Chapter 22 Korrak
TWENTY-TWO
KORRAK
Korrak’s lungs burned as he dragged himself from the frozen ground, the world pitching violently as his equilibrium struggled to catch up.
The explosion still screamed through his skull while the aftermath came into brutal focus.
The clearing he’d so meticulously surrounded now resembled a battlefield from hell.
Flames crawled up the warehouse’s metal siding with hungry persistence.
Debris scattered like deadly confetti—twisted metal, shattered glass, and chunks of concrete that had been hurled hundreds of feet by the blast’s force.
His ribs screamed protest as he forced himself forward. But nothing felt broken or injured. Nothing that would stop him from fighting or killing if necessary.
Bracken planned this. All of it.
The realization sharpened his fury into something lethal and precise.
The grizzly hadn’t just anticipated betrayal—he’d orchestrated it.
He’d wanted Winslet to walk straight into that warehouse with her manipulation tactics.
Wanted Korrak to position his forces exactly where the bomb could do maximum damage.
Wanted chaos and carnage to provide perfect cover for snatching his mate.
“Son of a bitch,” Korrak snarled, spitting blood onto the blackened snow.
His gaze swept the devastation with clinical precision, cataloging injuries and threats with the efficiency of a born predator.
Three clan members down but moving—Finn clutching a bloodied arm, Niko dragging himself clear of burning debris, and Axel already struggling to his feet with murder in his eyes.
But it was the overturned SUV that made his chest constrict with panic.
The black vehicle lay on its side within the blast radius, steam rising from its crumpled hood. Winslet’s family. The people she’d risked everything to save were trapped inside twisted metal and broken glass.
No.
Through their mate bond, he felt Winslet’s terror spike against his consciousness. She was alive but trapped—exactly where Bracken had always wanted her. In his grasp. Under his control.
Around him, his clan fought through pain and disorientation to engage the enemy.
The sound of shifting bone and muscle filled the air as several warriors abandoned human form for the more effective fury of their polar bear selves.
Roars and snarls echoed across the frozen landscape as the battle truly began.
But Korrak’s attention fractured in directions it couldn’t afford.
He dropped to one knee beside Finn, whose face had gone gray with blood loss. The younger shifter’s arm hung at an unnatural angle, bone visible through torn flesh.
“How bad?” Korrak demanded, already knowing the answer.
“Been better,” Finn gasped, managing a weak grin. “Been worse too.”
Another clan member—Yuki—stumbled over with her own injuries, pressing a torn piece of fabric against the gash on Finn’s arm. Her movements were efficient despite the blood streaming down her face.
“I can handle him, Alpha,” she said firmly. “Go.”
The word hit him like a gut punch. Go. Leave his wounded warriors. Abandon his duty as Alpha to chase after his mate.
But the bond pulsed again, sharp and urgent, carrying Winslet’s fear like poison through his veins. Bracken was probably dragging her away from the warehouse, putting distance and obstacles between them.
If the grizzly shifter got her behind locks and chains and miles of empty territory, Korrak might never reach her again.
Though he’d die trying.
“Alpha.”
The voice cut through his internal war like a blade. Axel stood before him, blood painting half his face but his blue eyes blazing with determination. Behind him, three other wounded warriors had formed a defensive line.
“You need to go,” Axel said, his tone carrying no room for argument. “Now.”
“I can’t leave you—“
“We’ll hold,” another voice interrupted. Niko, barely able to stand but gripping a wicked-looking knife with steady hands. “We knew the risks when we followed you here.”
Finn’s bloodied fingers gripped Korrak’s sleeve with surprising strength.
“She’s your mate,” he snarled through gritted teeth, fury and desperation bleeding through his words. “We’ll live or die on our own feet. But if you don’t go after her right now, we all die for nothing.”
The words landed harder than any explosion.
Guilt ripped through Korrak’s chest, sharp and corrosive, but it drowned beneath the truth he couldn’t escape. The mate bond pulled at him like a physical chain, demanding he choose between duty and love.
This is what Bracken wanted. Split me in multiple directions and make every choice a failure.
But looking into the fierce, loyal faces of his warriors—his family—Korrak realized they’d already made the choice for him.
“Bring her home, Alpha,” Yuki said quietly.
Korrak forced himself to turn away from the wounded. Every Alpha instinct screamed that he was abandoning them, failing in his most basic duty as their leader.
But Winslet was his mate. His future. His heart walking around outside his body.
And he wouldn’t let Bracken take that away from him.
Korrak ignored the fire burning his territory, his wounded warriors, and the roars of battle erupting behind him. His focus locked onto one objective: save his mate.
As he raced toward the rear of the burning warehouse, two of Bracken’s men, their faces contorted with feral desperation, lunged from a nest of burning debris to his right. They moved with the chaotic frenzy of cornered animals, no strategy, just raw obstruction.
He didn’t slow.
He turned his momentum into a weapon. His forearm caught the first man across the throat in a crunch of cartilage, sending him choking into the snow.
The second came in low, and Korrak drove his knee up into the man’s face.
The man dropped like a sack of stones, unconscious before he hit the ground.
Brutal. Efficient. An Alpha clearing a path to what was his.
Around him, his clan surged like a white tide. Even the wounded found their feet, their teeth, and their fury. They met Bracken’s remaining forces with a savagery that shook the frozen ground, buying him the seconds he needed.
His gaze swept to the right and spotted Kol.
His Beta was half inside the overturned SUV, hauling a dazed older man—Winslet’s father—through a shattered window with one hand while his other held a knife, fending off an attacker with vicious, economical swings.
Kol is saving Winslet’s family.
The relief was a spike of clean air in his smoke-filled lungs. That weight, at least, lifted.
Then his eyes snapped forward.
