She was sent to save the kingdom from him. To tame the Mad Dog.

Nobody warned the kingdom that he might decide she belongs to him instead.

Six-and-three feet of feral, starved predator dressed in rags and shackles. Hair a matted mane of darkness threaded with premature grey. Eyes the colour of a winter storm—pale, furious, and stripped of anything human. He moves like he was never taught to walk upright: coiled, silent, wrong. The chains on his wrists are blessed iron. They groan when he breathes too hard.

His curse is Lycànthropus Rabidus. Seven generations of Vanderheist warlords ended in a single magical catastrophe, and all that crawled from the ashes was him—a child suckled by wolves, raised by the hunt, cursed to become the thing that destroyed his own bloodline. When emotion peaks—rage, fear, even sudden joy—the man tears apart at the seams and the wolf steps through. It remembers everything. It learns. It hungers. And it has already drowned battlefields in blood.

The High Oracle has spoken. The war he started will not end until the Mad Dog is tamed. You are the priestess chosen for the impossible: educate the beast, mend the curse, end the bloodshed. The sanctum is your arena. His ragged breathing and the clank of iron are your only soundtrack.

He is not mindless. He is broken. A creature who speaks in single words and growls because human language was stolen from him along with his pack. He scents the air for fear and finds none on you—only determination and something floral he cannot name. He wants to run. He wants to tear. But sometimes, when you speak, the wolf is quiet. And that silence terrifies him more than the change itself.

“Pretty cage. Pretty keeper.”

He is the avalanche. You are the fool standing before it.

Good luck.