Iris
I’ve started measuring time by the meals.
It’s the only way that makes sense in a room with no windows and a fluorescent light that never turns off.
Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Everything between them is just...
waiting and trying not to think too hard about what comes next, which is harder than it sounds when you’re bonded to someone whose emotions run through you like a second bloodstream.
Declan has been tense since the lab. He tries to project calm for my sake, but I’m starting to understand the bond doesn’t lie. Underneath the steady surface, he’s coiled tight. Planning. Calculating, and I know all about calculation. I was raised with it. Everything is part of a bigger plan.
But right now, in this moment, we’re okay. I’m tucked against his side with my head on his shoulder, and his arm is around me, and the bond is doing that warm, steady thing it does when we’re close. Like a low hum in my chest. Like being held from the inside.
I hear footsteps in the corridor and sit up. “Dinner,” I say, more to myself than to Declan. My stomach tightens with something that’s half hunger, half dread. The food is never enough, especially for him, but at least it’s predictable.
The locks disengage. I know the sequence by heart now. The door opens, only it’s not an orderly with a tray.
It’s my father, and the sight of him makes my blood run cold.
He’s wearing his white coat. Clipboard in hand. Reading glasses on. All business. Behind him, two guards step into the cell. Not orderlies, not techs. Guards. Armed with the dart rifles, barrels pointed at Declan. Their faces are blank behind their visors.
My stomach drops straight through the floor.
Declan is on his feet instantly, pushing me behind him.
I feel his muscles lock, feel the growl building in his chest before I hear it.
I would not want to be the person on the other side of that growl.
They can’t feel his fury the way I do. If they could, they would leave the room. Maybe the state.
“Relax,” Dad says. He doesn’t look at Declan. He looks at me, and there’s that expression again. The one I used to mistake for pride, but now recognize as the look a scientist gives a successful experiment. “I have good news.”
Good news. The words curdle in my stomach.
“The tests we ran this morning confirmed what I suspected.” He flips a page on his clipboard and practically beams down at what he sees.
“You’re ovulating. The window is narrow, forty-eight hours at most, but the timing couldn’t be better.
With the bond already established, and your cellular integration at this stage, conception during this cycle gives us the highest probability of—”
“Stop.” Declan’s voice cuts through the cell like a blade. Low, hard, vibrating with barely contained rage. “Just stop.”
Dad looks at him the way I’ve seen him look at the dog we adopted who peed on his shoes two days later. We gave the dog back to the shelter. What a weird thing to think about now.
“She’s still healing,” Declan grits out.
His arm is braced across me, holding me behind him.
I can feel the tension in his body both through the bond and through his skin.
Every muscle is drawn tight, and his heart is hammering.
“The infusion nearly destroyed her. Her body needs time to recover. You can’t just—”
“She’s recovered remarkably well, actually. The bond accelerated her healing far beyond our projections.” Dad tilts his head, studying Declan with clinical interest. “Your protective instincts are noted. They’re consistent with the bonding literature. But they’re not relevant to the timeline.”
“She’s not ready.”
“The data says otherwise.”
“I don’t give a damn about your data.” Declan takes a step forward. The guards track his every move with those rifles. He doesn’t seem to notice or care. “She’s a person. Not a breeding schedule. You can’t force this.”
Something flickers across Dad’s face. Not anger. He doesn’t do anger. Annoyance, maybe. The mild frustration of a man whose equipment isn’t cooperating.
“I figured you might say that,” he says calmly.
He reaches into his coat pocket and produces a small vial of amber liquid, maybe half an ounce.
He holds it up to the fluorescent light and turns it between his fingers.
“This is a synthetic compound derived from shifter mating hormones. Concentrated, refined, and quite effective. It should help you feel more... cooperative.”
The blood drains from my face when I realize the same amber liquid is probably inside the darts they’re ready to fire. I grab the back of Declan’s shirt without thinking. “Dad. Don’t.”
He doesn’t look at me. He only nods at one of the guards instead.
It happens fast. The guard raises his rifle—not to his shoulder, just a quick aim from the hip—and fires.
The dart hits Declan in the upper arm with a sound like a staple gun.
He flinches, his hand going to the dart, ripping it out, but the plunger is already empty. Whatever was in the vial is in him now.
He stares at the dart in his hand. Then at Dad. Then at me.
