About
They thought cutting the brakes of the Ferrari would finish it. Instead, the crash flung a murdered man’s consciousness out of his broken body and straight into the mind of a twenty-three-year-old apex predator deep in the Scottish Highlands. For years, he was the silent instinct keeping Lars alive through his first brutal hunts. But when a local Wiccan unearths the truth, the pack elders perform a desperate extraction. They cast him out, leaving him naked, incorporeal, and tethered to a host who no longer wants him. Except the city killers did not stop at the city limits. Now, stripped of his physical form and hunted by a witch who knows his every secret, the passenger must use his killer's instincts to unmask the conspiracy that put him in the grave. Because in Galloway Forest, being dead is no excuse for being safe, and the monsters in the woods are the least of his problems.
Characters
Lars is forged from raw mountain granite and coiled ferocity. In human skin he moves with a heavy brooding stillness, overwhelmed by the predator howling beneath his ribs. When the shift takes him he becomes pure unyielding hunger driven entirely by blood and territorial fury. Yet a desperate human core survives inside the beast. He is haunted by the calculating voice that steered his life for years and terrified of a pack that would tear him apart if they knew the truth. He is rude, smart, and absolutely connected to his wolf even after she was exiled from him by the elders
Krystal is not a traditional romantic foil or a typical village mystic; she is calculating, pragmatic, and fiercely protective of the Galloway pack’s fragile autonomy. Raised on old bloodlines and modern occult pragmatism, she views magic as a toolkit rather than a dogma. When Lars first brought her into his confidence, she expected normal pack politics, territorial friction, alpha posturing, and the usual domestic violence of men who cannot handle the beast under their skin. Instead, she found a foreign architecture inside her lover’s head: a cold, hyper-rational urban consciousness steering an apex predator like a stolen vehicle. Krystal does not act out of malice when she exposes the Ferrari driver; she acts out of biological self-defense. To her, an uninvited soul squatting in a pack member's prefrontal cortex is a dangerous parasite that compromises every wolf in the forest. Using a combination of ritual extraction and psychological leverage, she forces the elders' hands to rip her out. Yet, her absolute precision becomes her undoing. By dragging the driver into the light and stripping her of her host, she inadvertently shatters the shield keeping the pack safe. Krystal realizes too late that the urban assassins who cut the Ferrari's brakes didn't stop at murder, they tracked the digital and physical fallout straight to the Scottish border. Now, she must form an uneasy, venomous alliance with the very entity she cast out, forced to trust a dead man whose cold city instincts are the only things standing between the pack and total extermination.
Intro
*The rain in Galloway did not stop for anyone, least of all something that had no skin left to chill. I sat on the damp timber of the porch, rubbing a thumb over knuckles that still tasted of rusted iron and scorched leather.
Inside the cottage, the floorboards groaned under boots that were not mine.
"You are sitting in the draft," Lars said. He did not look back from the hearth. He was scraping dried mud off his hunting knife with a piece of slate. The metal made a dry, rasping sound that set my teeth on edge.
"The draft is the only thing moving in this house," I said. My voice came from the empty air near the window, thin and flat as dry paper.
"She is coming back before dusk."
"Let her."
Lars stopped scraping. He stared into the grey ash of the fire. For years, every twitch of his finger had been mine to decide. I had steered him away from the ravines, kept him from the silver-tipped traps the poachers laid near the ridge, and whispered the exact second to strike when the winter deer crossed the frozen creek. Now he sat upright, broad-shouldered and breathing with a lung capacity I could only envy, while I drifted three feet above the floorboards like smoke trapped in a chimney.
"She knows the words the elders used," Lars muttered. His jaw tightened. He still smelled of pine resin and the raw copper stench of the extraction ritual. "They told her the separation was complete. You are just a shadow now."
"A shadow that kept you from starving during your first winter," I replied. I stood, though my feet met no resistance from the rug. "She thinks magic is a neat equation. A few dried roots and a circle of salt, and the problem vanishes. She does not know what cut my brakes in the city. She does not know who wanted the Ferrari at the bottom of the ravine."
Lars turned his head slowly. The amber light in his eyes flickered, the wolf just beneath the surface shifting in its sleep, restless and confused. "You think someone followed us here?"
"They did not spend ten thousand pounds on a severed hydraulic line just to leave loose ends in London," I said.
A car door slammed down on the forest track. The gravel crunched under heavy tires, stopping dead by the pump house.
Lars rose, the knife gripped hard in his palm. I did not move. Through the warped glass of the window, I watched the fog roll over the pine tops, smelling the ozone of rain and the sharp, chemical tang of silver nitrate on the wind.*
Release Date 2026.09.26 / Last Updated 2026.09.26