365 Days to Bond With the Cursed Beast King

"He's a very expensive lawyer, Zenaida," my uncle said, not looking up as he straightened the cuffs of his white shirt. "And he assures me that every document signed after your father's accident is legally binding."

"He's a forgery artist with a bar license, Robert," I snapped, leaning both hands on the mahogany desk. "And you paid him with money you stole from my mother's estate forty-eight hours before her funeral."

The study was empty now. A shell of the room where my parents used to sit by the fire.

Faded rectangular shapes marked the dusty wallpaper where landscape paintings had been pulled down to sell off.

The brass lamps were dusty, the rugs rolled up and gone, leaving only stripped floorboards and the stale smell of damp plaster.

Three months of working late-night shifts at a shady downtown club had taught me how to read a room before danger read me, but standing in my childhood home felt like drowning in slow motion.

Robert finally met my eyes, his face a mask of false pity. "You've always had an overactive imagination. Just like your mother. You think the world owes you an explanation when things go wrong."

"I think you owe me twenty million dollars and the deed to this house," I said, slamming the folder on the desk.

The folder contained bank statements, flagged wire transfers, audited receipts I'd spent six weeks piecing together between tray-carrying rounds at the club.

"Sign the release form, or this goes straight to the district attorney at nine tomorrow morning."

Robert didn't flinch or reach for the folder either.

Instead, his right hand slowly drifted down, his fingers closing over the signet ring on his pinky. It was my mother's ring-an antiqued gold band carved with a strange crest of twisted vines and a split key.

A ring he had taken off her dresser before her body was even cold.

I opened my mouth to demand he take it off, but the words died in my throat.

The gold metal of the ring flared. A sudden, unnatural warmth pulsed beneath Robert's thumb, casting a strange faint aura against his pale skin.

Robert froze. His calm demeanor cracked for a fraction of a second, his eyes darting toward the water-stained plaster ceiling a half-second before the air in the room thinned to nothing.

The atmospheric pressure plunged as an anchor dropped into an abyss. My ears popped painfully. The brass desk lamp flickered once, twice, and died.

"What did you-" I started, but my voice had no air to carry it.

The water stain directly above us split down the center. It curled outward as a crack tore through reality. The room contracted, the study shrinking to a pinprick of light behind my eyes.

Then the floor vanished.

I fell.

There was no wind, no sound, only a weightless drop through a void.

Heat hit me in waves. Through the dark, a sudden golden glint flashed past-dozens of unseen, vertical eyes opening and closing in the shadow.

I braced for the impact of the floor, reaching out wildly into nothing.

The void spat me out.

I slammed straight into a mountain of warm muscle, and dark fabric.

The impact knocked the breath out of my lungs. I skidded, my knees dug into something hard and cold, my hands instinctively slamming down onto a solid chest to stop my momentum.

Papers scattered around us, fluttering down across black tile floors.

"Assassin!" a voice roared.

I scrambled backward out of survival reflex, my heels catching on the hem of a cloak.

My eyes whipped around, taking in the scene.

We were in the middle of a wide, cavernous hall carved from dark stone, lit by sputtering iron braziers that threw long shadows against the walls.

At the center sat a colossal, circular stone table. And around that table stood seven imposing, armed figures.

They weren't human.

Half-shifted features bristled in the torchlight-thick fur along jawlines, claws extending from gloved fingers, ears flattened back like cornered predators.

A woman with slitted, panther-like eyes drew a curved blade from her hip; a giant of a man with the wide shoulders of a bear gripped a double-headed battleaxe.

Steel screeched as seven weapons cleared their scabbards, all pointing straight at my heart.

My chest heaved, my hand dropping to my jacket pocket out of instinct. I had no mace. No knife. Nothing.

"Don't move," the panther woman hissed. "Give the order, My Liege, and I'll take her head where she sits."

I looked down.

I wasn't just on the floor. I was in the lap of the man sitting on the central throne.

He was tall, powerfully built, his shoulders easily filling the carved back of the seat.

Dark hair fell across a brow carved with deep, exhausted lines, and dark scale-like scars ran along his forearms where his sleeves were pushed up.

My palms were pressed directly against his bare skin, right at the open V of his collarbone.

The man beneath me remained still.

"Get off," I whispered, my chin coming up out of habit even as seven blades hovered inches from my neck.

He didn't push me away. Maybe he couldn't.

His hand rose slowly, hovering half an inch above my waist, trembling with restraint. He tilted his head back, looking directly into my eyes.

The dark, stormy brown of his irises dissolved.

In a heartbeat, his eyes changed to a molten gold-the color of a dragon breaking through the surface.

His breath hitched, as if a decade of ice had just broken inside his chest.

"Mate," he rasped.