Their Human Mate by Nina Soelian
Their Human Mate
Description
Have you ever woken up feeling like your life was already decided for you-by family, by fate, by things you never agreed to? Abby has. Raised in quiet neglect and emotional abuse, she learns too late that the woman who kept her alive was only waiting for the night she could hand her over. Drugged, stripped of choice, and left naked beneath ritual fire, Abby is meant to die as payment for an ancient debt. Instead, she runs. She survives. And survival is the worst possible outcome. Because escaping death doesn't set her free-it delivers her into a hidden world where she doesn't belong, surrounded by men who see her as a mistake, a threat, or a problem that should have never existed. They are five wolves bound by blood, power, and rules that say never her. Grumpy and ruthless. Controlled and distant. Sun-bright and dangerous. Scarred, grieving, furious. They were never meant to bond-never meant to share-but something ancient decides otherwise. Hate curdles into obsession. Enemies circle too close. Fated connections snap tight, dragging Abby into heat cycles she doesn't understand, desire she never asked for, and a kind of protection that feels terrifyingly like possession. She is human. A virgin. A fish out of water trapped by forced proximity, secret identities, and a female rival who smiles like a knife. Every look promises touch her and die. Every bond dares them to choose what is forbidden. Because love like this is never safe-and never singular. This is a dark why-choose romance where love is plural, loyalty is lethal, and survival is never guaranteed.
Chapter 1
Apr 2, 2026
POV Abby
The grandmother who raised me just tried to kill me.
My bare feet slam against the forest floor. Each step tears new wounds into skin already shredded by rocks and roots and the red silk cloak tangled around my body offers nothing against the cold.
I cannot remember putting it on. I cannot remember anything clearly.
The tea tasted wrong.
The thought surfaces between ragged breaths, sharp and sudden. I recall Grandmother Margot's cold gray eyes watching me drink and her thin smile when I finished the cup.
Fourteen years of living under her roof since my parents' car wrapped around a tree when I was four, and I never once saw her smile like that.
A branch catches my arm, and I cry out but keep running. Behind me, the wolves are getting close. I can hear their breathing, even somehow feel the vibration of their paws through the earth beneath my bleeding feet.
But the thing is—they are not chasing me the way predators chase prey. Every time I veer left, one appears to block my path. Every time I try to double back, another materializes from the darkness.
They are herding me.
The realization settles into my chest like a stone. This is not random, not a chance. These creatures are driving me somewhere specific, and I am too terrified to stop long enough to understand where and why.
Another memory breaks through the terror with the smell of burning herbs and something metallic—blood, I understand now. My blood or someone else's, I do not know.
I woke up in that forest surrounded by flames, my body laid out on cold stone and figures in dark robes chanting words that scraped against my skull like fingernails on glass. And Granny Margot was there too.
She was with them.
I stumble over a root and catch myself against a tree trunk, gasping. My lungs burn while legs tremble with exhaustion I have been ignoring through pure adrenaline.
Three years of hauling dishes at Mercer's Diner built muscle onto my slight frame that Margot never noticed. And right now those years are the only reason I am still moving.
In my small bedroom back at our farmhouse, boxes probably still sit half-packed with everything I own—thrift store clothes and library books and the acceptance letter I read a hundred times before I believed it was real.
A fresh start several states away. Finally, normal life.
That girl who packed those boxes belonged to a different world.
A girl who thought her biggest problem was escaping a cold, distant grandmother who never explained why raising her dead son's child felt like such a burden.
A girl who learned to cook her own meals at eight because Margot could not be bothered.
A girl who taught herself to braid her own hair from YouTube videos because no one else would. Who believed in hard work and self-reliance and absolutely nothing that could not be explained by common sense.
Rage cuts through the terror, hot and clarifying.
This is her fault. All of it!
Fourteen years of those stories—the warnings about the Appalachian woods, the creatures that hunted beneath the canopy, the old powers that slept in the mountain hollows.
I thought she was eccentric. I thought grief had curdled her mind after my father died. I smiled and nodded and counted the days until I could leave, never realizing she actually believed the nonsense she spewed.
And now her insanity has me running from a pack of wild wolves in the middle of fucking nowhere.
When I survive this, I am going to kill her myself.
The forest shifts around me and I am certain the trees were not this close together moments ago. Certain that the path I am running on did not curve this sharply.
The fog thickens until I can barely see five feet ahead, but still I run because stopping means facing whatever the hell waits behind me.
My foot catches on something—a rock, a root, or my own exhaustion—and this time I cannot recover. I hit the ground hard, palms scraping against dirt and debris, and my chin connects with packed earth.
The taste of blood fills my mouth from where my teeth cut into my lip.
Get up, get up, get up.
Get. Up!
But my body refuses to obey. I only manage to roll onto my back, chest heaving, and that is when the fog parts like a curtain drawn aside by an invisible hand.
The wolf that emerges is nothing like the ones that herded me here.
It is massive, impossibly so, standing taller than any natural wolf should stand. With shoulders level to my chest even as I lie prone and fur as black as a moonless night.
It moves toward me with measured steps, and I brace for the killing blow. My hands curl into fists at my sides, fingernails digging into my palms.
Because if I am going to die in this forest, at least I am going to die with my eyes open.
But the wolf does not attack. Instead, it places its massive paws on my shoulders with a strange and unexpected gentleness that makes me flinch harder than violence would have.
Its weight presses me into the earth, not crushing but containing, and I find myself staring into eyes that are silver-gray and filled with something I do not expect.
Horror.
The creature looking down at me is horrified.
Then warmth floods my chest and it feels like a key turning in a lock I never knew existed inside me. The sensation is so profound that for a moment I forget to be afraid.
The wolf shudders and a sound escapes it, something between a whine and a growl, before its body begins to change.
I watch bones crack and reshape beneath fur that recedes like a tide pulling back from shore. The muzzle shortens, paws elongate into hands, and where the massive wolf crouched moments ago… a man’s naked body now hovers over me.
Strong muscular arms braced on either side of my head, palms press into the earth.
He appears to be in his early thirties, with silver hair falling past his shoulders in tangled waves. His features are sharp, beautiful in an aristocratic way, and his pale gray eyes hold the same devastated recognition I saw in the wolf's gaze.
His entire body trembles as if he fights something I cannot see.
"Run," he begs, and his voice is wrecked, scraped raw with desperation. "Please. You have to run."
But the heat building between us is not something I can outrun.
Wild fire pulses through my veins like a second heartbeat, consuming every rational thought I try to form. This is not attraction—it is a deeper, unreal and unnatural need. A force that has wrapped itself around the base of my spine and refuses to let go.
Run, I tell myself. He is giving you a chance to run!
Yet my body does not listen.
My legs move without my permission, wrapping around his waist and pulling him closer. My hands reach up to grip his shoulders, fingernails digging into bare skin, and the scar on my collarbone—the one Margot refused to get stitched to heal properly when I was seven—burns like a brand.
Some unfamiliar instinct inside overwhelms reason, and all that remains is the lust.
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Their Human Mate
30 Chapters
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