Page 11 of Scarlett’s Wicked Wolf (Filthy Fairy-tales #1)

Scarlett

When we break from the treeline, my stomach drops. The soft glow that usually smudges the roofline is gone; the protective lattice my grandmother wove looks shredded, the threads snapped, and the corners frayed.

Ruby Cottage shouldn’t sound like this; it shouldn’t breathe. The wards that hummed like bees tucked into warm comb now hiss, a thin, angry sound that raises the hair on my arms. Ash and rosemary hang in the air, but the rosemary has turned bitter.

I hear it before I see anything. Wet breath. Claws dragging slowly across wood. Grandma’s magic flailing against something older and hungrier.

“She’s in there,” I whisper.

Reid’s hand closes around my arm, warm and steady. “Scarlett—”

“She’s in there.” The words are raw in my throat.

“We do this smart.” His voice is low and leashed. “He’s baiting you. He’s been—”

“—circling me for years,” I finish in an oddly calm voice.

I lurch against Reid as everything is revealed to me in a blinding vision.

“He couldn’t touch me while the wards protected me.

He had to wait until I was beyond their protection.

Until I left to get the wild ginger. Then you bit me, and our bond changed my magic.

It cut the last thread of protection, leaving him free to mark me. ”

The truth clangs in my skull. I thought I was strengthening the wards by leaving. I thought I was protecting us. Some part of me knew I was walking into the forest with a lit match, but I didn’t understand what would burn.

A scream spikes from inside. Grandma.

I rip away from Reid and sprint up the steps.

The front door hangs crooked on splintered hinges, the wood speared with ice where claws probed for seams. I shoulder through, my breath sawing.

The little cottage I grew up in is a ruin—salt lines scraped and broken, thyme wilted to black threads, frost-blasted wood shining like bone.

Grandma is slumped against the pantry door, one hand pressed to her side, blood seeping between her fingers.

Her eyes are open and furious. Oh, thank the gods, she’s alive!

I don’t have time to sob in relief. The gray wolf looming over her is no longer a wolf.

He’s peeling.

Fur splits along long seams, claws tear his paws apart, and the thing beneath steps out—a wraith wearing tatters of wolf-skin like a cape, ribs showing through night-black flesh, thorns sprouting from his shoulders as if he grew up through a dead hedge.

His eyes burn like coals. They fix on me, and he smiles.

“You smell like him,” the thing rasps. His voice is metal dragged over a stone floor, and the windows shiver in their frames.

“Who?” The word scrapes my throat.

“Your father. A man who tampered with dark magic. Who used me like a tool. Who spilled my blood to save his own and cursed me to roam this forest in hunger, bound me as wraith and wolf to his bloodline, unable to reach him.”

Its teeth glint like shards of black glass. “I worried your nest. I left antlers and thorns, drove you out to gather, and waited for a wolf to mark what the wards once held. But now you’re marked. You left the nest. The last ward broke, just as I planned. And now his debt lives on in you.”

The floor tilts. My knees go weak. “What… Who are you?”

The thorns along his shoulders twitch like hackles as his ember eyes flicker with memories. “Fenric. I was once a man. Simple. Good. A warden of the forest.”

I lick my dry lips. “What did my father do to you?”

“He came to me under the guise of friendship,” Fenric says. “Offered me money. Work. Promised it was nothing more than a favor—a small spell to help him stay hidden. I agreed.”

He laughs, low and bitter. “But he tricked me. Poisoned my body with thorn-wine. Burned ash into my mouth. Spoke my name into rot. Then he tied my fate to his bloodline so the price of his power would fall on me instead of him.”

“Why would he do that?” My voice breaks.

“He needed a shield,” he says, stepping closer.

“And a weapon. He found both in me.” He gestures to his ruined form.

“I fought the hunger at first. I tried to hold on to who I was. But he kept feeding me names—people to find, people to punish. And the more I obeyed, the more I forgot myself. The man I was died in pieces until nothing was left but this. He killed me without a blade.”

Fenric’s gaze snaps back to mine. “You carry his legacy. His blood.” His voice curdles with cold delight. “And that means I can finally collect.”

He lifts one bramble-wrapped hand and points at my chest. “Free me with your blood. Or feed me. Those are the terms he left. And I’ll keep coming—again and again—until the debt is paid.”

