Chapter 33 – Rex
REX
The bullet is still in my fucking back.
I can feel it. Lodged between my shoulder blade and my spine, a white-hot coal buried in muscle that screams with every movement and I don't fucking care.
I don't care about the blood soaking through my shirt and jacket, hot and wet and spreading.
I don't care about the mask.
I don't have a mask.
My face is bare. The full horror show—melted cheek, exposed teeth, lidless eye—all of it open to the night air and the streetlights and anyone unfortunate enough to be in my path.
Let them look.
The only thing I give a fuck about is the thread.
That filament of bond stretching from my sternum into the dark, pulling me forward through the streets as literally as a chain on a dog. Faint and flickering but there, and it leads somewhere specific, somewhere I know even if my conscious mind hasn't caught up.
Bells is alive.
Bells is mine.
And someone took her.
The opera house materializes through the fog three blocks ahead. Stone facade, arched windows dark, no signs of life.
That's where she is.
The service entrance is a steel door set into the alley side. Locked.
I put my boot through it.
The frame buckles inward with a shriek of metal that echoes down the corridor beyond. Pain detonates through my back where the bullet shifts and I snarl through it, shouldering through the gap.
The thread pulls me left.
I follow it down a concrete hallway lit by emergency strips.
My boots echo off the concrete. Blood drips from my fingertips, leaving a trail behind me that I'm dimly aware of and couldn't give less of a fuck about. Every step drives the bullet deeper into whatever it's nestled against and every step brings me closer to her.
The first guard rounds the corner twenty feet ahead.
He's big. Private security type. Black tactical vest, earpiece, hand on a holstered sidearm. He sees the blood first—my hand, my shirt, the drops on the concrete.
Then he sees my face.
His mouth opens.
No sound comes out for a full second. His brain is doing what brains do when confronted with something that doesn't compute. Running through its library of human faces, failing to find a match, defaulting to the oldest subroutine in the evolutionary playbook.
MONSTER.
"What the f—"
I hit him before the word finishes forming.
My fist connects with his jaw and the impact travels up my arm and into the bullet wound and I don't stop. His head snaps sideways, his earpiece flying, and I grab his vest with both hands and slam him into the concrete wall.
Once.
Twice.
His skull bounces off the cinderblock and his eyes roll and his legs buckle. I let him drop. He crumples like wet paper, groaning, his sidearm clattering free.
I step over him.
The thread pulls.
Down.
Below.
A stairwell opens on my right. Metal stairs descending into amber light. I take them three at a time, the icy pain in my back biting harder with every jarring step.
I hit the landing and keep going.
Another fucking corridor. This one has velvet-lined walls.
An underground rehearsal level.
Two more guards.
They're positioned at a set of double doors at the far end, standing shoulder to shoulder. They hear me before they see me. The boots, the harsh breathing from a fucked up face, the wet sound of blood hitting stone.
They turn.
The one on the left has his gun out. Professional. Trained. His stance is good, weight balanced, barrel aimed center mass at the thing moving toward him down the corridor.
The one on the right doesn't even get that far.
He sees my face and bolts.
Turns and runs, abandoning his post, his partner, his fucking dignity, all of it jettisoned in the span of one heartbeat because his lizard brain has overridden everything else and the only signal getting through is RUN.
His boots slap the stone. He rounds the corner and he's gone.
The one with the gun holds.
Credit to him.
His hands are shaking. The barrel wavers. But he holds his ground and his finger is on the trigger and at this range he won't miss.
I don't slow down.
"Stop! STOP or I'll—"
I close the distance in four strides.
His gun fires too late and I'm on him.
My hand closes around the barrel and twists. His finger catches in the trigger guard and snaps sideways with a sound like a dry stick. He screams. I rip the gun free and hurl it behind me and his broken finger sprays blood across my shirt as he staggers.
He swings at me with his good hand.
I catch it.
I don't remember the next part clearly.
It's red and it's fast and it's the sound of a body hitting a wall and then the floor and then silence. When I come back to myself, the guard is on the ground, his face a mess and his vest torn.
I'm standing over him.
My knuckles are split open.
More blood.
Mine, his, impossible to tell.
Don't give a fuck.
The double doors are in front of me.
The thread is a scream now. A howl of connection pulling me through these doors with a force that would take a fucking army to stop.
I kick them open.