Claimed by Drago Wolf (Magnificent Beasts Book 1)

by Ana Calin

  She drinks and turns. I slap my back to the wall to avoid being discovered, tuning up all my senses. I can hear the swooshing sound of her steps as she walks upstairs, the floorboards creaking slightly under her feet. I hear it when she turns on the water in the bathroom. I climb the brick walls, using the ivy and my claws.

  She’s already under the shower when I push the window up and slip in, closing it quietly. She turns, worry on her face, but I hide behind the drywall separating her room from the bathroom.

  By all devils. Who would have thought? The great Casanova Drago Wolf taken with a girl like a teenager with his first crush. Usually I lose interest in a woman as soon as my cock is out of her and the condom off, but with Arianna, I didn’t even think of using one. And now, instead of forgetting all about her, I stalk her. Is this my punishment for having used other women? Something deep inside me says it is, that I deserve this and worse. That Arianna Parker will mean more and more to me until she becomes a Scarlet Letter burnt onto my heart, a painful obsession.

  The water now runs faster, steam enveloping Arianna’s shape behind the glass. A liquid ripple goes through my eyes as I approach, adjusting my vision to pierce through the steam and see the delicious shape of her body clearly.

  By all devils, my cock is painfully hard. I’m in my wolf form, covered by fur, my cock sticking out, veined and strong. I want to pierce her right now, from behind, push her tits against the tiles as my dick slides between her thighs.

  I groan, grabbing my cock. I can’t help stroking as I watch her rub the body wash onto her skin, foam licking her body as it travels down. I watch her stretch her arms, her palms plastered to the tiles to let the water wash away the foam, her head tilted back with her eyes closed. Water pours down her mouthwatering body, rivulets caressing those breasts and that ass that I’m dying to grab while I fuck her.

  “Damn it.” I squeeze my cock, pre-cum glistening on its tip. I bite my lip, the veins swelling all over my body. I’m not gonna be able to resist, I’m a moment away from walking into the shower with her and sticking my dick inside her pussy.

  This is sick, this isn’t right. I should be staying away from her.

  My cock twitches, begging for release. She’s mine, the beast inside growls, she’s mine to take.

  “Not without her consent,” I growl, and Arianna’s back stiffens. But I’m out the window before she can turn around.

  I’m back in the bushes by the time she appears naked at the window. I didn’t have the time to close it, the curtains flapping in the wind. Her big round tits glisten white and wet in the night, forcing me to masturbate like crazy. I jerk off, biting into my lip until I taste blood in order to keep quiet, the veins swollen all over me as I cum for her.

  I imagine her under the shower, bent to my will, her buttocks full and white as alabaster against my wet black fur. I imagine fucking her like those devil beasts take women in gothic paintings. Still, I may be a devil, but she is the one possessing me.

  CHAPTER IV

  Drago

  “Here you go.”

  I take the drink from Nero’s hand, expecting him to sit by my side on the couch. But he rests his elbow on the mantelpiece, his white shirt rolled up to reveal his strong forearms, drink in hand. There’s no fire in the fireplace because it’s warm outside, birds chirping like fucking messengers of a spring crush.

  Fuck, I’m crushing for the first time in my life, and it’s almost certainly unrequited. Otherwise she would have written to me by now, like all the others, wouldn’t she? I think I checked my phone a thousand times by now. This must be divine punishment for all the rich chicks I fucked without sentiment.

  “Argh.” I down my drink, my jaw clenching as it burns its way to my gut. It’s a special brandy for supernaturals that Nero makes himself, and it’s the only thing that can actually get us drunk.

  “I can’t help you unless you tell me exactly what happened,” Nero says in his fatherly voice.

  “I feel so stupid.” I lean forward with elbows on my knees, running my hands through my disheveled hair.

