Fate Bound to the Monsters (Spring Equinox Mates #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter one

Jen

There are two of them.

For one stupid second, with alarms screaming and concrete dust hanging in the air and the front of Crull's cell blown open, that is the thing my brain gets stuck on.

Not the breach. Not the fact that the facility is actively coming apart around us.

Two.

One moves left. One moves right. One is controlled enough to disappear into motion. The other hits a Syndicate guard hard enough to dent concrete.

Twins. Actual twins.

And under my sternum, two new threads are already forming. Bonds. The beginning of the same impossible connection that ties me to Thaw and Crull.

Two more.

Three weeks ago my biggest problem was loose dogs and nuisance raccoons.

Now I am standing in the middle of a prison break with six monsters, a facility full of alarms, and a building that seems determined to collapse around us.

Crull growls.

The sound vibrates through the concrete and straight into my ribs.

I stay behind him.

His back is a wall. Gray, scarred, scorching-warm, angled so that every line of him is between me and the open mouth of the cell where the bars used to be. Dean did something to the lock — a tool, a charge, I did not see — and the gap is full of the noise the twins are making in the corridor.

Dean moves first.

He goes left, toward the north end, toward the boots that have not stopped coming since the door blew.

He does not run. He flows — low, fast, economical, a body that has done this a hundred times in rooms I will never see — and the first Syndicate guard who rounds the corner does not get a word out before Dean is inside his reach and the guard folds.

Daron goes right.

He is not economical. He hits the second guard full-body and the sound the guard makes when he goes into the concrete is wet and final.

And then Daron turns fast, his whole body coming around and I think for half a second he is going to scan the corridor for the next threat.

He doesn't.

He comes to me.

Three strides, straight toward us, and his ice-blue eyes are locked on my face and the growl in his chest is not a warning, but a yearning.

There is a thread for him. New. Thin. Forming.

He stops at the edge of Crull's reach.

He does not cross it.

Even now with the building falling, guards down, the growl climbing out of him — Daron stops at the invisible line of another male's claim and waits. His hands come up, open, and hang there. He is vibrating with the need to get to me and he does not take the step.

Crull's rumble shifts. One note. Lower.

Allowed.

Daron moves in. He does not touch me — there is no time and I am not his to settle yet, the thread is too new, but he takes the open side beside me, the one Crull's body does not cover and just like that I am boxed. Gray wall on one side. Blond wolf on the other.

"Jen." Crull's voice, above me, low. He has not turned around. Every part of him is still aimed at the corridor. "Eyes on me."

I put my eyes on him.

It is the right call. My body wants to track all of it — the twins, the downed guards, the flashing lights and my training wants the same, wants the full field, wants every exit. But there is too much input and the corridor is too loud and Crull knows it. Eyes on me is a smaller world.

I can hold a smaller world.

"Thaw," Crull says, toward the wall.

"Coming."

And then Thaw is there — out of his own cell, in the corridor, and I have never once seen him outside a set of bars.

He stands all the way up. Something in me goes still.

The man is enormous.

Not folded into a space too small for him. Not restrained.

Free.

The width of his shoulders fill the corridor. His presence hits me like a physical thing, and something low in my body pulls tight in response.

For the first time, I am looking at a Thaw that nothing is containing.

The patterning under his skin is moving. His eyes are gold. Not red. They sweep the corridor once, twins, downed guards, me, Crull, Daron at the gap, the north door, the dark beyond it — and lock.

He does not ask what happened. He does not ask how the twins got here, or where they have been for the two years he thought they were gone.

His brothers are thirty feet away putting Syndicate guards into the floor and he registers it and files it and moves past it, because there is a corridor to get me out of and he is the one who is going to do it.

"Dean." Thaw's voice cuts the noise clean. "North door. Hold it."

Dean is already in the frame of the north door. Already a problem for anything that wants to come through. He does not answer. He does not need to.

"Daron. I want both ends sealed."

Daron's growl spikes. His eyes come off me — it costs him, I watch it cost him — and find Thaw's.

"She does not get touched," Daron says. It is not a question and it is not quite agreement. It is a term.

"She does not get touched," Thaw says. "By anything. That's the whole job. Go hold your end of it."

Daron goes.

The growl goes with him, but he goes.

Thaw crosses to me.

Thaw's hands land on my shoulders.

"Jen. Look at me." I do. His eyes are gold and certain and the bond at my sternum floods with him. "We are leaving. Now. You stay between me and Crull. You do not stop. You do not look at anything. If I go down, you go with Crull. If Crull goes down, you go with Dean. Tell me you understand."

"Between you and Crull. Don't stop. If you fall, Crull. If Crull falls, Dean."

The corner of his mouth lifts. "Good girl."

Then his head turns.

Fen.

"Crull." Thaw does not look away from Fen's cell. "Get him."

Crull moves.

For the first time since the bars opened, the wall of him is not at my back and the second it is gone the corridor feels enormous and wrong, and I understand, in my body, how much of my calm for the last minute has been the simple fact of him standing there.

Then Thaw steps into the space Crull left.

The geometry closes around me again.

Crull reaches Fen's cell. Harek is already out and he and Crull nod at each other. Harek looks at Crull and gets one word out, rough and low and urgent.

"Careful."

Crull goes in.

Fen is face-down on the concrete where they dropped him.

The dart he pulled out of his own chest is still on the floor three feet from his hand.

He has not moved. The gas has him deep, deeper than I have ever felt him through the wall, the place under my sternum where his faint thread should be gone flat and cold and silent.

When Crull crouches and gets a hand under him, Fen's body comes up loose.

Boneless. A head that lolls against Crull's arm.

Claws still out, because Fen's claws are always out, even unconscious, even now.

Crull lifts him.

Six and a half feet of feral hybrid over a shoulder, Crull's other hand splayed wide across the back of Fen's thigh to lock him there — and the rumble in Crull's chest changes.

It does something I have not heard it do.

It goes low and continuous and aimed down, at the unconscious body on his shoulder.

He is purring at Fen. I thought only Harek could purr.

Carrying him out of the cell that broke him, and purring the whole way, so that wherever Fen has gone under the gas, the first thing that reaches him that is not the lab is a brother's chest saying held, held, held.

My eyes sting. I do not have time for it. I breathe through it.

"Moving," Thaw says.

And we move.

Thaw in front. He reaches back without looking, finds my hand, folds my fingers into the back of his waistband and closes his own hand over mine for half a second — here, stay here — and then lets go and walks.

Me behind him, fisted in the fabric. Crull behind me with Fen on his shoulder.

Harek a half-step off my flank. I am inside all of them. Boxed on every side.

The north door. Dean in the frame of it, and past him the dark.

Dean's eyes find Thaw's. A question with no words in it.

"Out," Thaw says. "All of us. Now."

Dean looks once at the woman in the center of the pack.

At me.

The thread pulls taut. His. The twin of Daron's.

Something flashes across his face.

Whatever is climbing in him, he sets it aside for later, the way Daron could not quite manage and Dean can.

He turns. He takes the dark first, so that if there is anything waiting in it, it gets him before it gets the rest of us.

Daron falls in at the back, behind Crull, behind Fen. The last body. The door.

Thaw steps through into the dark and does not slow and does not look back to see if we follow.

He doesn't have to.

We are already moving.