The night carried that scent that comes before a storm that never quite breaks: metal, old rain, and something else… something that tasted like an omen. In Rome, scents always speak before people do. This one, in particular, announced blood—or decisions that carve themselves into the skin from the inside.
From the top of the underground club—a fortress of glass and shadows built over the hills—the city gleamed like a corrupted altar. The lights resembled trembling candles in a ritual everyone pretended not to see. And I, locked inside that private balcony, felt the weight of every single one of them.
The music vibrated… but not in my ears. My body was listening to something else. A pulse that wasn't human, insinuating itself into my bones like an ancient, dangerous echo.
I hadn't wanted to come back here. I hadn't wanted to breathe the cold air perfumed with old money that wrapped itself around my family—that family that had raised me the way one raises a stolen jewel: with care, but without love. When you're born into a mafia dynasty, freedom is a ridiculous disguise; everything you do is written before you even learn how to read.
And yet, none of that unsettled me as much as him.
I saw him leaning against the railing of the adjacent balcony, almost fused with the darkness. The club's dim light barely brushed his profile, but that minimal glow was enough to steal my breath. His stillness wasn't that of a predator lying in wait. It was worse. It was the stillness of someone who expects nothing… because he knows everything already belongs to him.
His eyes—so dark they seemed to pull light inward—burned as if a storm lived inside them, one only he knew how to control.
Lysander Vólkov.
The Alpha without a family.
The shadow my uncles mentioned only when business was on the verge of collapse. The man—the creature—who, according to rumors, had slaughtered his own pack. The mafia loves monsters… but it hates not being able to control them.
When he lifted his gaze, I had the absurd sensation that he was tearing a secret straight from my skin.
That was my first mistake: holding his eyes.
The second mistake was believing I could remain calm.
Because with an almost imperceptible movement—or perhaps only a shift in his breathing—he stopped being a distant stranger. He became a presence that knew how to dismantle me without ever touching me. The air between us tightened, warm, electric, alive.
He walked toward me with that brutal elegance possessed only by predators fully aware of their own strength. Each step seemed to echo through the club's foundations, as if the entire building recognized who ruled here.
"You shouldn't be here," he said.
His voice wasn't a sound; it was a vibration I felt directly in my ribs, as if it were calling to me from the inside. There was no threat in it.
Worse: there was recognition.
"Neither should you," I replied, because I knew blood calls to blood, and if I showed fear, I would be his.
The shadow of a smile—small, dangerous—curved his lips.
"You belong to another city," he whispered. "Another war."
"And you belong to none," I shot back.
Third mistake.
Attacking a man who is not exactly a man.
The atmosphere tightened as if someone had stretched the air to its breaking point. For a moment, I could have sworn the music downstairs stopped playing. Or maybe it was just fear biting into my senses.
When I blinked, he was closer. Too close.
I didn't see him move; it simply… happened. Space yielded to him. Distance became impossible. And the heat of his body—inhuman, intense, like that of a wild animal—brushed my skin through the air.
"You know who I am," he murmured.
"I know enough."
I lied.
I knew nothing.
I had only read half-written reports filled with torn bodies, howls caught on security cameras, red zones marked on maps where there was always one body missing.
"And yet, you don't run," he continued, with that calm that felt like a claw sinking beneath my skin.
"I don't usually."
Fourth mistake: the truth.
His eyes flared—not as a simple reflection of the club's lights, but like embers awakening deep within a dark forest. An amber glow that did not flicker, alive and feral, as if he himself were the fire no one could extinguish.
In that flash, I understood the truth with the cruel clarity of a revelation: the rumors were real. All of them. He was real.
The ceiling lights trembled with an electric hum, and a sharp explosion tore through the enforced silence, followed by another, closer one that made the beams shake. Screams. Orders cut off mid-sentence. Heavy footsteps pounding up the stairs. And within that chaos, I recognized voices I thought I'd left behind—voices of blood and family.
My body reacted before my mind did, as if a part of me—one I didn't know existed—understood that whatever was coming through those doors had not come to negotiate.
"It's my family," I whispered. "They came for me."
He inhaled… and something changed. A whisper. A muscle tightening. A shadow hardening in his expression.
"No," he said. "They came for me."
He turned toward the railing, and in that moment I saw him clearly for the first time. His pupils narrowed. His shoulders tensed beneath the black shirt. The veins in his hands pulsed, as if something were pushing from the inside, trying to break through the skin.
"Lysander…" I began.
I couldn't finish.
The club doors burst open. Three men from my family stormed in, shouting, weapons raised, fury masking their faces. They were looking for someone.
Him.
Me.
Both of us.
Lysander took a step forward.
Just one.
And fear became physical—a blunt impact that slammed into my chest, as if the air itself had decided to crush me. I felt a чуж foreign heartbeat in my ribs, a pressure that wasn't mine, but came from the presence standing before me.
Lysander wasn't looking at the weapons aimed at us. Nor at the men shouting his name with trembling voices. No. His attention was fixed slightly higher, on the vulnerable curve of their throats, where skin pulses with life and betrays itself.
That detail—that brutal, instinctive, predatory fixation—chilled me more than any gunshot. Because I understood then that he didn't see enemies.
He saw prey.
And I was trapped in the middle, breathing the same air as the beast that had just awakened.
"I won't allow," he growled, his voice no longer entirely human, "anyone to touch you."
I didn't know what to say. Too many questions crashed into me at once, burning like hot glass beneath my skin. Why was he protecting me? How did he know my name? What the hell was I to him?
Before I could even organize a single thought, a gunshot shattered the window behind us, and the glass exploded into a rain of gleaming fragments, like small knives falling from the sky.
I didn't even have time to scream.
Lysander moved with a speed that did not belong to the human world and shoved me against the wall. It didn't hurt—but the force was so absolute it made one thing painfully clear: if he had wanted to, he could have crushed my bones without effort.
He stood in front of me, shielding me like a living wall—hot, brutal, unyielding. A boundary that could not be crossed.
His fingers curled.
I saw it clearly, far too close to ignore: something gleamed beneath his skin. First a silver line. Then another. Then the flash of bone.
They weren't nails.
They weren't human hands.
They were claws—breathing, growing, claiming territory.
It was the beast.
The killer.
The Alpha without a pack.
The man capable of ending this night… or beginning it all over again.
And in that instant, I understood that all of his power—that storm he carried beneath his skin—was aimed at my enemies…
Or at me, if he decided I was one of them.
"Lysander," I whispered, because I didn't know what else to do, because my voice was the only part of me that still obeyed. "You don't have to—"
I was cut off by a sound that was not human—a deep, rough exhalation, almost a roar forced to remain inside, chained beneath his flesh.
"Stay still," he ordered.
The air changed. It smelled of gunpowder, fresh fear, skin tightening just before it tears.
My men—my family, my sentence—reached the balcony and froze when they saw him transforming. Not fully. Not completely. Just enough for death to brush their throats before ripping them open.
And Lysander smiled.
Slowly.
Dangerously.
With the smile of a beast that has chosen its war—and has no intention of retreating.
"You chose not to run," he said, without taking his eyes off them. "Now there's no turning back."
And then he attacked.