  I can sense the worry in Nero’s eyes. It makes fucking sense, he’s never seen me like this before. I sit here shirtless, my skin like bronze in the daylight, the tattoos around my biceps flexing with my every move. All useless, the muscles, the tattoos, the bad boy face, because the one woman I want doesn’t want me back. My other clients wrote to me for days after we fucked, trying to impress me with their wit and personalities, and to get me to break my one-time rule, but not Arianna. It’s been over twenty-four hours, and I haven’t heard from her. I hold out my tumbler to Nero.

  “Can I get another one?”

  “Whatever will loosen your tongue.” He pours more brandy, and offers it back to me.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m listening.”

  It’s easier to talk if I don’t look at him, but I’m aware of his every move and facial expression as he listens, his eyebrows knitted in a big-brother frown, one elbow on the mantelpiece.

  I tell him about last night, keeping the spicy details to myself, claiming they’re irrelevant, but it turns out that very few of them actually are.

  “Listen, Drago,” Nero says when I’m done, his voice particularly warm, but I hear the alarm behind it. “I know this is uncomfortable to you, but I have to ask you a few things.”

  “Ask away.”

  “I need to know exactly how you started feeling this special attraction to this woman.”

  I down the brandy, my lips stretching over my teeth. In my mind, I go through every moment since the one I walked into the hotel lounge, to the moment when I first laid eyes on her.

  “She popped out to me on first sight,” I begin. “Because she’s a special kind of pretty. Round, full-moon face, white skin, dimples. Powder blue eyes that shine like jewels, and a small mouth. If you look at her longer she pulls you in like a witch.”

  “And when did you start desiring her?”

  I squint at the empty fireplace as I recollect. “I find all women attractive, that’s why I can fuck any of them. But Arianna, she was—Yes, I remember when it struck me how special she was. I walked to her to inspect the goods up close, like I always do. Then it hit me.”

  “What exactly hit you? It’s important.”

  “That she not only had a gorgeous face, but a drop-dead sexy body, too.” I press my lips together, visualizing her big tits and her ass, but I refuse to mention it to Nero. I can’t bear the thought of sharing her even in words. “This woman could have any man she wants, hell, she could get paid for sex herself, big bucks. But she doesn’t know it. She’s completely oblivious to her power over men.”

  “Maybe she only has power over you,” Nero says.

  I hitch my phone from the pocket of my jeans and search Arianna’s social media profile. She doesn’t have any pictures of her dressed scantily enough for her body to show, but there is one of her on the stairs of Notre Dame in Paris where we get a view of her full frame. I turn the display so that Nero can see her closely.

  “Like I said,” I slur as Nero’s face lengthens, his eyebrows rising. “She can have any guy she wants. Even you, the incorruptible Alpha, would get a hard-on for her, trust me. She could mess with any guy’s head, and that thought alone is driving me crazy. I can’t believe she doesn’t even realize all this about herself.”

  “It’s because of the standard of beauty in the media, she’s not exactly it.” He looks at me apologetically before he says, “She’s better.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “I can agree that many men would want her. But it’s likely few would ever act on it.”

  “What?”

  “This young woman is beautiful, Drago, but intimidating. It’s clear she wouldn’t take just any poor devil to her bed, and most men see themselves as poor devils, no matter how confident they manage to appear. But you, you couldn’t resist the attraction if your life depended on it.”

  “Well, I am a werewolf, I’m not easi
ly intimidated.”

  “Exactly. Not to mention that it’s as good as impossible for werewolves to fall in love like humans do. We’re not as easily aroused as human men. We can react to women’s charms if we choose to, yes, because of the beast’s built-in virility, but there’s also a paradox here—while we can choose when to give in to our animal instincts, our higher sentiments are almost impossible to trigger. It takes a special kind of woman to crack our hard shell and make us fall in love. But when we fall in love, it’s an intense feeling that lasts forever.”

  I hold my hands up. “Whoa, hold your horses. I like this woman a lot, yes, but love? I only spent one night with her, I wouldn’t say—”

  “You remember the ancient lore, don’t you?” Nero motions to the tall bookcase that stretches over the entire sidewall, full of old books that we inherited from our family, over a thousand years up the bloodline. “Myths and origins of the werewolves.”

