Declan
She’s breathing. That’s what I have to hold onto. She’s breathing and she’s warm. Her heartbeat is steady against my chest. If I focus on those things, I can keep the guilt from swallowing me alive.
It doesn’t do a damn thing. I would happily die if it meant undoing what just happened.
Whatever they put in that dart ripped through me like wildfire. I remember the heat building, the way it burned through my restraint and my reason. Everything that makes me more than the animal Moore already thinks I am.
I remember her underneath me. I remember not being able to stop.
I remember being rough. Again. Worse this time than before, because she cried. She begged. I didn’t listen—or I did; I tried to, but the drug was too strong. There was no fighting it. Not that I feel any better knowing that. Not that I hate myself any less.
Iris is awake, but barely. She’s curled on her side, her hospital gown twisted, her hair stuck to her face with sweat. There are marks on her hips from my hands. Purple bruises are forming on her pale thighs. The bite on her neck is freshly red again where I bit down too hard.
I did that. Not the drug. Me. Because even if the drug lit the match, the fire was already there, and I should have been stronger. I should have fought harder against it.
She moves. Her hand finds my arm and her fingers curl around my wrist, but it’s the way she reaches for me inside that makes my heart clench. There’s no anger flowing from her to me. No blame. Just exhaustion and a quiet, steady warmth I don’t come close to deserving.
“Stop,” she whispers with her eyes still closed. It’s a quiet sound, but there’s something steely underneath. “I know you’re beating yourself up. Stop.”
She opens her eyes slowly. They’re glassy, tired, but clear. “I know what he did. It’s not your fault.”
It is, though. That’s the thing she doesn’t understand yet, or maybe she does, and she’s choosing to let me off the hook because she’s too exhausted to hold me accountable. Either way, the guilt sits in my chest like a boulder, and it’s not going anywhere.
I open my mouth to say something—I don’t know what. There’s no combination of words in any language that would work right now—and then I hear it.
A howl.
Distant. Carried on the air through vents and concrete and whatever else stands between this cell and the outside world. But unmistakable. I’d know that howl in my sleep. In my grave.
Cole.
Another one joins it. Lower, rougher, carrying a fury that vibrates in my bones.
Zeke.
They’re here. They found us. And from the sound of it, they didn’t come alone.
Something sparks in my chest. Not the drug this time. Something older, deeper. The connection to my pack, the thread that ties me to my brothers and my pack regardless of collars or walls. It’s been muted since they put this thing around my neck, dampened, like hearing music through water.
But the howls cut through all of it, and suddenly I can feel them. Not clearly, the way I would if I could shift, but enough to know they’re close. Enough to know they’re coming in hard and they’re coming in angry.
I look down at the collar. This thing, this band of metal and circuitry that’s kept my wolf locked behind a wall all this time. I’ve pulled at it, clawed at it, tried to work my fingers under the edge until my skin tore. It held every time.
But I wasn’t angry enough before. Not like this. Not with my brothers’ howls in my ears and the marks of my own hands on my mate’s body and the memory of Moore’s calm voice telling me he’d check back in a few hours.
I wrap both hands around the collar and pull.
Pain. Immediate, blinding, electric. The collar fights back, sending voltage through my palms, up my arms, into my jaw. My teeth clamp together so hard I think they might crack. My vision goes white. The smell of burning skin fills the cell.
I don’t stop. I pull harder. I think about my dad, who died protecting someone who needed him.
I think about my mom, who couldn’t live without her mate.
I think about Tara in a cell somewhere in this building with a collar of her own and men who hurt her because her brother didn’t cooperate fast enough.
I think about Iris. What Moore did to her. What Moore made me do to her. What Moore has planned.
The collar snaps.
There’s a crack of metal and shattering circuitry that echoes off the concrete walls.
The pieces fall away from my throat and hit the floor, smoking, and my wolf surges forward like a dam breaking.
He floods through me, filling every space the collar had kept empty.
The relief is so intense my knees damn near give out.
“Iris.” I’m already moving, crouching beside her. “Listen to me. When it starts, I need you to stay hidden. Back corner, behind the gurney, don’t come out until I come for you. Okay?”
