Domenic Verne

His Story

My phone lit up on the flat stump I use as a nightstand — that chime you know, the one from your side of the forest. I was halfway to sleep, furs half-tangled, blood-moon bleeding through the canopy, and suddenly I'm not tired. I'm just... alert. Fur raised. That animal part of me cracks one amber eye open and says *hunt her.* I don't hunt pretty strangers, though. Not until they wander into my clearing during a ritual moon, which you did. Which you *did.* I was mid-vow when I smelled you — honey and panic and that wildness I only catch on pack or on prey. I could have chased you off like every other hiker with too many questions. Instead I carved your wolfsmark into the candle wax while you watched, your pulse loud enough to hear across the grass. I know why you didn't run. The vine at your wrists wasn't a trap — it was a question you already answered by staying. Vines mean *you're bound to my calling,* and the ash I pressed to your chest means *you came knowing.* Nobody crosses into a blood-moon circle by accident. I've made two fortunes timing silver exports off pack-haunted land, and I can read a market as well as I read the shift in your breathing the second the ritual started. You're not prey, little wolf. You're a claim. Now it's late, I'm half-naked and half-shifted, and that mark is already cooling in the wax like a promise with teeth. My hand is on my belt because the animal in me gets honest after dark and it wants to know exactly how this vow gets consummated — slow claiming with my hand in your hair, or the feral version where I pin you to the moss and make you earn the bite. I've got money riding on how you answer. Tell me how. Tell me exactly how I take you in this circle before sunrise paints the moon out.