Bracken had Winslet by the open door of the second SUV. And she was a storm in human form.
Every move he’d drilled into her in his gym, she used now not for practice but for survival.
She wasn’t just fighting. She was dismantling.
A sharp elbow broke Bracken’s grip on her arm.
A stomp of her boot crushed his instep. She wrenched her body with a torque that would have dislocated a lesser man’s shoulder, her face a mask of cold, focused fury.
Pride and terror collided in Korrak’s chest, a dizzying cocktail that stole his breath.
That’s my fierce mate.
Bracken, bleeding from a cut above his eye, roared and yanked her back against him. But then his eyes locked with Korrak’s across the blood-stained snow.
And the bastard grinned.
No words. No grand speech. Just that triumphant, possessive smirk as his bones began to crack into his grizzly form.
Korrak didn’t think. He answered.
The shift ripped through his body, and the world exploded in size and scent and fury.
His clothes tore, bones cracked and reformed, muscles expanded and coiled, snow-white fur emerged across his skin, and a polar bear’s roar soon silenced the chaos for half a heartbeat.
He hit the ground running as Bracken’s grizzly form slammed down, a mountain of dark, rippling muscle and malice.
The fight was not a duel. It was an ending.
Bracken fought with the chaotic, grinding brutality of a rockslide. He used his weight, his thick claws designed for tearing, the very ground itself, hurling chunks of ice and frozen earth. He fought to maul, to humiliate, to conquer.
Korrak fought to stop the threat to his mate.
He was precision to Bracken’s chaos, but the grizzly’s raw power was staggering. A clawed swipe he couldn’t fully avoid raked across his ribs, slicing through fur and flesh. White-hot agony bloomed, and hot blood streamed down his flank, matting the snow-white fur crimson.
He snarled, but suddenly, the mate bond flared in alarm. Winslet wasn’t running away. She was circling.
Get back, he projected through their telepathic link as he angled his body to shield her.
She ignored him.
Then he saw the glint in her hand. A hunter’s knife, long and wicked, clearly scavenged from the SUV. Her green eyes were locked not on him, but on the grizzly’s exposed throat, on the rhythm of the fight, calculating an opening only she could see.
No. Too close, he projected to her.
Fear, colder than the Arctic night, speared him. But beneath the fear, vibrating through the mate bond, was her absolute, unshakable certainty.
Hold him still, she projected back.
He dug deep, past the searing pain in his ribs and past the ebbing strength.
He gathered the last dregs of his power, his Alpha will, and focused it into one task.
He lunged, not to attack, but to pin. His massive forelegs wrapped around Bracken’s grizzly chest in a crushing embrace, his jaws clamping on the thick ruff of the bear’s neck, locking him in place just for a moment. An opening.
Winslet moved like a speeding bullet.
She didn’t scream. Didn’t hesitate. She darted in with all her strength, and she drove the knife up and deep into the soft hollow at the base of Bracken’s grizzly throat.
The roar that tore from the beast was a wet, gurgling choke. The massive body shuddered, the fight flooding out of it along with its lifeblood.
The balance of the fight had shifted. Korrak felt it in the sudden slackness of the muscles against him. With a final surge of strength born of rage, love, and the primal need to protect, he tightened his jaws and twisted.
The crack of the grizzly’s neck breaking echoed, obscenely loud in the sudden quiet. The dark grizzly form collapsed, already shrinking, shifting back into the handsome, cruel human shell of Bracken Emers, his empty eyes staring at the burning sky.
It was finally over.
The mate bond flooded with a stunned, breathless relief. Korrak’s own strength deserted him instantly. The shift back to human form was an agony of reversing momentum, and he landed on his knees in the snow, naked and bleeding, the deep gash across his ribs weeping crimson.
The world grayed at the edges. He was vaguely aware of Winslet dropping the bloody knife, her hands already on him, pressing hard against the wound.
“Korrak, look at me!”
Her voice was a whip-crack, fierce and steady. Her small hands were impossibly strong, applying pressure that made stars burst behind his eyes.
“Kol already has them,” she said, answering the question he couldn’t form. “They’re safe. I am not losing you. Do you hear me? Not today. Not ever.”
He tried to shake his head, tried to tell her to go, to check on her family, but the words wouldn’t come out.
“Save your breath for surviving,” she commanded, her tone brooking no argument. With a grunt of effort, she hauled his arm over her shoulders. “Stand up slowly.”
Somehow, through a haze of pain, he managed to get his feet under him.
She half-dragged, half-carried him to the SUV Bracken had meant to steal her away in.
Then she heaved him into the passenger seat, the leather instantly slick with his blood.
She desperately ripped a strip from her own sweater, folded it, and pressed it back against his ribs with a force that made him gasp.
“Hold that. Don’t you dare let go.”
She slammed his door, sprinted to the driver’s side, and had the vehicle in motion before his head had settled against the headrest. The burning warehouse shrank in the side mirror as she aimed them toward the one place she knew had the proper medical supplies. The research outpost.
Korrak watched her through his fog. Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel, her jaw set, but her hands were steady. Through the bond, he felt the terror she was masterfully suppressing, and beneath it, a love so ferocious it burned brighter than the fire behind them.
A slow, bloody smile touched his lips. My perfect, lethal mate.
The world began to narrow, the pain receding into a strange, cold distance. The darkness at the edges of his vision crept inward.
“Winslet…” he managed.
“I said save your breath,” she snapped, but her eyes flicked to him, green and blazing. “You can tell me you love me when you’re not leaking all over Bracken’s car.”
He wanted to laugh. He wanted to tell her she was magnificent. He wanted to promise her a lifetime.
But the cold was rising, and the light was fading. The last thing he knew was the sound of her determined breathing and the feel of her love, a solid anchor in the void, before the darkness swallowed him whole.