FORTY-SIX
KAITO
The bond doesn’t break.
That’s the first thing I know.
The second thing is worse.
It stretches, thin and wrong and dragged farther away from my chest with every passing second until Dakota becomes a line of pain being yanked from under my ribs.
Alive.
Afraid.
Furious.
Drugged.
But not gone.
Not gone. Not gone. Not gone.
I hold on to that because the alternative isn’t something I can survive. Not calmly.
Smoke has drowned the service lane, Biters are groaning and snarling against the fence behind us, bodies are piling up against the chain links and broken metal. Gunfire still splits through the air, small booms coming from the west wall. Men are shouting orders that don’t even matter anymore.
Literally none of it matters.
Because Dakota is gone, the hatch is sealed, and the chemical fog has swallowed her scent so thoroughly that my Alpha is clawing at the inside of my skin, blind and useless and really damned violent.
I stab a blade through the skull of a Biter reaching for Ewan’s back and yank it free with more force than really needed.
Ewan doesn’t make a joke, and that’s how I know everything really has gone to complete and total shit.
His face is pale under the smoke and blood, eyes wide and mouth parted around breaths he can’t seem to pull into his lungs properly.
His bond with Dakota is loud enough that I can literally feel the echo of it through mine, and it’s filled with panic, smoke, clove, and sheer terror turned sharp.
Fletcher is kneeling near the hatch, one hand pressed to the ground, and blood dripping from his mouth. He’s too still, but that’s not a shock. That’s the calculation forcing itself over the grief.
Good. That’s good. We’ll need that.
Xeon is standing over the sealed hatch, his hands braced flat against the metal. He doesn’t move and he doesn’t speak. He doesn’t have a bond tearing him south, no thread under his ribs, and no outline of Dakota inside his chest telling him she’s still alive.
All he has is the last place she stood. Only scent stripped from the air. Only silence. His face is completely empty, and it’s that emptiness that’s the most dangerous thing in the lane we’re standing in.
Valeria eventually reaches us through the smoke with six armed guards behind her, some of them disposing of the compound’s straggling Biters that have snuck through the damaged gate. Maine is with them, a crazy-looking shotgun in both hands, and his face white under the blood and soot.
His eyes cut over the lane.
Fletcher.
Ewan.
Xeon.
Me.
Then the sealed hatch, and then back to us. His grip tightens around the shotgun, knuckles turning white, and I’m convinced I can hear his heartbeat start to speed up in his chest. Then he asks, “Where is she? Where’s Kota?”
No one is quick enough to answer, and his face changes. Not all at once, but piece by agonizing piece. Confusion first, quickly followed by denial. And then we get to the kind of fear that guts a person before the blade even reaches skin.
“No,” he says.
Fletcher rises from beside the hatch, shoulders slightly hunched, hands clenched tightly, and blood dripping from his mouth. “Maine—”
“No.” Maine steps back once, shaking his head. “Where’s my sister?”
The bond yanks south against my ribs again, weak and covered and wrong. I look down at the hatch like it’s the worst thing the world ever invented after the Biters.
Maine catches me looking, and his eyes fall down to it, too. I catch the exact moment he understands what words aren’t telling him. It’s then that his question is answered and his heart splits in two right in his chest for all to see.
He moves so fast the moment the lightbulb goes off above his head. He rushes toward the hatch and slams against it with the butt of the shotgun.
Once.
Twice.
“Come on!” he roars. “Open the fucking thing!”
The shotgun rings against the metal with a rattling clang. Again. And again. And again. And then Fletcher catches it before Maine can swing a fifth time.
Maine turns on him with murder in his eyes and a snarl on his lips. “Let go.”
“No.”
“She’s down there!”
“I know.”
“Then fucking move!”
Fletcher doesn’t move. Not even an inch. “You crack the hinge wrong, you jam it shut for good. You want that?”
Maine’s face crumples like wet tissue paper and I can relate to the feelings flooding through him. If I didn’t have blinding rage and panic racing through every inch of my body, I’m pretty sure I’d fucking fall apart like that, too.
It only lasts for half a second, though. Long enough to show the boy who lost his sister once and then just watched the world take her again. Then it is gone, buried under a similar rage that’s simmering under my skin just waiting to burst free.
“I am not losing her again,” he says, his words coming out like more of a warning than a statement.
“No,” I tell him, and he looks at me. I wipe blood from my blade, using the body of a Biter as a cleaning rag, and add, “You’re not going to lose her.”