  “Our lore is vast. What part are you talking about?”

  “The mating part.”

  I snort. “That’s nonsense, and you know it. No werewolf has imprinted on a woman in what, a thousand years? And even before that, we don’t have any proof our ancestors didn’t make their choices just like normal people do—falling in love, fucking like mad for a few years, only to deflate and settle into a sibling-like relationship they flaunt around as special.”

  “Remember Ma and Pa, you know damn well it wasn’t like that for them.”

  A memory of them flashes through my head, Ma and Pa laughing heartily at the dinner table, Ma’s eyes teary slits. She was genuinely amused. I remember them kissing passionately in the dark, too, when they thought the five of us were asleep, or roaming in our little wolf forms through the woods. And by that time they had already been together for many centuries.

  “I don’t know what to say, Nero. It doesn’t make any sense. Even if I found a woman whose DNA complemented mine in that perfect way—” Which is how a female becomes ‘eligible’ to be a werewolf’s mate, and which is extremely rare, according to the lore. “—Why would my body react so impulsively and imprint on her so fast? I mean, aren’t these things supposed to take time?”

  Nero walks to the bookcase, and extracts a big book with silver-sewn pages and an old, worn-out leather spine. It’s an ancient tome, made by the Elders to endure millennia.

  “The reason these women are so rare,” he begins, sitting on the couch so that we can both look into the book. “Is that werewolves are immortal supernatural creatures, so they don’t need to multiply. Our forefathers needed to breed because they were few, and the wars with the serpents were bloody, so nature created special females for them. They called them ‘fated females’. When our generation was born, on the other hand, we were many, we had peace, and reproducing wasn’t necessary. This book reveals that in such times fated females became very rare.”

  He looks at me, and I know he’s come to the heavy part. As head of our clan, he knows the lore better than anyone.

  “But I think you stumbled over an entire nest of them, which is a treasure.”

  “A nest?”

  “This woman, Arianna Parker,” he continues, his face serious. “Has a very specific face and physicality. I think she’s descendant from hybrids—children that resulted from werewolves’ random pairing with human women, without imprinting. I also think she’s not the only one, and that there are others like her in her town.”

  “Wait a minute, werewolves did what?”

  “What did you think, that you and Achilles were the only wild boys out there? It’s hard to seduce werewolves against their will, and impossible to make them fall in love if they don’t imprint, but they do like to fuck around until they meet The One.”

  He leafs through the book until he gets to a special chapter. I freeze when I see the drawing of a woman that reminds me strongly of Arianna. The same shape of the body, the same full-moon shape of her face, even the proportions between the eyes and the mouth. She’s carrying an amphora on her head—the water type of woman that stills werewolves’ thirst. I remember stories about the water woman, Ma used to tell them to us back when we were pups.

  Nero leafs through a few more pages until we come to a map. I recognize the area, the mountains where Darkwood Falls now exists.

  “After the so-called fated females disappeared, werewolves went mad with need. They took advantage of normal women, but couldn’t marry them because of how things are with us, we need to imprint. Actually, it is said that once a werewolf imprints and thus chooses a mate, he becomes useless for other women. But they didn’t have anyone to imprint on, so they pretty much did what you and Achilles do today.”

  “They fucked for money?”

  “Good that you retain your sense of humor, but consider that you might not be able to sleep with other women from now on. If you imprinted on Arianna Parker, that was it for you. Now back to history. Back then people didn’t know much about birth control, and kids resulted from the werewolves’ union with normal women. It was a scandal, but the werewolf Elders of the time saw great opportunity—they took the mothers and their babies, and moved them to a new town, back then called Dark Forests.”

  “Darkwood Falls today,” I whisper.

  Nero nods. “Times were different back then and, well, you know how it was for single mothers. People rejected them and shamed them. Of course they took the chance, and started a new life.”

  “What about the werewolf fathers? They didn’t take any responsibility for this?”

