Chapter 35 Kit
Kit
Ipressed myself against the corridor wall, struggling to catch my breath. The gauze against my neck was already soaked through, warm blood trickling down.
“This way,” Rory whispered, checking around the corner. The lights were back on—one small mercy. “We’re almost to Felix. I… I think.”
I tried to catch Felix’s scent in the air, but the metallic tang of blood overwhelmed everything else. My head spun, and I blinked rapidly to clear my blurring vision. I needed to heal, and fast.
“Rory, I think we should shift. I—”
WHAM.
Two men slammed into us from a side passage. I reacted on instinct, wrenching the gun from the nearest one’s grip as his fingers closed around my throat. Behind me, Rory grunted as he grappled with the second attacker.
The shifter’s eyes were vacant, pupils blown wide. Whatever they’d done to him, there was nothing human left behind those eyes. I drove my elbow into his solar plexus, using his momentum to flip him over my shoulder. He hit the concrete floor with a sickening crack.
A gunshot echoed through the corridor. I spun to see Rory standing over his attacker’s body, blood streaming from a gash on his forehead.
“Fuck,” he breathed, hands shaking around the smoking gun.
“Quick, we need to shift while we can,” I said, wiping blood from my lip. “Your transformation takes longer—”
Rory’s face went white, his gaze fixed over my shoulder.
“Kit.”
I turned slowly.
Our father stood at the far end of the corridor, rifle raised. His eyes held the same vacant quality as the controlled shifters, yet something else lurked beneath the emptiness. Recognition? Rage?
Rory stood frozen still. “He’s… here.”
“Move,” I grabbed Rory’s arm, but the sound of more approaching footsteps echoed from both directions. Fuck. How many soldiers did Moira have?
Malcolm’s finger tightened on the trigger.
I shoved Rory sideways as the first shot rang out, concrete exploding where his head had been. Behind us, Rory grunted as something—someone—slammed into him.
“Kit!” he shouted, but his voice was already moving away, engaged in his own fight.
More shots. The gun bucked in my hands, but my aim was off, blood loss making everything swim. From the corner of my eye, I caught glimpses of Rory wrestling with two shifters, their movements horribly coordinated.
Malcolm aimed, and I threw myself sideways, his shot punching through the air where I’d been standing.
Then my legs gave out.
I hit the floor hard, the corridor tilting sickeningly. The gash in my neck pulsed with each heartbeat, blood streaming out of me. Too much. I’d underestimated the wound. Malcolm loomed over me, rifle forgotten as his hands found my throat.
His fingers were cold. Familiar. The same hands that had beaten me as a child, before turning to Rory as the target for his rage, now pushed me onto my back and squeezed, and I couldn’t summon the strength to fight back.
I stared up into his face, searching for something—anything—that resembled the father I’d once known. His eyes were pale blue, washed out and empty as winter sky. Nothing like Rory’s. Nothing like mine. How had we ever come from him?
My lungs burned, desperate for air that wouldn’t come.
This was how it would end. Killed by the bastard who’d destroyed us both. Felix would die in this place. Rory would die, or worse. All because I couldn’t—
“TAKE THAT, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!”
Something heavy connected with Malcolm’s skull with a wet crack. His body collapsed on top of me, suddenly lifeless, and I gasped in a lungful of air, shoving the dead weight aside.
Black hair falling across worried eyes. Familiar hands reaching for my face, warm against my skin. The scent of vanilla, sweet and intoxicating and everything I thought I’d never have again.
My brain disconnected, floating. Those hands were too real. Too warm. The worried frown creasing his forehead, the way his lips moved as he said my name—everything about him was exactly right and completely impossible.
“Are you really here?” I asked, voice horrifically hoarse.
Big brown eyes widened. “Yes. Yes, I’m here.”
“Why are you here?” I managed, attempting to sound cross.
“To do this.”
He climbed into my lap, straddling my thighs, and suddenly the hallucination became solid weight and warmth and Felix, definitely Felix, pressing close enough that I could feel his heartbeat against my chest.
His lips found mine, soft and desperate and alive. For a moment, nothing else existed except Felix’s mouth, Felix’s hands, Felix, Felix, Felix. My mate. Alive. With me. Kissing me.
When he pulled back, pink flushed across his cheeks, his eyes bright with something between terror and joy.
“Hi,” he said quietly, almost shy despite everything—the gunfire, the blood, the fact that he’d just saved my life with what looked suspiciously like a fire extinguisher.
“Hello,” I said. “You’re supposed to be in London.”
His smile was small but real. “And so are you.”
