Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
Lucas
Standing over Vale’s dead body, I throw my head back and howl.
The sound rips out of me raw, a call no alpha can ignore. Across the dirt, Darius’s gray head comes up sharply from where he is finishing off a fighter at the south wall. We lock eyes, and he begins running in my direction.
The shift takes me as I stride toward him. The change rolls through me hard, paws turning to bare feet on bloodied earth. The cord at my ankle tears as I pull my trousers on. Darius has just shifted back.
“Lydia.” My voice is wrecked. “It’s Lydia.”
He looks at me in confusion as he follows my lead and starts to dress.
“She’s the traitor. She’s inside with Sienna and Violet!”
Darius’s eyes go past me toward the central building, and when he looks back at me, they have filled with a terrifying rage.
We break into a run.
Wolf form would be faster across open ground, but the corridors will choke us. A wolf trapped in a hallway cannot turn or strike. I have been in plenty of skin-to-skin assaults before. So has Darius. Our boots hit the dirt in unison.
The bond pulls tight in my chest. I can still feel Sienna. Her anger comes through, hot and bright, the familiar spike of her temper when someone has wronged her.
But it’s all layered over fear.
Something’s wrong.
The front of the holding building yawns open ahead of us. A few of my men see us heading inside; they shift back and follow us, no questions asked. Darius’s shoulder bumps mine in the doorway, but we don’t break pace. The corridor is gray concrete, streaked with blood at shoulder height.
“Down,” I tell him. “Holding cells will be sub-level.”
“I smell Violet.”
He doesn’t say where. He doesn’t need to. He follows his bond, and I follow mine. Our two compasses are pointing at the same heading.
Stairwell.
We take it three steps at a time. My ribs are screaming from Vale. I shove the pain back behind this urgency. Darius has a cut above his eye that has bled into his stubble. Neither of us comments on the other.
The sub-level corridor opens at the bottom of the stairs.
Bodies.
Ten of my men in a tangle along the walls, fatigues torn, throats opened. Kessler closest to me, eyes still open, his hand reaching for nothing. The smell hits me a half second after the image. Copper. Bile. Underneath both, the sour wrongness of the operatives who killed them.
I do not let myself think about it.
“Go,” Darius rasps.
The bond is stronger now. Sienna is ahead and to the left, dimmer than she should be. Iron. They have her in iron. My wolf snarls inside my ribs, and I tell him not yet. We have to get to her with our human hands free, or we may not get to her at all.
At the next junction, Darius stops. His head lifts. His nostrils flare. “Right.”
We turn, and then, I hear it, too. A faint scuffle, far ahead. A shout, cut off.
Violet.
Darius is flying now. The corridor narrows, bends, ends at a steel door with a keypad.
Violet’s scent is layered on the metal, fresh, mixed with the static-burn of her magic.
Darius hits the door with his shoulder. It does not give.
He hits it again. The third strike puts a crack in the frame.
The fourth tears the bolt out of the wall.
The door slams open.
The chamber on the other side is wider than it should be, ceiling pulled high, the floor a wide circle of poured concrete that does not belong to a corridor system. Walls bare. Lights overhead. An arena, built into the heart of a holding facility for a purpose I do not want to know about.
Violet is at the far wall.
She is on her feet, barely. Her hand is braced against the wall behind her. Blood has run from her nose to her chin, and a thinner thread of it has tracked from her ear down the side of her neck. Her hair has come undone. Her shirt is ripped at one shoulder. Bruises darken the line of her jaw.
She is facing a shirtless man standing in the center of the room.
He turns his head when we burst through the door. His eyes find Darius, and his mouth pulls into a slow, pleased curve.
“Brother.”
The word comes out of him like he is greeting a man he has been hoping to see at a long-promised dinner. Easy. Familiar.
Darius does not answer.
So, this is Zion.
The squadron’s report did not prepare me for him.
Taller than the description implied. Wider through the chest than any shifter I have ever stood across from, built thicker than any man should be.
His skin holds a faint, dark sheen along the shoulders that is not sweat.
The wrongness of him fills the air. Whatever the Covenant has done to their fighters, they have done more to him.
Zion’s eyes track to Violet against the wall, then back to Darius, and the smile widens.
“I told you, didn’t I?” His voice is calm. Casual. “The day you killed our father, I told you I would take everything from you. Every good thing in your life. I would dismantle you piece by piece before this was finished.”
