Chapter 34 – Bells
BELLS
I'm running like fucking hell.
The knife is slick in my fist, Stephen's blood warm and wrong on my fingers, and I don't look back because looking back is how people die in horror movies and this is not a fucking horror movie even though it's doing a spectacular impression of one.
The rehearsal theater has three exits.
I know this building. I've performed here.
Stage left wing. Down the corridor. My combat boots hammer the stone and my lungs are burning because the chloroform is still in my system turning my muscles to wet sand.
Behind me, Stephen screams.
No words. That wouldn’t be unsettling enough. He’s just making raw, animal, furious sounds that echo through the theater as he chases me into the corridor.
I take the first corner hard, my shoulder slamming into the wall, and keep going.
The corridor splits. Left goes up toward the main lobby. Right goes deeper into the building, toward the dressing rooms and storage and the labyrinth of underground passages that connect the opera house's various stages.
Left. Up. Out.
I go left.
Footsteps behind me.
Fast footsteps.
The fucker can move for someone who just took a knee to the dick and a knife to the eye. Guess even a neutered alpha is still a fucking alpha.
I push harder. My thighs are screaming. The binder is crushing my ribs with every gasping breath and—
There's a fucking body on the floor.
I almost trip over it.
The guard is crumpled against the baseboard, his tactical vest torn, his face a mess of blood and bruises. His earpiece dangles from its cord. His sidearm is gone. His arm is gone.
What the—
I leap over him.
Ten feet further, another one.
This one's worse. Slumped against the wall, his arm bent at an angle arms don't bend at, his jaw slack and his eyes rolled back. Blood smears the wall behind his head in a wide arc, like someone used him as a fucking paintbrush.
Holy shit.
What the fuck happened?
My boot hits a blood splatter.
My foot slides out from under me and I go down hard on one knee, catching myself on the wall with my free hand. My palm connects with the stone and slides—more blood, a long smear of it, still warm—and my stomach lurches.
Oh my gods.
I gag.
Wrench my hand away. It's coated red. The wall is coated red. The floor is coated red. There's a trail of it—two trails, actually—one from the guards and one from whoever did this to them, leading from the stairwell in a wet, gleaming path that paints the emergency strips crimson.
Rex.
Rex did this.
Rex is here.
The bond thread flares in my chest like a struck match and I almost sob with the force of it because he's close, he's so fucking close, he's alive and he's coming for me—
Stephen's footsteps pound closer.
I scramble to my feet and run.
The corridor dead-ends at a service stairwell. I yank the door open and take the stairs down because up means the locked lobby doors and Stephen's helicopter and I'd rather take my chances in the basement than anywhere near a fucking rooftop.
Down.
Deeper.
The stairwell dumps me into the opera house basement. Exposed pipe overhead. Concrete floor. The lights down here are fluorescent tubes behind wire cages, and half of them are dead, the other half flickering in that strobing, horror-movie way that makes every shadow jump and twitch.
It's cold.
It smells like mildew and old stone and rust and blood—my blood, Stephen's blood, Rex's blood, so much blood tonight that the metallic tang has become the baseline scent of my entire existence.
My inner omega is freaking the fuck out.
I scan for exits.
There's a long corridor ahead with doors on either side. Storage rooms, mechanical rooms, the kind of industrial guts that every old building hides beneath its pretty face.
No exit signs.
Fuck!
I turn to double back and Stephen is there.
He fills the stairwell doorway. The charcoal suit is ruined. Blood down the front, one lapel torn, his shirt untucked. His hand is clamped over his right eye. Blood streams between his fingers in thick rivulets, tracking down his jaw, soaking his collar.
His remaining eye—the one I didn't stab—locks onto me with a focus that makes my skin crawl.
"Nowhere left to run," he says. His voice is wet. Strained. The words slur slightly, his face working through the pain. "Songbird."
I raise my knife.
"Don't fucking call me that."
He lunges.
I slash and the blade catches his forearm, slicing through his sleeve, and he snarls but doesn't stop. His hand closes on my wrist—the one holding the knife—and twists.
Pain shoots up my arm. My fingers spasm.
I knee him in the same spot I hit before and he buckles but his grip doesn't loosen. He wrenches my wrist sideways and slams it against the concrete wall and the impact rattles through my bones.
The knife clatters to the floor.
No—!
I drive my elbow into his throat. He chokes. His grip loosens for half a second and I tear free, diving for the knife, but his boot catches it first and kicks it skittering down the corridor into the dark.
