The Wolf-Fiancée
Description
One anonymous hour. One secret son. One lighthouse between love and the dark. When iron-willed COO-and hidden wolf-Mara Voss steals a single name-less hour in a fog-laced Shadowbinding, she leaves with nothing but a frayed silver ribbon... and, months later, a baby. Seven years on, her arranged marriage to a ruthless Alpha is days away when a human architect, Elias Kade-the cocky rival trying to "modernize" her lighthouse-stumbles into a warding circle that marks him the truth: Theo's father. Now the coast is a powder keg. PR knives out. A courthouse ambush. A witch with a legacy to reclaim. And a sea-ward that will take their child on Halloween unless both parents speak the truth and bind the light together.
Chapter 1
Oct 23, 2025
I signed the last page of a covenant I didn’t believe in and stared through the office glass at a city intent on devouring itself. Blackwater looked clean from up here— a grid of sodium lamps slicking the wet streets, the lighthouse throwing its white spine across the harbor— but the water kept its secrets; so did I.
There was a month until my wedding to an Alpha I hadn’t chosen. My son’s half-blood fever rode the moon like a riptide. And I had begun to fall for a brilliant, infuriating upstart—Elias Kade—the man trying to turn the ancient lighthouse that protected my child from death into a luxury gallery.
I pressed my forehead to the cool pane, breathed brine and printer toner, and let the weight stack where I could carry it. Then I did the one thing I almost never allowed: I looked backward—the first step on the road that led here.
The fog came back first.
***
Fog swallowed the headland like a closed fist. Braziers spat orange light, jack-o’-lanterns brooded along the path, and the lighthouse sawed the dark in slow, white circles.
I climbed barefoot with the ribbon smoking in my palm, my dress black as a threat and my braid tight as a vow. I hadn’t come for love or fate. I had come for feral, no-strings sex—one hour, then gone. The Shadowbinding was clean that way: faces blurred, voices veiled, wolves rendered barren for the span of the rite. Hunger without consequence, a mercy with rules.
The bells tolled twelve, iron braided into the air.
A shape burst from the fog and struck me—shoulder to chest—hard enough to steal breath. His apology vanished into mist as the charm smeared his features to watercolor. All it left me was scent and pulse.
He smelled of rain, fresh-cut wood, and warm skin. My mouth went dry, and my body answered like a struck match.
“Did I crash a haunted tour?” he asked, trying for humor. “What are you—some kind of witch?”
I smiled. “If I were, you’d already be on your knees.” I tipped my chin, tasting him in the damp air. “First time?”
“First time walking without a map.” No mockery—brave, or pretending well.
I caught his wrist and set his palm to my throat. “Feel that,” I said. “The pulse is steady. Trust it.”
He swallowed. “So this is… actual magic.”
I took his mouth like a door closing, like a claim. He answered like a storm breaking—careful, then hungry with nothing to prove. Even blurred, he was beautiful up close: young, reckless, and mine for an hour.
I set the pace and he kept it. Months of self-denial turned to fuel. I pressed him back against the cold stone, fog beading on our skin; climbed him with my body, wrapped a thigh around his hips, and drove until his heartbeat tripped to meet mine.
He laughed once—shocked, delighted—and the sound emptied a quiet, lonely place in me. I wanted swiftness, not sweetness; the ache burned out of my bones and poured into heat. My nails raked his back and he shuddered—not with the low wolf sound I knew but with a human catch of air—and instead of flinching he leaned into it, as if pain proved he was alive.
The world shrank to skin and tide. The ocean hammered the rocks below, the lighthouse beam counting our minutes. He filled the quiet with small, helpless nothings the fog would keep; I answered with my hands and the sounds control could not contain.
Then the bells ended and witchlight guttered. The ribbon lay ash-black in my palm. I reached for him and found only fog and the taste of him on my mouth. No face, no name. Perfect and safe—exactly what I’d come for.
I went down the cliff path the way I’d come—unhurried and unmarked.
Morning became coffee, brine, and paper. Voss & Black hummed under my hand. I was new to the chair—two months in—and the yard already matched my rhythm. Men who tested authority got cut to size, schedules snapped into place.
I gutted a storage delay, plugged a procurement leak, and moved a crane crew off Pier Seven before it snarled the trawlers. Work respected clean direction—I kept it that way.
Olga breezed into my office without knocking—small, sharp, smiling with leverage. She dropped a mint on my desk. “You look human today.”
Soon days stacked like crates on the dock. But something wasn’t right. Once, standing in my bathroom, I began to count backward from my last cycle—and the numbers refused to comply.
Fact arrived at midnight in a white-tiled mirror. The test strip felt cheap and priestly between my fingers. I listened to the apartment breathe—the hum of the fridge, the sweep of a car—and watched three minutes drown.
Two lines bloomed, bold as wounds. The world tilted; I forced it level again. I broke the mirror with my fist. Glass spidered outward; blood beaded and halted under the wolf’s will.
“Impossible!” I told the shards. “The rite makes us barren. That’s the point.”
My plans stood at attention: career, truce, dockyards tight as drumskin—not a time for a child. I rinsed my hands already clean and slid the test into a drawer as if burying a sin.
Memory—traitor—sweetened. His careful first touch, the shaky laugh, the red crescents my nails must have left, and how he hadn’t healed fast the way a wolf would. The thought rose cold and bright: What if he wasn’t a wolf. What if—
“No,” I said to the face laced with cracks. “That is not—no.”
Outside, the lighthouse bell tolled three, low and deliberate, the ward acknowledging what lived where it should not. The sound went through the fracture and through me.
Choices lined up like knives: pretend this storm was only weather, crawl back to the temple and beg mercy I didn’t trust, or draw my own lines before anyone else did.
I lifted my chin at the broken mirror. “Fine,” I told every shard. “We’ll do this on my ground.”
But when I closed my eyes, a mouth I had never seen returned like the tide, heat ghosted my skin, and the question I did not want grew anyway, black and silver as the sea: What if he was human.
The Wolf-Fiancée
30 Chapters
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