LUCIAN’S POV
By the time I found Jack, the forest had already begun dying around him.
Leaves blackened on branches he’d passed beneath. Grass curled inward, brittle and gray.
The air carried the reek of blood, burned magic, and something deeper—something that belonged neither to wolf nor man but to the kind of evil that had become synonymous with Catherine.
Jack crouched in a hollow between two old sycamores. His massive, corrupted wolf form hunched over a half-crushed boulder as black blood dripped steadily from his wounds.
His breathing came unevenly, each exhale rattling through his chest like broken glass dragged over stone.
For one moment, I did not move. I simply looked at him.
I had known Jack Draven when arrogance still looked human on him. I had known him as cruel, reckless, hungry for power, desperate for approval he would never admit he wanted.
But the creature before me now wore only fragments of that man.
Marcus had not saved his son.