My pulse slams so hard that it shakes my chest. “You knew what would happen. That Reid would bite me. That it would sever the last of the magic protecting me,” I whisper, knowing it’s true.

He nods. “A wolf always comes when his mate needs him. And he always claims what he saves.”

Of course. Fenric can read scents and ward-signatures the way a ledger reads ink. He knew Reid was out there; he simply had to draw me out and wait.

“Another should have paid the debt,” he continues, his mouth curling with frustration, “but she was denied me.”

“Another?” I echo.

Fenric trains his empty gaze on me. “A woman with the same red hair and green eyes. The same blood. Your sister. But she chose a future that put her beyond my reach when she chose to drink.”

I shake my head. “I don’t have a sister.”

“Arya,” Grandma breathes, her eyes wide with realization. “She drank the punch. It… changed her. He could no longer use her blood to pay the debt.”

I know the story—Arya drank Dr. Karloff’s Frankenpunch to buy forever with Gregor. The brew could bless or ruin; in her, it made a shapeshifter.

And now I learn that we shared a father, that Arya is my sister…

I shove down the million questions invading my head to focus on the larger emergency of blood on Grandma’s fingers and the thing smiling at me with a mouth full of glass.

“Old Law counts names,” Fenric says, savoring my shock. “Arya’s change renamed her. I can’t tally what I can’t read. But you still carry his name.”

Reid’s growl starts low and rolls through the floorboards. His eyes catch lamplight and flare amber. “You won’t touch her.”

The wraith looks him over with something that might be contempt, might be hunger. “You’re not even a true wolf. A science mistake in a costume. But your bite served me. It opened the door I couldn’t.”

Reid doesn’t answer with words. With a feral growl, he shifts—a ripple of bone, a low crack, black fur rolling over shoulders. He lands on four feet in the crushed rosemary, his amber eyes burning with protective fury.

The wraith shifts his weight as he recalculates.

He lunges for the easy target, the injured woman on the floor.

Reid is faster, catching him mid-stride and turning him with a snapping twist as they smash into the table.

His teeth meet flesh that isn’t flesh. It yields wrong, then splinters like waterlogged wood.

My mate grunts as the spines rake through fur and flesh. His blood hits the floorboards in a dark spray as the wraith’s thorns rake his ribs. Reid staggers, rights himself, plants his feet, and drives again, his jaws closing on the wraith’s hind leg to pull him away from Grandma.

But the thing moves like smoke, flowing and reforming.

Grandma’s eyes find mine. “He's not alive. We can’t kill him like this. The rune. Answer him with magic.”

She’s right. This isn’t a creature you kill the way you kill a boar or a bear. He’s not alive in a way that ends with teeth. He’s a curse wearing a carcass. Curses aren’t slain; they’re answered.

A memory unfolds in my head. I’m six again on scrubbed floorboards while Grandma lifts the braided rug and shows me the spiral carved into the heart-plank.

Hearth-law, she said, tapping the curl with a flour-dusted finger.

The house’s oath-mark. It remembers what we promise it.

If a curse comes to the door, you send it back.

This mark takes a debt and writes it where it belongs.

I know exactly what to do.

I grab a splintered length of chair and slice my palm open in a clean, fast line.

Blood wells. In the center of the main room, beneath the rug, the spiral carved into the heart-plank of Ruby Cottage—the house’s oath-mark—sleeps like a seashell in wood.

Yanking back the rug, I press my hand to the spiral.

My blood hisses where it hits, glowing red-gold.

“You were bound by my father,” I say, my voice strong. “Cursed by his dark magic. Tied to his blood, so you could make him pay with ours. But I am not him.”

I draw a fresh spiral over the old one, my blood the ink, my Sight the pen. Lines flare like molten iron. “I end the tether by lawful redirection. The debt returns to the doer; it cannot hunt the heirs.”

My blood unspools from the spiral and runs along the seams of the floor, up the lintel, through the knife blade on the mantle, out along the invisible lines that make this house our house.

I have never felt my magic move like this—thin threads catching, then holding, then tightening into a rope.

When the net finds the wraith’s edges, it tightens again.

“You’ll never be free,” he spits. “Magic remembers.”