Darius’s growl drops to a level below normal hearing. I feel it through the floor.
Zion gestures at Violet without looking at her. “So much for hybrid strength. She can barely stay on her feet. I’m supposed to test her strength against mine, but it’s really not a fair fight. How pathetic.”
Violet bares her teeth at him from the wall. “Still standing, asshole.”
“For now.”
Darius takes one step into the room. “You stay where you are, Violet.” His voice has gone cold.
Violet sneers. “No, thank you. I’ve been itching to beat this one for years.”
“This is no longer your fight, Violet.” Darius snarls at her, and she scowls.
Zion laughs, rolling his shoulders. “I’m going to finish what I started, brother. I want your mate to watch you bleed. I want you to die knowing that, for the rest of her life, she will be used as a medium by the Covenant. No dignity, nothing. She will be a tool to make more shifters like me.”
Violet’s chest is still heaving. Her eyes are fixed on Zion, hatred evident in them. “The attack on the hybrid settlement, the exile of our kind…It wasn’t impulsive, Darius. This asshole has been with the Covenant since he was young. It was all staged.”
Darius’s eyes tighten. “Staged?”
Zion shrugs. “The Covenant needed hybrids for their magic. We were still experimenting at that point, and many of them died. We needed more. We could only kidnap so many of them before someone noticed.” A sly smile forms on his lips.
“It worked, though. We finally managed to figure out how to enhance shifters to a power greater than an alpha’s.
In a way, I am immortal now. You can’t kill me, Darius. ”
Disgust fills me.
Darius scoffs. “Let’s see how immortal you truly are.”
He shifts mid-leap. The gray wolf hits the concrete already at a run, head low, teeth bared.
Zion does not shift. He plants his bare feet and waits.
Darius hits him at full speed. The collision is bone on bone, and the man goes off his feet, three hundred pounds of wolf driving him back across the chamber until they slam into the far wall together, right near Violet.
Darius’s jaws find Zion’s throat and bite down, tearing a strip of skin and meat away in his teeth.
Zion’s head rolls forward against the wolf’s muzzle, and he laughs.
His knee comes up under Darius’s ribs. The gray wolf is launched off him, airborne across the floor, and hits the floor in a skid that rolls him back onto his feet. Darius charges again.
My wolf is roaring inside my chest to be let out. I move toward them, and I am mid-shift when Darius crashes into Zion the second time, jaws opening for his brother’s throat. This time, Zion catches him by the ruff. He pivots and throws the wolf.
Darius hits the wall ten feet up. He drops to the ground and is back up before he has fully landed, charging again.
I see what is happening before Darius does. The torn skin at Zion’s throat where the first bite went in is already knitting closed under that weird, dark sheen. The strip of meat Darius ripped free is no more than a pink shine at the surface now, sealing as I watch.
The third charge from Darius lands, and Zion takes the hit, skidding back two yards on his bare feet until the floor under him cracks. His arm hooks the wolf’s neck on the way past, and he spins.
Darius hits the opposite wall hard enough that the concrete spits dust. This time, the gray wolf does not get up immediately.
My turn.
I growl toward Violet, warning her to stay back.
I know she will not. The sound is not even out of my throat before Violet has pushed off her wall, the blue light of her magic coming up at her fingertips weakly. My paws move at full speed, my head aimed at the center of Zion’s spine.
I hit him, and he flies off his feet. Both our bodies slam into the concrete together, my jaws working at the meat of his shoulder, tearing strips, tasting the weird heat in his blood for one full second before he throws me off him.
I am airborne.
I land hard on my torn side, and my shoulder joint gives way with a sound I hear inside my own bones. I get up, counting on my remaining three legs to hold me, and they do.
Darius rises, too, swaying on his paws.
At the same time, Violet’s magic hits Zion in the chest.
The blue arc catches him just as he is standing up, punching him backward across the floor in a long slide. His bare feet leave dark drag marks on the concrete. He stops at the far wall, and his head hangs for one second.
One second.
Then, he gets up.
He rolls his shoulders again, the torn meat at his back, his shoulder, his throat, all of it closing as he stands there. I watch the worst of the damage seal itself in front of me. He shakes himself out, loose and easy, and comes off the wall again at a walk.
“Better,” he says to Violet. His tone of voice has not changed.