Chapter 2: The Wolf god
Vivian Grey’s POV
The moment I woke, a dull ache throbbed through my neck in time with my pulse. I didn’t move yet. Something warm covered nearly every part of me, heavy in a way that should have felt smothering and instead felt like the safest I’d been in days. That should have scared me more than it did.
There was a thin trail of warmth along my cheek too, running from under my eye to the corner of my mouth, like someone had pressed their face there a moment too long.
Then the memories came back, all out of order. The forest. Gwen screaming. The alarm. That reddish wolf. A pair of green eyes locked on mine right before everything went dark.
I gasped and my eyes flew open.
He was the first thing I saw.
Blue eyes, close enough that I could count every lash, fixed on me like I was something he hadn’t decided about yet.
"Who are you?" My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to.
"Where did you come from?"
"Stop," he said, low, in an accent I couldn’t place anywhere.
And I did. My body simply listened, before I’d even told it to.
I don’t know how that’s possible. He hadn’t spoken a word of English, but somehow I’d understood every syllable of it anyway, the way you understand a song in a language you’ve never learned. My wolf went still with me, watching him through my eyes. She wasn’t afraid. If anything, she seemed almost glad, which made me angrier than anything he’d said so far.
"Your mate," she said quietly.
Hell no, I told her.
He wasn’t even looking at me when he muttered it. "Why would the Goddess send me a mate now? Is this her idea of a peace offering, after taking my Luna from me?" His mouth curled, no warmth in it anywhere. "Then she’s about to learn I don’t accept gifts from thieves."
His hand found my jaw and tightened until it bordered on pain, turning my face up so he could study it properly, like he was confirming something he already hated.
"Do you know what she took from me to make room for you?" His voice dropped lower, almost gentle, which somehow made it worse. "No. Of course you don’t. You’re just the apology nobody asked for, wrapped up and delivered like I’m supposed to be grateful."
"Mate? Who was your mate? What gods are you even talking about?"
"Stop talking, woman!"
I shut my mouth instantly. The command hit something in me I didn’t recognize, some instinct that listened before my pride could catch up and be furious about it.
"Let’s establish a few facts," he said, voice flat. "I’m not letting you go. You might as well accept that now, because your odds of walking out of here alive are not good."
He said it the way you’d mention the weather. Like none of it cost him anything. It cost me everything though, and I hated that some part of me had already started flinching at the idea that this was the same man who’d just called me his.
His hand fisted in my hair and pulled, not gently, until his breath was right against my face. I closed my eyes. Fear and confusion and something I refused to name were all fighting for space in my chest at once, and I couldn’t sort out which one was winning.
He breathed me in slowly, a low sound rolling out of his chest that I felt in my own before I even registered hearing it. My body answered him before my mind had any say in the matter.
"As tempting as a mating bond is, and I know exactly what they’re hoping I’ll do, I’m not going to kill you," he said. "I don’t know what you are to me yet. I’m not falling into their trap either. I won’t mark you. I won’t mate you. For all I know you’re one of theirs, sent here to slit my throat the second I’m fool enough to fall asleep beside you."
"And even if you’re not," he added, quieter, crueler, "know now that you will never be her. I won’t pretend otherwise just because the Goddess thinks a replacement settles a debt."
Each sentence took something from me I hadn’t realized I still had left to lose.
My wolf made a small, broken sound in the back of my mind, hurt that he could even imagine us doing that to him. It was a strange kind of grief, mourning a betrayal that hadn’t happened and never would.
"I don’t know what any of this means," I whispered, barely holding my voice together. "But if you don’t want me, just let me go."
He didn’t answer for a long time. Long enough that the silence started doing more damage than his words had. Where I come from, mates aren’t a metaphor. They’re closer to a sentence, something passed down and carried out. Rejecting one doesn’t just hurt. It carves a piece out of you that never grows back the same shape. He would survive without me. I wasn’t sure I’d survive without him, and hating myself for that didn’t make it less true.