“So do I. And it’s time to pay with something that isn’t me.” I push my hand harder into the spiral, into the house that made me, into the rules that raised me, the magic that Grandma taught me. “By hearth-law, the debt returns to the doer. It will not claim the heirs. Be unbound from us.”

The stone flares white-hot beneath my hand. The spiral pulses with magic as light erupts from it.

Fenric screams, thorns shriveling, limbs cracking backward as the wraith-skin blisters and peels. His shadow tries to flee, but the magic catches it. Nails it in place.

“You tied yourself to blood, Fenric,” I whisper as the light burns through him. “Now bleed it back into the earth.”

His coal-bright eyes turn white. Not empty but wiped clean. His form collapses inward, crumbling into a pile of thorn-dust and ash and broken spellwork.

Smoke curls in the shape of a spiral above the ruin he left behind… and vanishes.

Silence fills the room, thick and ringing. My knees wobble. Reid sways on four legs for a heartbeat longer, his fur soaked along his side where the thorns raked him. He stumbles and shifts back to man again on a breath—bloody, bare, and glorious.

I run to him as he sinks to his knees, throwing my arms around his neck. He catches me even though he’s hurt.

“Hey,” he says into my hair, his voice ruined and soft, as if we’re in the bed by the fire and not in a room that still smells faintly of rot. “Hey, little wolf.”

Over his shoulder, Grandma stirs. She blinks, gathers herself, tries to sit, and thinks better of it.

“Don’t you dare move,” I tell her.

She huffs, which means she’ll listen to me for exactly as long as she wants.

Reid’s hand is heavy and careful at my back; the other is clamped to his ribs. I press my palm over his and feel his warmth, the pulse that matches mine even when we’re not touching. I let my forehead fall to his and breathe him in.

Grandma watches us with eyes that have seen more winters than I can count. “Smart girl,” she murmurs, and I can’t tell whether she means the spiral or Reid. Maybe both.

I help Reid to his feet first, then cross to Grandma.

“Just a graze,” Grandma mutters through gritted teeth as I press a clean cloth to her wound. “Don’t make that face, girl. I’ve had worse from a wood sprite with a bad attitude.”

But I keep pressing. Then I cleanse it and apply an antiseptic. When she’s bandaged and breathing easier, I guide her to her chair by the fire and turn my attention to Reid.

He barely flinches as I clean the blood from his wounds, which are already healing.

“Breathe,” I murmur, my mouth twitching. “In for four, out for six.”

He huffs a laugh. “Knew that would come back to haunt me.”

“I suppose enhanced healing is part of the whole wolf-shifter package?” I ask, half-teasing, half-serious as I focus on his wound, now a raw pink gash where Fenric’s claws raked across his ribs.

Reid nods. “One of the perks. The other is having a strong, beautiful, magical mate who breathes life into me and lights up my world.”

My breath catches, and I swallow back tears.

He catches my wrist gently, his hand warm. “You saved us tonight, Scarlett. You chose your power. Wielded it.”

“Because I had so much to protect,” I whisper, meeting his amber gaze. “The two people I love the most.”

His smile is lopsided and sexy as hell. “I love you, too, my little wolf.”

“Don’t mind me,” Grandma mutters, eyes still closed but a smile ghosting her mouth. “Just dealing with a headache from hell while you two flirt on my living room rug. And for the love of all things holy, close that blanket. I can see things I didn’t ask for and can’t unsee.”

Reid makes a choked sound somewhere between a laugh and a strangled cough as he secures the blanket tighter around his lean hips.

“You’re supposed to be resting,” I say, glaring at her and trying very hard not to think about the fact that, yes, Reid is very much naked under the blanket and yes, my grandmother just got a front-row seat.

“I was resting. Until Mr. Well-Endowed over there started talking about lighting up your world.”

Reid coughs again. “In fairness, I was trying to be romantic.”

“Next time, make sure you’re wearing pants,” Grandma mutters, but the edge of affection in her voice is impossible to miss.

Reid smirks and catches my hand, bringing it to his lips and pressing a kiss on my knuckles in a gesture that melts my heart.

“You’re mine,” he whispers. “And I’m yours. In blood. In bond. In whatever comes next.”

I nod. The fear that lingered like a shadow behind my ribs is gone, replaced by something solid and bright.

“Yes,” I whisper. “Whatever comes next.”