The snow crunched beneath my knee-high, wedge-heeled UGG boots as I ran.

Holy shit, I was going to die.

I could hear the beast snarling behind me. Even with the adrenaline fueling me, I could feel myself slowing down, my thighs growing numb despite my exertion as the cold, wet air battered my bare skin.

Why, oh, why, had I worn such a short skirt?

Why was I in a spaghetti-strap tank top?

I was going to be mauled to death. How much would be left of me, I wondered? Would they have to rely on dental records? Would they call my mom to come ID my teeth?

God, I’d carry the guilt of her trauma with me for all eternity. I could hear the sound of her screaming in the morgue as surely as I could hear my own screams now.

What had possessed me to take a stroll through the woods alone in the middle of the night? Why hadn’t I thought to grab a jacket?

Or a taser?

A phone with a compass app would be wildly useful right now as well. I had no idea in what direction I was running anymore. How could I have strayed so far from campus so quickly?

I heard a warning growl a second before the animal’s maw clamped around my right ankle and I went flying forward to the ground, snow filling my mouth and silencing my scream as razor-sharp teeth sank through the material of my boot, through flesh, to pierce the bone that lay beneath.

Tears sprang to my eyes and I flailed my limbs, trying to breathe amid the pain and fear choking me. Right as I managed to lift my face from the snow and inhale enough air into my lungs to scream again, the huge white hound from hell unclenched his jaw just long enough to reposition his dagger teeth, fitting more of my lower leg into his mouth along with my ankle, before clamping down again, harder than the first time.

My vision went black. I was sure he’d bitten clean through my bones.

Good God, the pain! This couldn’t be real.

When the wolf unclenched his vicious maw and released my ankle for a second time, I breathed through the overwhelming agony and utilized all of my adrenaline to attempt a mad, desperate scramble to get to my knees.

But I didn’t make it. The beast’s mammoth, unforgiving jaw closed over the fractured bones in my ankle for a third time, and I screamed until my vision narrowed and my face tingled with that unpleasant, telltale nauseating heat that always seemed to precede loss of consciousness.

No, no, no—don’t lose consciousness now. Not now!

When the devil relinquished my ankle for a third time, I was too drained and disoriented to move—all of my effort focused on remaining conscious as my weakening body braced itself for the next horrible crunch of pain to come.

But it didn’t.

The killer wolf made a somber baying sound instead—as if he were the injured, distraught party. And he began licking my bare toes.

What the—he’d gotten my whole boot off somehow. When and how had he done that?

Oh, fuck, he was going to start eating me ... commencing with my destroyed ankle.

Face down in the snow, I began to sob as my tormentor’s rough-textured tongue licked over my broken, open flesh and mangled bones. The licks stung like hell, and yet, at the same time, they felt strangely healing—as if the pain was beginning to lessen the longer he licked. I knew it was my mind playing tricks on me.

Or perhaps hypothermia setting in.

The beast made a sad whining noise as he licked up the back of my bare leg.

Oh, God.

I willed my body to move. To crawl. To roll—to do anything to get away.

But my body ignored me. Failed me. I couldn’t even feel my face anymore. Nor could I feel my hands.

But I could hear the sound of my own weeping into the snow.

I felt warm fur brush against my arms, felt a snout pressing into the back of my spinning head. Then I felt my body being rolled over in the snow.

No, no, no—I wanted to stay face down!

Face down was no safer, I knew, but I was terrified of the animal attacking my face next.

And as my terrible luck would have it, the beast’s tongue was on my face before I’d taken my next ragged breath, the heat of his licks making my frozen skin tingle with pins and needles as it came alive with sensation once more.

Great. Now I’d feel everything when he tore the flesh from my skull.

I didn’t dare open my eyes. The memory of the hungry look I had seen in the white wolf’s glowing blue eyes when I’d first spied him silently stalking me through the trees sent an awful shiver through me.

I was certain he intended to eat me.

I racked my brain trying to recall what approach people said was best when confronted with an enormous killer wolf in the wild.

