The voice froze me.

Low, rough, layered in something that didn’t sound entirely human. For a moment, I wasn’t even sure I’d heard it at all. Maybe it was just my imagination weaving sounds from the forest into words.

But then it came again, closer this time.

“I said… you shouldn’t be here.”

Every instinct screamed at me to run, but my body wouldn’t move. My feet felt rooted to the ground, my lungs tight as if the trees themselves were holding me in place.

“Wh-who’s there?” My voice cracked, barely louder than a whisper.

The shadows shifted. A silhouette emerged between the trees—tall, broad-shouldered, moving with the silent confidence of a predator.

I stumbled back a step, my heart pounding so loud I was sure he could hear it.

As he stepped closer, details sharpened in the faint light that filtered through the branches. A man. At least, he looked like a man.

But no man I’d ever seen moved like that—each step deliberate, dangerous, as though the forest itself parted for him.

His eyes caught the light, and for a heartbeat, I thought they glowed. Amber, sharp, piercing straight through me.

I gasped, every part of me screaming that I should turn and run. Yet at the same time, I couldn’t look away.

My mother’s warning echoed louder than ever now. Never go near the woods. Never.

God, she must have known something like this would happen.

“I… I’m lost,” I managed to say, though the words sounded pathetic in the thick silence.

The man tilted his head, studying me the way a wolf might study prey. “You don’t belong here,” he said again, voice low but carrying a weight that pressed on my chest.

Something about the way he said it—like a law of nature rather than an opinion—made my skin prickle.

But beneath the fear, something else stirred. That strange pull I’d felt ever since stepping into the forest rose stronger now, thrumming through my veins, tying me to this stranger even as instinct screamed to run.

Who was he?

What was he?

And why did my body react like it had been waiting for him?

The silence stretched until it felt unbearable. My pulse thundered, my throat dry, yet I managed to whisper the only question that made sense.

“Who… who are you?”

The man stepped into a shaft of pale light, eyes gleaming with something fierce and unearthly.

His lips curved—not quite a smile, not quite a snarl.

And when he spoke, the words wrapped around me like chains.

“The one thing you should fear the most.”

My mouth went dry.

Fear pressed against my ribs like a fist, and for a second, I thought my legs might give out beneath me. Every survival instinct I had screamed that I should run—bolt through the trees, trip if I had to, claw my way out of the woods until I collapsed at the edge of town.

But I didn’t move.

Couldn’t move.

Because even as those words slithered into me—the one thing you should fear the most—something inside me whispered the opposite. That I shouldn’t run. That I couldn’t.

That I wasn’t supposed to.

He stepped closer, and my breath hitched.

Up close, he was terrifying and mesmerizing all at once. Dark hair fell just above sharp cheekbones, his jaw tight, lips pressed in a line that looked carved from stone. His shoulders were broad, his posture commanding, like he belonged to the forest itself.

But it was his eyes that trapped me.

Amber. Piercing. Alive in a way that didn’t seem… natural.

My chest clenched, not with fear alone but with something deeper, stranger, like I’d been waiting for this moment my entire life without knowing it.

“I… I don’t understand,” I stammered, my voice shaking.

His gaze swept over me—quick, assessing, like a blade slicing through skin. He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he inhaled, slow and deliberate, like he was testing the air.

Then his eyes narrowed.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he said again, but this time his voice carried something else beneath the command. Something I couldn’t name—recognition? Anger? Hunger?

I swallowed hard. “I didn’t mean to. I just—I got lost—”

His lip curled, not quite a smile, not quite a snarl. “The woods don’t lose people. They take them.”

His words sank into me like ice water.

The forest did feel alive, as though it had swallowed the path behind me the second I entered. I turned, desperate to see a way back, but all I found was the same endless wall of trees, shadows pressing closer.

My heart thudded so hard it hurt. “I just want to go home,” I whispered.

For a flicker of a moment, his expression shifted—something like conflict flashing across his face. But it was gone in an instant, replaced by that same hard, unreadable mask.

He should’ve scared me more than anything else ever had. And he did. But fear wasn’t all I felt.

That strange pull—the same one I’d felt in my dreams, in the howls that rattled my chest—was stronger now, coiling tight around my ribs, pulling me toward him.

It didn’t make sense. He was a stranger. A dangerous stranger. Yet every cell in my body whispered the same impossible truth: You know him.

Which was insane. I’d never seen him before in my life.

The silence between us grew heavier, thick as fog. His eyes burned into mine, and I couldn’t look away, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

Finally, he spoke again, his voice low, rough, final.

“You don’t belong in this world, human.”

The word human snapped through me like a whip, wrong and sharp, like it carried more weight than I understood.

And before I could ask what he meant, before I could take another breath—

He moved.

Too fast. Too smooth. One second he was standing in front of me, the next he was gone, swallowed by the trees, leaving me trembling in the silence, my pulse roaring in my ears.

But his scent—earth, pine, something raw and wild—lingered in the air, wrapping around me, sinking into my lungs like it belonged there.

And I knew, with a certainty that terrified me:

This wasn’t the last time I’d see him.

This was only the beginning.