Chapter 30 #2
For a second — one second — I stop. My body stops. My wolf stops. Everything I am stands in this room and sees what they did to him. And it guts me.
He’s strapped to the chair. Wrists, ankles, chest. The dampening cuffs are on his wrists, the runes still glowing faintly.
He’s shirtless. The cuts I gave him in the cabin — the silver marks I put on his skin with my knife — are surrounded by new damage.
Bruising across his ribs, his shoulders, his face.
His left eye is swollen shut. There’s blood in his hair, dried brown, and fresh red at the corner of his mouth.
His lip is split. But that’s barely the worst of it, and I squeeze my eyes shut to block out the rest.
I pull in a deep breath, then stare into his ruined face.
He’s looking at me with his one open eye.
Brown. Clear. Not dazed, not broken, not the glazed stare of a man who’s been in a chair for two days while people worked on him. Alert. Focused.
“Briar.” The word comes out cracked. “What—?”
“Shut up.” I cross the room. My hands find the wrist restraints. The buckle is industrial; heavy, stiff, my fingers fumbling with it because my hands are shaking now, and I need them to stop shaking. “Conner. The other wrist.”
Conner is there. He takes one look at his brother and something moves across his face that I’ve never seen from him — the enforcer’s composure weakening, just for a second.
“Garrett.” Conner’s voice. Rough.
“Hey, little brother.” Garrett’s mouth twitches. The split lip opens again. “Took you long enough.”
“Shut up,” Conner says. The same thing I said. He works the other wrist restraint.
Rook handles the ankle straps. The chest strap is harder. Jericho cuts it with a blade because the buckle is jammed.
Garrett tries to stand. His legs don’t hold.
He goes down on one knee, and I catch him, my arms under his, his weight on me.
His body is hot with fever and heavy with damage, but I’ve got him.
I’ve got him, and the smell of him — over the blood and sweat and antiseptic — fills my nose: male, alpha…
mate. My wolf makes a sound inside me that I’ve never heard from her. A sound of utter, wrenching relief.
“Can you walk?” I say against his ear, my mouth close enough that my lips brush his skin.
“If you give me a minute.”
“You don’t have a minute. We have about three minutes before the shift change ends, and forty guards figure out we’re here. Can you walk?”
“Then get me up.”
I get him up. Conner takes his other side. Between the two of us, we haul him to his feet, and his arm goes across my shoulders. His weight settles onto me, and my knees almost buckle. I lock them because my knees do not buckle. Not now.
“The cells,” I say to Rook. “The guard said three prisoners.”
Rook is already at the first cell door with Willow close by. The keycard works. He pulls the door open. Inside — a woman. Young. Thin. Curled on a cot with her arms over her head. She flinches when the light hits her.
“We’re getting you out,” Rook says. “Can you walk?”
She stares at him. Doesn’t move.
“I’ll bring her,” Willow says. Rook nods and moves to the second door. Another prisoner: a man, older, who gets to his feet immediately and says nothing and walks out of the cell on his own.
Third door. The keycard flashes red. Jericho tries it again. Red.
“Higher security,” Jericho says. “Different clearance level.” He examines the lock. “This is… I haven’t seen this configuration before. This is above standard detention.”
“Break it,” Brenna says.
“Brenna, we’re running out of—”
“Break it.”
Jericho works the lock. Not the pick set this time, brute force, his shoulder against the door, the lock mechanism groaning under pressure that isn’t entirely human. Jericho is a dragon. Even restrained, even operating in human form, his strength exceeds what any wolf could bring to a steel door.
The lock gives. The door opens.
Inside, the cell is different. Reinforced walls. Thicker door. And in the corner, on the floor — not a cot, the floor — is a figure.
Male. Chained. Not the standard detention restraints. These are heavy chains, bolted to the wall at four points, the links thick enough that even Jericho’s eyebrows rise. The chains have runes cut into them, different from the dampening cuffs on Garrett. Older. More complex.
The man is barely conscious. He lifts his head when the light comes in, and I see his face, gaunt, hollow, the face of someone who’s been in chains long enough that the chains have become part of his body.
His eyes are open but unfocused. There’s a number tattooed on his forearm.
No name on the cell. Just the number, repeated on a tag bolted to the wall.
“Jesus,” Conner breathes.
“We take him,” Brenna says. “Jericho… the chains.”
“These aren’t standard. The runes… I’d need tools I don’t have to—”
“Then break the wall mounts. Pull the bolts. We carry him with the chains on and deal with them later.” Brenna isn’t budging.
Jericho attacks the wall mounts. The bolts resist, then give — one, two, three, four — and the chains go slack. The man slumps forward. Rook catches him, and his expression darkens.
“He’s a wreck.” His lips tighten into a thin line.
“Goddamn motherfuckers,” Brenna snarls, moving up beside Rook and peering into the man’s face. “Whatever he was before they chained him, they’ve stripped him.”
Willow is at the door, staring with a hand over her mouth.
“Earpiece,” I say. “Mara.”