Stephen straightens up, one hand on his bleeding eye, the other reaching for me.
I backpedal. Fast. My boots scrape concrete. The flickering lights strobe his ruined face. Blood-soaked hand, manic grin, that single remaining eye burning with something that makes my inner omega want to burrow into the earth and never come out.
"You stabbed me in the eye," he says, almost admiringly. "That's new."
"You kidnapped me in a birdcage. That's new and lame."
He advances. I retreat. My back hits a door—locked—and I dodge sideways as his hand slams into the metal where my head was.
I duck under his arm and sprint.
Three doors down. Four. The corridor stretches ahead in strobing light and shadow and every door I try is locked, locked, locked—
He catches the back of my jacket.
I twist out of it. Leave it in his fist. Keep running in just the t-shirt and binder, the cold air biting my arms.
Dead end.
The corridor terminates in a concrete wall with a massive electrical panel bolted to it, all switches and warning stickers and a chain-link cage over the breaker boxes.
I spin around.
Stephen is twenty feet away. Walking now. Not running. The leather jacket hangs from his fist like a trophy. Blood drips from his chin onto the concrete in a steady pat pat pat.
"I've been patient," he says. His voice echoes in the dead-end corridor. "I've been so patient with you."
My back presses against the electrical panel. The metal is ice cold through my thin shirt.
"Years," he continues. "Years of watching you. Protecting you. Building something for us."
"You're literally fucking delusional."
"I gave you The Reverie. I gave you a career—"
"You gave me a cage!"
His mouth twists. The blood-soaked hand drops from his destroyed eye and what's underneath makes my stomach flip. The socket is a ruin. My knife went in clean but came out messy and the damage is catastrophic. Burst tissue, blood still flowing freely, the lid shredded.
"This," he says, gesturing at his face with eerie calm, "will cost you. But I forgive you. I always forgive you. And it's nothing a little nip and tuck can't help."
"Oh, you're way fucking beyond plastic surgery," I say with a hoarse laugh, side-stepping along the wall.
He was right about one thing.
There's nowhere left to run.
He's ten feet away.
Eight.
My fists clench. I have no knife, no weapon. It’s just me and a concrete wall and the worst person I've ever known closing the distance with the patience of a man who believes he's already won.
Six feet.
My scar throbs.
Not from Stephen.
From behind him.
The bond thread in my chest detonates. A flare of wild, ferocious, barely-human energy that hits my nervous system like a freight train and makes every hair on my body stand up.
My eyes snap to the corridor behind Stephen's shoulder.
The flickering lights strobe.
Dark.
Light.
Dark.
Light.
He's there.
At the far end of the corridor, moving toward us at a striding clip that eats distance like a predator covering open ground. No mask. The lights strobe off the destroyed side of his face—the melted cheek, the exposed teeth, the lidless eye blazing feral blue in the dark like a flame.
He looks like a nightmare.
My nightmare.
He doesn't slow down.
He doesn't make a sound.
Stephen doesn't see him.
Stephen is watching me. My face. My eyes. And whatever he reads there—the relief, the savage fucking joy—makes him hesitate.
"What are you—"
Rex's hand closes over Stephen's skull.
His fingers splay wide, thumb hooked under the jaw, four fingers gripping the crown, and he lifts.
Stephen's feet leave the ground for a fraction of a second like he's just levitating before Rex slams him into the concrete wall face-first with a sound I've only ever heard from a watermelon hitting pavement.
Stephen rebounds off the wall, blood spraying from his already ruined face, and Rex catches him before he hits the floor and does it again.
And again.
The third time, Stephen's legs give out. Rex lets him drop and Stephen crumples to his hands and knees, blood pouring from his nose and mouth and destroyed eye, and tries to crawl.
Rex kicks him in the ribs.
Stephen folds sideways with a choked scream and Rex is on him, grabbing a fistful of hair and wrenching his head back.
"You—" Rex's voice is barely human. A shredded rasp dragged across gravel. "—don't—" He slams Stephen's face into the floor. "—touch—" Again. "—her."
"Rex!" I yell.
His head snaps toward me.
Both eyes.
The good one and the damaged one, both of them burning with something that has nothing to do with the man I've been falling in love with and everything to do with the animal underneath.
He's feral.
Full, complete, no-one-fucking-home feral.
"GO!" he snarls at me, alpha authority weaponized and deafening in the concrete corridor. Not an alpha bark, but my legs move before my brain authorizes them.
I run.
Behind me, Stephen roars. The sound of bodies colliding. Fists on flesh. The wet crack of bone.