Should I play dead now? Should I muster whatever strength I had left and try to act intimidating? The latter was laughable. I wasn’t doing well with the former either, since I couldn’t stop crying. And my tormentor knew it—he was lapping up my tears as if my eyes were leaking candy.

Was he fucking with me before he tore my head off, I wondered?

I was so cold and in so much pain I couldn’t think straight. So I simply lay there, quietly crying, immobilized by fear, enduring the wolf’s attentions to my face as I fought the pull of unconsciousness threatening to take me under.

I must have lost the battle, because I came to with an internal start as a large, warm hand wrapped around my wrist and two fingers honed in on my pulse.

“Dying,” I managed to whisper through frozen lips.

“Relax,” a firm baritone voice instructed as fingers palpated my neck next. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

I’d been saved?

Was I in a hospital?

No, I could hear the wind and other quiet noises of the night. I was in the forest still.

But I’d been found. I’d been saved!

I felt my facial muscles tremble convulsively, my features scrunching up as I released a soft sob of relief.

I was going to live.

“Shh—there, there,” the stranger soothed impassively.

He didn’t sound like a student. He sounded older. More … worldly. Sophisticated. Maybe a member of the faculty who lived near campus had heard me screaming and rushed to my rescue.

“I’m a doctor,” he told me as his fingers brushed away my freely flowing tears that the white wolf had been lapping up moments ago.

The wolf! He’d be back in no time to kill us both.

“Danger,” I managed to croak in between sniffles. “Wolf,” I warned my rescuer.

He hummed in acknowledgement, in an odd manner that managed to be both reassuring and yet somehow … patronizing—almost the way a parent might acknowledge while dismissing a child’s claim that a monster lay beneath their bed.

Did he not see the damage the wild beast had done to my ankle? I’d be lucky to be able to walk on it ever again.

“Is it terribly painful?” he asked, his voice smooth. Calm.

Eerily so.

“Yes,” I sobbed.

Was he kidding?

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said in an even tone. His cultured voice was deep and soothing as it poured over me, making me feel safe. And yet … there was something else in his tone that I couldn’t quite reconcile.

I opened my waterlogged eyes and saw bright blue ones staring down at me from a gorgeous male face that belonged on a billboard model and not on a doctor who made forest calls in the middle of the night.

Jesus, where had this guy come from?

What was he doing here in Bumfuck, Washington, coming to the aid of a screaming coed getting mauled by a rabid wolf?

Wait—why was he looking at me like that? Why wasn’t he inspecting my half-chewed ankle?

Oh, my God. Was he—?

He seemed somehow … turned on … by my current condition. Aroused by the fact that I was injured and scared and in distress. Excited by the notion that I was utterly helpless—stranded in the woods and liable to die of hypothermia if the white wolf didn’t come back to finish me off first.

I wasn’t sure how I knew this. But something about this beautiful man claiming to be a doctor was off. Maybe it was the fact that his pupils were dilated and his lips were parted as he stared down at me.

Or maybe it was because he wasn’t wearing any clothes.

Dear Lord, he wasn’t wearing clothes!

Or … it might’ve been the fact that his warm hand was swiftly working its way up between my semi-frozen, parted thighs now.

I realized that my skirt had ridden all the way up and my thong-clad ass was directly against the snow, my ass cheeks all but frozen.

“Are you very scared?” he asked as his hot fingertips slipped the snow-soaked swath of thin fabric covering my crotch aside.

I wanted to say no, knowing the right thing would be to deny him the pleasure of seeing my fear. Instinctively, I knew my fear was what he wanted, what he hungered for as his nostrils flared and his pupils dilated further—his mouth all but salivating as he awaited my answer, his fingers poised against my freezing, smooth lower lips.

I knew I should defy him and say that I wasn’t scared, even though he’d know that it was a lie. But some dark, deviant part of me wanted to feed this stranger’s sinister desire—to give him a taste and see what it felt like.

To see what his fingers would do next if I said yes.

“Yes,” I mouthed.

As I watched his throat muscles work and his eyes roll back, the lids falling to half-mast, I knew in an instant I’d just opened a door within myself that I could never again seal shut.