“I’m here.” Her voice is tight. “You need to move. The Cravens are about to light up the vehicle depot, and the window after that is approximately six minutes before response teams mobilize from the main building.”
“We have four with us. One can walk. Three need carrying.”
“Copy. Merric is holding the loading bay. Get there.”
We move. Garrett on my shoulder and Conner’s.
Rook is carrying the woman from the first cell.
She’s stopped flinching, gone somewhere inside herself that’s beyond flinching.
The older man is walking on his own, steady, silent.
Jericho carries the chained man over one shoulder, the chains clinking with each step.
We move fast up the stairwell. Through the corridor. The second keycard door. The first.
Then the sky opens.
The sound comes through the walls: a roar that shakes dust from the ceiling and makes almost everyone in the group stumble.
Not a human sound. Dragon. The Cravens are hitting the vehicle depot, fire erupting somewhere above us, and the building responds with alarms. Sirens. Red lights in the corridor, strobing.
“Move!” Merric is at the loading bay door. He sees Garrett. Sees the civilians. Sees the chained man over Jericho’s shoulder. His eyes meet Brenna’s, and she gives him a tight smile.
We pour into the loading bay. The drainage culvert is on the far wall. Sienna is at the grate, holding it open, her face lit red by the alarm lights.
“Culvert won’t work,” Jericho says. “Not with the chained one. He won’t fit through with the hardware.”
“Loading dock.” Merric points. “The bay doors. We go out the front.”
“That puts us in the open.”
Another roar from above. Something explodes, the vehicle depot, probably, fuel and metal and dragon fire turning the Syndicate’s transport capability into a column of black smoke. Through the loading dock windows, I can see the sky lit orange.
“The dragons are giving us cover,” Merric says. “We go now, or we don’t go.”
We go.
Merric hits the bay door controls. The industrial door rolls up, loud and grinding, the mechanical complaint of a system that wasn’t designed for emergency evacuation. The night air rushes in, carrying smoke and heat and the sound of the Cravens doing what they do best.
The yard is chaos. Guards running toward the burning depot. A dragon — Caleb, I think — is banking overhead, fire trailing from his jaws. A second shape — Dorian — dives toward the main building’s roof, drawing fire upward, away from us.
We run. Across the yard. Through the gap in the perimeter fence that Sienna has cut while we were inside. Into the scrub beyond the fence. The staging vehicles are three hundred yards south, their headlights off. Mara’s face is visible through the windshield in the glow of her screens.
Garrett’s weight on my shoulder is enormous. His feet are moving but barely — dragging, stumbling, the effort of a body that’s been sitting in a chair for two days slowly being stripped apart. I haul him forward. Conner takes more of the weight. Between us, we carry him.
“You’re heavy,” I tell him. Through my teeth. Running.
“Sorry.” The word comes out in a gasp. Then: “Briar.”
“Not now.”
“Briar. I need to tell you—”
“Not. Now.”
“I got it. What I went in for. I got what I needed.”
I almost stop. Almost. My stride hitches, and Conner feels it and adjusts, and we keep moving.
“What?”
“Everything Creed told me. The locations of other facilities he mentioned during interrogation.” He coughs. Blood on his lips. “I wasn’t just sitting in that chair, Briar. I was working.”
I look at the ruin of him, the battered body, and the torn flesh. And underneath the damage, the expression on his face. The same expression I saw at the hearing. Not the alpha mask. Not a performance.
A man who walked into a cage with his eyes open and came out with the map.
“You stupid, reckless, arrogant son of a bitch,” I say.
The corner of his mouth lifts. The good side. The side that isn’t split.
“Missed you too.”
We reach the vehicles. Willow opens the back of the SUV.
We load Garrett. He goes down on the seat and his body curls.
The sound he makes when his ribs hit the upholstery is the first real sound of pain I’ve heard from him.
I get in beside him. Conner takes the front.
The other captives go in the second vehicle, Rook and Sienna with them, the chained man across the back seat, his chains pooling on the floor.
Merric drives. The headlights stay off. We pull out of the creek bed onto the access road, and the burning facility falls behind us, the orange glow shrinking in the mirrors.
Above, the Cravens bank away from the smoke. Two shapes against the stars, massive, the wingspan blocking the light as they climb. They’re pulling out, covering our retreat from altitude.
Mara’s voice is in the earpiece. “All teams clear. Facility compromised. No pursuit detected. Say again: no pursuit.”
“Copy,” Merric says.
The road opens ahead of us. Dark. South Texas scrub on both sides. The smell of smoke fades as we put miles between us and the burning.
On the seat beside me, Garrett is breathing in short, shallow pulls. I have his hand in both of mine, his fingers cold despite the fever heat of the rest of him. I hold on. His fingers tighten, faintly, around mine.
I sit in the back seat, and I face forward, and I don’t look at his face because if I look at his face, I’m going to do something that wolves don’t do in vehicles full of people.
But finally, the beast within is quiet. Settled. The stillness of an animal that has retrieved what was taken from her and is holding it close.
My hands are still shaking. But they’re holding his, and his are holding back.
The miles pass.
Merric drives.
Nobody speaks.