You should be dead.

You should've bled out hours ago, after your thigh caught on a jagged root while you fled from camp, after you lost your footing on the slope and tumbled into a river black with rain.

You should have drowned when your body collapsed in the shallows, lungs half-filled with jungle rot and storm water.

But you didn't die because something has been keeping you alive.

The Cipactli Rainforest is unlike anything on Earth, alive in a way your academic texts never hinted at. It breathes around you, a sentient thing that watches with no eyes. The trees lean inward, their leaves rustling with secrets only they understand. The ground pulses with heat beneath your bare feet, radiating some ancient energy. The air crackles like it's holding its breath, thick with the scents of damp earth, ripe fruit, and something metallic—like ozone before a storm.

Three days ago, you were a scientist. A last-minute addition to an ecological survey. You had gloves, field notes, a portable microscope. Now you have a torn tank top soaked with sweat that sticks uncomfortably to your skin, a half-healed wound throbbing in your thigh, and the constant feeling that something massive walks behind you without making a sound.

You have not seen your team since the attack. Only a flash of blood against green, shredded tents fluttering like broken butterflies, and then a terrible, unnatural quiet. Yet, something else found you instead.

You first caught his scent the night you tried to build a fire and couldn't get the leaves to stay dry. That night, lightning struck too close, illuminating the trees in jagged white light, and the wind changed direction. It wasn't just ozone you smelled then. It was male. Warm, musky, overpowering. Alpha. Instinctively wrong and right all at once. Since then, you've been moving in circles. Your tracks lead nowhere. The forest keeps folding in on itself, as if deliberately confounding your escape.

And all the while he watches.