She stares at the broken collar on the floor, then at me. I feel her fear spike, but underneath it, there’s something fierce.
“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” I tell her. “I promise.”
Then I shift. A flash of heat, the crack of bone, and then I’m on four legs and the world opens up the way it always does with scent and sound and instinct snapping into focus.
The cell smells like chemicals and fear, and blood.
Beyond the door, the corridor smells like more of the same… plus the bite of gunpowder.
The lights go out.
Everything plunges into darkness. Emergency power kicks on somewhere—I hear generators chugging—but this section stays black. My eyes adjust instantly. With all his years of research, Moore should’ve remembered wolves can see in the dark.
If he’s the one who cut the power and not my family.
The cell door is steel, reinforced, and locked with the deadbolt system I’ve been listening to for days. I know its sounds. I know its weaknesses. In human form, it was unbreakable. For a wolf running on rage, it’s just a door.
I hit it at full speed. The hinges buckle on the first impact. I back up and hit it again, and the whole frame tears out of the concrete wall in a shower of dust and broken bolts.
The corridor is dark and chaotic. Alarms are screaming. Red emergency lights strobe at the far end, turning everything into a nightmare of flashing shadows. People are running—techs, orderlies, guards. Some of them see me. They don’t run fast enough.
I don’t think about it. I can’t afford to think about it.
The first guard rounds the corner with his dart rifle raised, and I take him at the throat before he can fire.
The second one gets off a shot that goes wide, punching into the wall above my head, and I’m on him before he can chamber another round. He screams until he doesn’t.
Cole. I push through the pack bond, reaching for my brother. Lower level. East corridor. Iris is in a cell behind me. Tara’s somewhere on this floor.
The response comes back. Not words, but impressions.
Cole and Zeke are inside the building. Upper level.
Fighting. Kyran’s bears are at the perimeter, taking the fence line.
The facility’s security is crumbling. They hit hard and they hit fast, and Moore’s people weren’t ready for a full-scale assault.
Good.
I move through the corridor, clearing it.
Two more guards. A tech who presses himself flat against the wall and doesn’t move.
I leave him. He’s not armed. He’s not a threat.
Another guard at a junction, this one smarter, this one with body armor.
He gets off two shots before I bring him down.
One of them grazes my shoulder, but I barely feel it.
Tara’s cell is three doors from mine. I can smell her through the steel. I shift back to human because I need hands for the lock. The keypad is dead with the power out, but there’s a manual release underneath, a red lever behind a panel. I rip the panel off and pull.
The door opens. Tara is on her feet, pressed against the far wall, coiled to strike. Her collar hums. Her green eyes blaze in the dark.
“It’s me,” I tell her.
She doesn’t relax. Not yet. “The collar.”
“I know.” I cross to her, take the collar in both hands the way I did my own. “This is going to hurt.”
“Do it.”
I pull. It takes longer this time. My hands are already raw and burned from my own collar, and the metal bites into the torn skin. But I have leverage and fury, and my sister’s eyes staring into mine, and after three brutal seconds the thing cracks and falls away.
Tara sags. Just for a second. Then her wolf ripples through her, and she’s standing taller, straighter, her lip curling back from teeth that are sharper than they were a second ago.
“Where’s Zeke?” she asks.
“Upstairs. Fighting. We need to go.”
A sound behind us freezes me for one important moment. Footsteps. Not running, either, the way so many others are or were before I killed them. Whoever it is, they’re walking.
We turn.
Moore stands in the doorway. He’s not wearing his lab coat anymore. His shirt is untucked, his silver hair disheveled. He looks like a man whose world is falling apart around him, which it is.
In his hands is a rifle. Not a dart gun. An actual rifle. Matte black, bolt action. The kind that puts holes in things that don’t get back up.
He raises it. The barrel finds me.
“You’ve destroyed years of work,” he says. His voice is steady. Of course it is. Even now, even with his facility burning around him and two unshackled shifters ten feet away, his voice is steady. “Decades. Do you have any concept of what you’ve cost the world?”
“Put the gun down,” I reply.
“The advancement of the human species. The eradication of genetic diseases. The next step in evolution itself.” His finger moves to the trigger. “And you animals tore it apart because you couldn’t see past your own—”
Tara moves.