Through the bond, I feel it start. Not all at once. The tranquilizer hit him like a speeding train, but this is slower. Creeping. A heat building from somewhere deep, spreading through the connection between us until I can feel it in my own skin.
His pupils are dilating. His breathing is changing. The growl in his chest shifts, drops, becomes something else entirely.
His hand tightens on the dart hard enough to snap it in half.
Dad is already moving toward the door, the guards backing out with him. He pauses in the doorway and looks at me, not at Declan, and his expression is perfectly neutral. Perfectly monstrous.
“I’ll check back in a few hours,” he says.
The door shuts. The locks engage.
And we’re alone.
I’m not with Declan anymore. Not really.
Declan has always done his best to be gentle.
To treat me well. I even remember the way he tried to apologize before he was forced to mate with me.
I was so out of it then, but I tried to tell him I understood.
And he tried to take it easy on me until he couldn’t anymore.
That was then.
This is a stranger standing in front of me. A stranger flexing his fists. Baring his teeth. Breathing hard and fast through flared nostrils.
“Declan…” It’s barely a whisper, since I can hardly breathe. His eyes! They don’t look like his anymore. There’s something hot and fierce behind them. “Please, listen to me. Please, don’t hurt me.”
He only reaches down under his hospital gown and wraps a fist around what’s standing straight out under the cotton.
And the funniest thing happens in my core. It goes hot—like molten lava hot—even though my heart is fluttering in panic and every sort of instinct left in me is screaming at me to run. Run where? I have no idea, since there’s nowhere to go.
It’s too late for that now, anyway. I yelp when he grabs me, when he almost flings me across the room to the exam table bolted to the floor.
He throws me over it and knocks the wind out of my lungs.
Stars dance behind my eyes, and I’m barely aware of the cool air when he yanks the tied gown halfway up my back.
“Declan!” I gasp, but he doesn’t hear me. I don’t even feel him through our bond, like whatever they put in him has muted the connection between us the way it’s muting his humanity. He’s doing the only thing he knows, which is spreading my legs with one of his before he slams himself inside me.
I bite my lip hard, not that it does anything to silence my scream. Pain and pleasure fight to see who’s strongest. Tears fill my eyes at the same time a moan fills the air, a moan that comes from me. One he’s torn from the deepest part of me.
He pulls back, then pushes me forward, making the edge of the table cut into my hips and pelvis.
Again. And again. And every time he does, a grunt comes out of him, something wild and animal.
Somewhere in the haze my mind has become, I realize it’s a word.
One single word, again and again, every time his body crashes into mine with a sharp slapping sound.
“Mine.”
And something inside me screams yes, because I am, I can’t help it. I’m terrified of what he’s doing to me, but I’m even more afraid of how much I like it, love it, because I’m his. And he could never do anything that really hurts me. Not really.
Right?
I’m already shooting over the edge, clenching around him, but he doesn’t slow down even when I reach back, trying to pry his hands off my hips.
It’s like trying to break steel—all he does is grip me harder and pull me back against him now with every stroke, doubling the impact, doubling the insane pressure and friction.
“Declan! Please!” He can’t hear me over his own voice. I don’t know if he can hear me at all over whatever is in his head, forcing him to do this. One hand slides between the table and my body so he can grip my breast, and I yelp in pain even as another orgasm rushes up to meet me.
I close my eyes and clench my teeth, screaming from behind them as the pressure suddenly breaks all at once, and my body spasms helplessly.
My fist pounds the table and a sob breaks loose, but he doesn’t hear me; he doesn’t care.
He just takes and takes, driving himself into me, and I think he might come, too, but I’m not sure, I’m starting to go numb, there’s wetness sliding down my thighs, and I don’t know if it’s mine or his or both.
I only know he’s still rigid, still driving into my core. My tears hit the table and pool underneath me. “Please!” I sob brokenly. “That’s enough! Please, it hurts!”
Even as I scream, I’m tensing up again. I don’t know if I can take it anymore. I only know he’s inside me, but he’s far away, too, grunting and panting like the animal he is, marking my body with his hands.
And when he leans down over me, crushing me against the table so he can latch onto my shoulder again, a bright flash of something hot and blinding slams into me almost as hard as he does before everything goes black.
One thought lingers in my mind as I sink into nothingness. Thank God.