Chapter 37
Tess
"Look at you." Dominick's voice carried the length of the corridor without effort. Not loud. Placed. The way a man speaks in a room he owns.
He was looking at me. Not at the team, not at the victims in their cells. At me.
"A human." He said it like the word tasted interesting. "On a dragon. In my facility. Breaking my things."
The temperature dropped another degree. The emergency strips along the floor pulsed red and the orange glow of the hellfire barrier behind us threw his shadow long and wrong across the concrete.
"I have to admit," he said. "I'm curious what you thought would happen next."
He lifted his hand.
The pressure dropped. A wave of invisible force rolled outward from Dominick in a pulse, and I felt it pass through me, through the walls, through the cells on either side of the corridor. A low hum vibrated in my teeth, in my sternum, somewhere behind my eyes.
Then I heard it. A sound I will never unhear.
Every victim in every cell gasped at the same time.
Not a breath. A seizure of air—dozens of throats pulling in oxygen they didn't ask for, bodies jerking upright like something had grabbed them by the spine. I saw it happen through the bars—eyes snapping open, pupils blown wide, irises flickering with a dull, ember-orange glow that wasn't theirs.
The woman in front of Mason stood up inside her open cell. Her hands lifted. Magic gathered at her palms in two colors that should not have been on the same person.
"No—" The word left me before I could stop it.
Dominick smiled. Not wide. Just enough.
"You came to save them," he said. "Let's see how that goes."
He closed his fist.
Every cell door opened at once. The locks didn't click; they shattered. Metal screamed against metal as the doors swung wide, slamming into walls, and the sound echoed down the corridor like a gunshot volley.
And then the victims moved.
Not all at once. A wave—the ones closest to the team first, then the ones deeper in the corridor, bodies lurching forward with the wrong kind of coordination. Smooth where people aren't smooth. Simultaneous where people don't move simultaneously.
They were still in there. That was the worst part. I could see it—tiny fractures in the blankness. A twitch of a mouth. A single tear. Eyes that screamed while bodies obeyed.
Dominick wasn't just controlling them. He was making them watch.
The werewolf girl took a step toward Raze and her hands came up and her claws were out.
Raze didn't move.
He was looking at the jacket still around her shoulders. His jacket.
"Raze!" Theron's voice cracked across the comms. "Contain. Don't engage. Shield and hold."
Raze caught the werewolf girl's wrist before her claws reached his face. He redirected her momentum—gentle, even now—and she spun past him and came again immediately, because whatever was driving her didn't know what gentle was and didn't stop.
The corridor erupted.
I threw my Golden Shield wide—not at Dominick, at Lunessa, who had three victims closing on her from the left side of the corridor.
The shield caught a bolt of stolen magic that would have hit her in the chest and I felt the impact shudder up into my shoulder, my burned shoulder, and everything went bright for a second.
His siphon pulled at the edges of the shield as it reformed. Not from the blast—from somewhere deeper in the corridor. My magic was leaking out the back.
"What are we supposed to do?" Raze, through the comms, and his voice had an edge I'd never heard on him before. "I can't—they're—am I supposed to hit her? She weighs a hundred and ten pounds. Theron, what am I doing?"
"Subdue. Minimize harm. Don't let them hurt you."
"That's not—those two things don't go together—"
A blast of wrong-colored magic screamed past my head.
The whispering woman—the one who'd been repeating the same words over and over with her hands moving in a pattern she'd worked out with herself—had her arms extended and the magic pouring out of her was someone else's, grafted, and it hit the wall behind me and left a scorch mark the size of my torso.
I threw another shield. Caught the next blast. The shield came up thinner than it should have. My arms were shaking and my magic was draining faster than I was spending it—every cast costing more than the last, Dominick's siphon pulling at the source.
"Little one." Thalon, distant, furious, fighting through static that scraped the bond like broken glass. "I am here. I cannot reach you but I am here."
"I know. I know you're here."
"Draven, report," Theron snapped.
"They can't stop." Draven's voice was the cold one—the one that meant the incubus underneath was feeling something that wanted to burn. "The bonds are active. He's driving them. They don't have a choice."
"Can you disrupt it?"
"I'm trying. I can find the anchor points but I can't—it's not a shield, it's a leash. I can see it but I can't cut it."
A body hit the ground to my right. Kane, driving a compelled fae man to the floor with a hold that pinned without breaking, and the fae man was thrashing, crying, trying to fight with magic that tore at Kane's arms, and Kane held him and took it.
I was moving.
Not toward my team. Toward Dominick.
The thought arrived the same time the decision did—he was the source. The leash ran back to him. Every victim in this corridor was a puppet and he was holding every string, and my team was being torn apart trying not to hurt the people we'd come to save.
Nobody else could get to him—they were all pinned, all fighting, all trying to hold without breaking.
I was the only one still moving forward.
My Golden Shield was up but it was thin. Thinner than it should have been, and I understood now—it wasn't exhaustion. Dominick was pulling magic out of the air around him in a radius, a slow steady siphon, and every spell I cast was feeding it. Feeding him.
I cast them anyway.
A victim lunged at me from a cell on the left—the man with two signatures, the one whose eyes had focused on something three inches behind my head.
His magic hit my shield and my shield held but I felt the cost of it in my teeth, in the backs of my eyes—my reserves burning down faster with every step closer to the thing at the end of the corridor.
I pushed past him. Threw a shield burst that knocked him sideways without hurting him—I hoped without hurting him—and kept moving.
"Whittaker." Theron. "Whittaker, what are you doing."