“Kit! Felix!” Rory’s voice shattered the moment. “For fuck’s sake you two, we need to move!”
Felix helped me to my feet, his fingers gripping mine tightly. That’s when I noticed her.
Isla stood beside Rory, gun in her hands, positioned like an ally rather than a threat. Blood spattered her pale face, but her eyes were clear. Determined.
“Isla.”
She nodded once, mouth set with familiar Thorne stubbornness.
“Now would be good,” Rory said, glancing nervously down the corridor.
A noise from the floor. Malcolm’s eyes fluttered. His fingers twitched against the concrete floor.
“Shit,” Rory breathed. “He’s not—”
Our father’s head lifted slowly, blood trickling from where the fire extinguisher had connected. Those vacant blue eyes found mine first, then shifted to Rory. Something flickered there—recognition? Or was it my imagination?
“I… I think we should kill him,” Isla said quietly. “Before he gets back up.”
Malcolm pushed himself to his knees, movements jerky like a broken marionette. The rifle lay beside him, and his gaze tracked to it with predatory intent.
Rory raised his weapon, arms shaking violently, the barrel wavering as he aimed at our father’s chest.
I moved behind him, close enough to feel the tension radiating from his compact frame.
“Rory, hand me the gun,” I murmured into his ear, keeping my voice low. “I’ll do it. Let me—”
“No,” Rory snapped. “I want to be the one. For… for everything he did to me. Everything he did to us.”
I reached for the rifle, but his grip only tightened. “Rory, you don’t need to carry this.”
He shook his head, pulling away from me. “I’m not a kid anymore, Kit. You don’t need to protect me from everything. You don’t want to carry this either.”
Malcolm’s hand closed around his weapon. He lifted it, the movement too smooth, too controlled. No human left. Only violence.
Something shifted in his expression. The emptiness flickered, and for one impossible moment, I saw him. Really saw him. Not the monster who’d terrorised our childhood, not the hollow shell Greywatch had made him, but the man underneath. Broken. Exhausted.
His gaze met Rory’s. A barely perceptible nod.
Rory’s finger pressed on the trigger—
The gunshot echoed through the corridor.
Rory jerked, spinning towards the sound. Not him. Not his shot.
Isla lowered her smoking pistol. “He was a fucking bastard of an uncle,” she said, voice steady until the end, when it wavered.
Malcolm crumpled sideways, a neat hole through his temple. Blood pooled beneath his grey hair, spreading across the concrete in an abstract pattern that was almost hypnotic.
Isla swayed on her feet. Rory was there instantly, wrapping his arms around her slight frame.
Rory’s eyes found mine over Isla’s trembling shoulder. For a heartbeat, we just stared at each other across our father’s corpse.
Da. The man who’d belted Rory for breathing too loud. Who’d called us disappointments, failures, mistakes he should have drowned at birth.
Finally dead. Properly dead this time.
Something passed between us—not grief. Relief? Understanding? The shared weight of surviving something that should have killed us both, long before Greywatch got their hands on him.
Felix, staring down at his tablet, gasped. “Shit! I can see at least twenty more coming. Armed. Moving fast.”
The distant sound of boots echoed through the facility’s corridors, growing louder. How the hell had Felix and Rory even got in here? The thought tried to surface, but survival instincts pushed it aside.
“Which direction?” I asked.
Felix’s fingers flew across the tablet screen. “All of them.” He turned to Isla, face set with grim determination. “Let’s do it. Now.”
“Do what?!” I demanded, but Felix was already moving, thumbs dancing across the screen.
Isla’s voice cut through the approaching footsteps. “All three of us need to squeeze our eyes tightly shut and cover our ears. Right now.”
“What?!” The boots were getting closer, echoing from multiple directions. We were out of time.
“We’re going to force everyone to shift,” Felix said, not looking up from the tablet. “Using the HVAC controls.”
“How—”
“No time to explain,” Isla interrupted, her hands already clamped over her ears, eyes screwed shut. “Do it. Just in case it triggers you too.”
Felix’s thumb hovered over the screen. “Five seconds!”
Rory, completely bewildered, copied Isla’s stance, palms pressed tight against his ears, face scrunched in concentration.
Felix threw himself at me, reaching up to press his hands firmly over mine against my ears as I squeezed my eyes shut.
He moulded against my bare chest, warm and solid and reassuringly real.
Quick, nervous breaths ghosted against my neck, the press of his lips against my skin cutting through everything else.
“Three,” Felix whispered against my throat.
The approaching footsteps thundered closer.
“Two.”
I pressed my face into his hair, holding him tighter.
“One.”
The world exploded.