Valeria’s gaze moves from Maine to me. “Kaito—”
“Dakota is alive,” I tell them quietly, my voice carrying now that there aren’t explosions going off and Biters are crawling into the compound, and we aren’t being raided by assholes who have taken the only thing that matters to me in this world. “Dakota is close. We are going now.”
“We don’t know where that hatch leads,” Valeria argues, though it’s a weak argument. Pretty sure she’s already fully aware that we’re going even if the hatch leads us to the fiery pits of hell.
“Then we find out,” I tell her seriously.
“We need a plan.”
“I already have one.”
Ewan laughs once but it’s completely humorless. It’s like cracked glass, splintered and completely wrecked.
“By chance, could this plan contain murder?” he asks roughly.
“Mhm,” I answer with a false sense of nonchalance while I wrangle my rage into a tight ball I have to grip with both hands.
“Beautiful. Sign me up,” he says.
Valeria’s jaw tightens. “If you run in blind, you’ll get her killed.”
My hand closes around the hilt of my blade but I don’t raise it. Hell, I don’t even need to.
“She’s being carted off by men who came prepared with Omega suppressants, scent-kill chemicals, shock weapons, and a route under your compound,” I tell her with a little more bite than I aim for.
“If we wait for a meeting, we’re literally choosing procedure over her life.
I’m not doing that. I’ve followed that woman since she saved me from Biters when I was bleeding and fucked six ways to Sunday.
I followed her when she told me not to, and I followed her when she didn’t tell me I couldn’t.
You can bet this entire compound that I’ll be following her down that fucking hatch. ”
My words hit with a hard enough punch that no one answers. That’s okay. I don’t need an answer from them.
Mercer arrives literally a split second later, out of breath, coat half-buttoned, and eyes sharp behind cracked glasses. “He’s right.”
Valeria turns. “Mercer.”
“They used broad-spectrum scent masking and bond-disruption compounds. Old NOVAC-adjacent formulas, only slightly modified.” His gaze cuts to the hatch. “It’s not perfect and it’s not permanent. But it is enough to blind immediate pursuit.”
A cold wave washes over me and I mutter, “Sedation window.”
Mercer looks at me. For once, he doesn’t soften the answer. “If they used a standard Omega transport dose, she might have roughly fifteen to twenty minutes of partial mobility before full motor shutdown. Less if they’ve layered suppressants.”
Ewan’s face twists and Fletcher closes his eyes. Maine makes a sound that only belongs to wounded animals and older brothers who have just lost their sister a second time in his lifetime.
“And after?” Xeon asks quietly, almost softly, though that softness is underlined with a sharp violence and a bright panic I’ve never seen or heard come from him since the moment we met.
Mercer swallows. “Unconsciousness. Instinct suppression. Scent dampening. Compliance through chemical restraint.”
Fletcher steps forward slowly and the air completely changes around him. Cedar and leather, blood and wrath.
“Say that again,” he says.
Mercer wisely doesn’t, and so I step closer to the hatch.
The bond pulls south, then slightly east.
Weak.
Covered.
But there.
“Can you track her through us?” Fletcher asks Mercer when the doctor keeps his silence rather than pissing off the biggest Alpha of all four of us.
“Not me,” Mercer says. “You. Her markers are reactive around her chosen pack. Her scent, her NOVAC response, the bonds. Whatever they gave her may dampen it, but I doubt it can erase it completely.”
“She chose four,” Ewan says, voice rough.
Silence follows and Xeon looks at him.
Ewan doesn’t look away. “How about you wipe that look off your face, mate? We all know she did. You should know. I don’t know what the hell happened with the two of you, but she chose you just as much as she chose us and you’re not going to make me feel stupid for seeing it when you won’t.”
Xeon’s expression does not change but his throat moves once, because he realizes Ewan has a point.
We already know they slept with one another.
Could smell it on them as soon as they emerged from the greenhouse they snuck into.
But she didn’t ask for a bite then, and something tells me it was purely out of fear.
Fear of not understanding that a bond with us isn’t a chain around her neck, or a cage to shove her into and feed through the bars.
It might have taken her a minute to realize it, but something tells me not having a bond with Xeon is bothering her more than it’s bothering him.
Valeria’s radio crackles then and Hale’s voice cuts through the static. “All armed units hold position. No one leaves the compound until we establish breach status. Repeat, no one leaves.”