, his voice like grinding stones, scraping up from a throat starved of air.
Before I could process the command—or the fact that he was talking about me—heavy footsteps thundered down the hallway. The encrypted glass doors of room 412 rattled.
The two federal agents in dark suits, stationed outside like grim sentinels, didn't even knock. They wrenched the door open, hands instantly diving inside their suit jackets toward concealed shoulder holsters.
Dominic’s grip on my wrist tightened so fiercely I gasped, but his eyes never left the doorway. With agonizing slowness, he released me, letting his hand drop back onto the crisp white sheet just as Agent Vance stepped into the sterile light, breathing heavily.
Vance froze. His eyes darted from the erratic heart monitor to Dominic’s face—to eyes that were wide, alert, and staring straight back at him.
“Well,” Dominic whispered, a dark, blood-tinged smirk touching the corner of his bruised lips, despite the agony radiating from his broken body. “Looks like the funeral was premature.”
Agent Vance’s face drained of color. He slowly pulled his hand out of his jacket, reached for his radio clip, and spoke three chilling words into the receiver:
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“The king is awake. Lock down the entire wing. Nobody enters. Nobody leaves.”
Outside the window, the Boston rain lashed harder against the glass, drowning out the sound of the world ending.
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