  “They were punished, even though the entire werewolf community profited from their mistake. The Dark Forests children were raised for mating with werewolves when they reached adulthood, because there was a high chance werewolves would be able to imprint on the hybrids. But the project never took off because....” He looks down at the book, his hand clenching into a fist. He doesn’t need to say it. We both remember the Great Massacre in which Ma and Pa died. The Reaper’s serpent raid.

  “Luckily only the Elders knew about the hybrid babies,” he continues, “and the serpents killed all the Elders during the night, assassinated them either in their sleep or while they were meditating, so they never found out about Dark Forests. The connection between Dark Forests and the werewolves was interrupted, but surely the werewolf DNA runs through the town’s people’s blood to this day.”

  Nero’s eyes meet mine. “I connected Darkwood Falls to Dark Forests the moment you mentioned the name, and when you showed me Arianna I was certain.”

  I focus, letting all this go through my head. “But it’s been a long time, Nero, centuries. The blood of the town people surely diluted, to the point where there must be little left of the hybrid DNA.”

  Nero smiles with knowledge. “There’s never too little left. If you take any person and analyze their DNA, you can find out which of their ancestors was the first to take a dump in anything resembling a toilet. Besides, I have a hunch.”

  He takes the book back to the bookcase, and brings his laptop from the study. He goes online and works his magic—Nero wouldn’t be running multinational businesses so well if he weren’t a sleek cyber ghost.

  “Arianna Parker, Darkwood Falls,” he murmurs to himself, then asks me for her friends’ names, since they’re all from the same town. He checks their social media accounts and all the data available on them online, then he hacks into government and private lab and hospital files, even discovering what they used to eat as children. Nero can do that and more, mastering both infotech and biotech, otherwise he wouldn’t be who he is in the world.

  I help him with everything I can and, days later, we have it.

  “There it is,” he says, showing me the laptop just as I return with food for us both from the kitchen. The screen displays data and family trees, DNA patterns running down the screen in a myriad of formulae. Luckily, I’m as good with science as Nero. I take the laptop, my eyes moving fast through the images.

  “I’ll be damned. They keep to themselves like
a sect.”

  “Which is why they have an aristocratic elite. They make sure no one marries outside of Darkwood Falls.”

  “But this means their town elite must know about the hybrids.”

  “I bet they do. Why else would they forbid the females to mingle genetically with outsiders?”

  All this means that Arianna is, or has become truly.... my mate.

  “I’ll be damned.” I drop on the couch. “Of all the werewolves out there, it had to happen to me—a man whore.”

  Nero laughs.

  “Wait until it happens to you,” I grumble, taking my head in my hands. “This whole imprinting thing doesn’t feel good, Nero.”

  I thought that all this research would help make the thought of Arianna more bearable, assuring me that I have some primordial claim on her that no one can attack, but it hasn’t helped. If anything, I feel more depleted of her than before. I need the warmth of her body. I need her like a drug.

  “This can’t be what imprinting should feel like, Nero. I mean, I want to possess the woman like a devil. I can’t control myself around her, and I’m dangerous to her.”

  “You wouldn’t do anything to hurt Arianna, believe me.”

  “But I wanted to take her, even against her will. That is—” I shake my head. I can’t even say the word, rape, only imagining what it would have done to her hurts.

  Nero pushes everything aside and sits by my side, hands on my shoulders. “Imprinting on a woman means that you want her to the point of despair. You would have kissed every inch of her body to still your hunger, but trust me Drago, she would have been sacred to you. In fact, you’d do anything to keep this woman safe, there’s no safer place in the world for her than by your side.” His words are reassuring, but when he pauses I know he has bad news, too.

  “Spill it. I can tell there’s a flipside to that.”

  “The thing is, your feelings for her will never change. You can take this woman as many times as you want, you’ll still crave her like you’re starved. There will be a balance at a certain point, enough of it for you to feel content and happy, but for that you might need to be around her all the time.”