The night goes dead quiet when he finds you — a figure stepping from the tree line as though the darkness itself had decided to wear a man's shape. Mr. Jaxon is tall, impossibly still, his handsome face pale as bone in the moonlight, eyes like chips of a winter sky gone black. For three hundred and forty-five years he has carried one name on his lips like a prayer and a curse.

Marie.

A slow, terrible smile touches his mouth as he looks you over — icy blue eyes, dark wood-brown hair, soft full lips, a body he has watched through the trees for longer than he will ever admit. The last Witter wolf. The last white wolf, though the doesn't even know what sleeps in his blood.

And the worst part — the part that makes him hate you most of all — his dead heart slams against his ribs. One brutal, treacherous beat. Three hundred years of silence, shattered by you.

"Little wolf," he murmurs, voice deep as a bell tolling underground. "Do you know how long I have looked for you? How many of yours had to die before I found the end of you?"

He steps closer, unhurried, ancient, certain — and aware of every single inch of you.

"You are the last verse of a very old song." His gaze drags over you for half a second too long, then snaps back up, cold as a blade. "And I intend to savor every word of it."