"He's the anchor. If I can get to him—"
"Negative. Pull back."
I didn't pull back.
I couldn't. Behind me, my friends were struggling. If I stopped, if I turned around, we'd be pinned here forever—fighting people we couldn't hurt, draining ourselves against victims while Dominick stood at the back of the hall and watched.
He was the only thing in this corridor that was a choice. Everything else was a trap.
The drain got worse with every step. My Golden Shield was guttering at the edges, the gold-and-purple light flickering.
The Thalon bond was static now—not gone, but buried under interference that tasted like brimstone.
My second heartbeat was hammering and I couldn't tell if it was the Draconis Heart responding to the threat or responding to what was pulling at it.
My shield cracked.
Not shattered. Cracked. A line of darkness across the gold like a fracture in glass. That hadn't happened before. My Golden Shield didn't crack. It dimmed, it drained, it guttered—but it didn't fracture.
He was pulling from me faster now, the siphon intensifying the closer I got, my magic being consumed and replenished and consumed again in a cycle I couldn't sustain.
I sealed the crack. It cost me. My vision tunneled for a second and the fluorescent emergency strips blurred.
Dominick hadn't moved.
He was watching me come to him. His expression hadn't changed since he'd stepped through the teleportation circle. Cold. Interested. The way you watch something small do something unexpected.
"Tess." Mason, through the bond. Not the comms—the mate bond, and his voice through it was raw. He was three cells behind me, fighting, I could feel the combat through our connection, the impact of blows he was taking because he wouldn't throw them at full force.
Another victim cut across my path. She stepped out of her open cell and her hands came up with magic that was two colors wrong and I threw my shield and the blast hit it and the crack widened.
"Lunessa's down." Raze's voice. Tight. Controlled in a way that meant he was about to be the opposite of that. "Something hit her—the vines are out. She's breathing but she's out."
I heard it but I couldn't turn around.
Dominick tilted his head. The fractional movement was almost thoughtful.
"You know," he said conversationally, "I remember you being smaller."
He didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. The corridor was narrow and the fighting was behind me now—I'd walked through it, or pushed through it, and Dominick was right there, and his energy drain was so strong my fingers were going numb inside my own shield.
"You were—what. A gift, as I recall. Garanth brought you in. Human girl, no family, no connections. Perfect for the ring." He looked at me the way someone looks at a ledger that doesn't add up. "And now you're here. On a dragon. With a team. Breaking my operation."
My shield was flickering. I could feel it guttering at the edges, the drain eating the light faster than I could feed it.
I threw Shadow Fire at him.
It left my hands and flew across the distance and hit his presence and dissolved. Not deflected—absorbed. He drank it the way dry ground drinks water.
"There it is," he said. Satisfied. Like I'd confirmed something.
"Draven." Through the comms, barely a whisper. "I can't—my shield's cracking. He's pulling everything."
"I know." Draven's voice was strained. "I can feel it. Tess, don't let him touch you. Whatever you do—"
The drain hit a threshold and my Golden Shield collapsed.
Not cracked. Not flickered. Went out. Like a light being switched off. The gold-and-purple glow around my hands vanished and I was standing in a concrete corridor with nothing between me and a seven-foot demon.
The cold hit first—the absence of the shield like stepping from a warm room into a freezer. Then the understanding. No magic. No shield. No Thalon through the bond, just static. I was standing in my own skin and I had nothing left.
Dominick closed the distance in two steps.
His hand came up and took my chin.
Not rough. Precise.
His touch wasn't cold—it was extractive. The moment his fingers found my jaw, the siphon became surgical, boring into me like a needle finding a vein. I felt him moving through my magic's pathways the way you'd walk through someone's house opening drawers.
My muscles relaxed without my permission.
His energy rewrote signals between my brain and my body, soft and invasive. My thoughts softened. The urgency thinned. The fighting behind me went muffled, distant, like sound through water. I knew it was him. I knew. I couldn't stop it.
Stop fighting, said a voice in my head that sounded exactly like mine. This is fine. You're tired. You've been fighting all night and you're tired and this is fine. Let go.
It was my voice. That was the worst part. Not his voice commanding me—my own voice, co-opted, turned against me, telling me things I would never say in words I would actually use. He'd gotten inside the part of me that talked to myself and he was wearing it like a mask.
My hands dropped to my sides.
Somewhere far away, Raze was shouting something. Theron was giving an order. Mason was sending something through the bond that I couldn't—the bond was—the bond was—
Let it go. It's easier. Let it all go.
Dominick's grip shifted on my chin. His thumb pressed against my jaw and tilted my face up and his obsidian eyes were right there, close, and they were looking into me the way you look into a room you're about to walk through.
"Oh," he said softly.
His expression shifted. A flicker—fast, controlled, but I caught it even through the fog. He'd found something. The Draconis Heart. My second heartbeat hammering behind my ribs, and his eyes went to my chest and back to my face and his grip tightened for one second.
Not confidence. Recalculation.
"What are you?" he murmured. Not to me. To the thing inside me.
His hand adjusted on my jaw. His thumb moved to the corner of my mouth. He leaned closer and I could smell brimstone and something sweet underneath it, chemical, and the fog in my head said this is fine, this is fine, this is—
I brought them here.
The thought cut through the fog sideways.
I told that girl she was safe.
Raze gave her his jacket and I told her she was safe and now she's attacking him with claws that are tearing his arms open because I brought them here.
I brought all of them here. I brought my team here. I thought showing up would be enough and Lunessa is unconscious and Raze is bleeding and Mason is fighting people he can't hit and I brought them here because I thought—
Let it go.