"Whether you’re one of them or not," he said finally, his voice dropping into something darker, "you were meant for me. If you’re with them, I’ll show you exactly why that was a mistake. If you’re not, then..."
He never finished it. He didn’t need to. Whatever was left unsaid sat in the air anyway, heavy and certain.
"But you’re not leaving," he said. "Not now. Not ever."
My pulse climbed into my throat. One breath he was pushing me away like I was something dangerous, the next he was talking like I already belonged to him completely, and I couldn’t decide which version of him frightened me more.
"Why?" I snapped, because it was the only word I trusted myself to say without my voice breaking.
He just looked at me. A hundred questions were stacking up behind my teeth with nowhere to go. Who did he think I worked for. What trap. Why claim me in one breath and reject me in the next.
I picked the only one I thought he might actually answer.
"What’s your name?"
Something shifted behind his eyes. Then a smirk, sharp enough to cut.
"I’ll humor you," he said, leaning in until his voice landed right against my ear, low and almost intimate. "You can call me the Lupus Deus."
Everything in me went still.
The Lupus Deus.
"Oh my God." The words slipped out before I could stop them. "This cannot be happening."
My wolf, traitor that she is, didn’t even flinch. I shoved a wall up between us before she could do something humiliating, like throw herself at the literal god who’d just admitted he might kill me. If I let go of myself even a little, I wasn’t sure what was left of me to find afterward.
I should have known the second I opened my eyes. I’d let his face distract me from everything else in the room. Idiot. Stupid, careless idiot.
The room itself was enormous, a bed against the far wall, the center of the floor cleared out like someone had once needed the open space for something I didn’t want to picture. The walls were painted a flat, suffocating black. No photographs anywhere. No books. Nothing that told me who actually lived here, or who had.
I found a door and went for it.
Locked.
Of course it was.
I needed out of this room, away from him, more badly than I had ever needed anything in my life.
There was a second door, heavier looking. Maybe an exit.
He sat up on the bed and watched me, daring me without saying a single word. Go on. Try it.
I looked away instead, my mind already scrambling for another way out.
Maybe this hadn’t even been his room to begin with. Maybe it had belonged to someone before me.
The thought landed harder than I expected it to. If this had been hers, the woman Gwen had told me about, the one the Goddess supposedly stole from him, that would explain the bare walls. No photographs. No books. Maybe keeping anything of hers around had hurt worse than losing it the second time.
I sat with that thought longer than I meant to, somewhere between guilt I had no right to and something else I refused to name.
He stood and walked toward a third door I hadn’t even noticed, which did nothing for my confidence about ever finding my way out of this place. I didn’t follow him. I didn’t trust my own legs to hold me up, let alone trust him.
"Just so we’re clear," he said, pausing near the door without turning around. "If you’re working for them, sending word out won’t help you. And if I find out you’re in contact with them, goddess help you, Vivian, I will kill you."
Vivian.
He said it like he’d always known it. Like I’d never had a single chance to keep it from him. I hadn’t told him my name. I was certain of that.
I will kill you.
He said it so plainly it took a second for the words to actually reach me, and when they did, the fear came in cold and total, nothing like the fear I’d felt up to that point. This wasn’t a threat meant to scare me into behaving. He meant it. My own mate, standing three feet away, had just told me exactly how this could end.
Them. Who in the hell were they.
The door creaked open. Something in my chest finally unwound enough that I looked up and met his eyes properly, that strange mixed blue that didn’t look like any color I had a name for.
Neither of us said anything. I already knew what I looked like. Pale. Wrecked. Out of fight, even if I wasn’t out of fear.
Whatever decision he was making, he made it in that silence.
"You can call me Zaliver," he said, and then he was gone, the door closing behind him before I could decide whether I was relieved or not that he’d left.
"Zaliver." I said it out loud once he was gone, just to feel the shape of it in my own mouth, and hated how right it felt there.
Zaliver.
The Lupus Deus.
My mate, who had just promised to kill me if I gave him a reason.
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