Chapter Twenty-Eight
CALYPSO
The floor jolts hard enough to nearly throw me off balance. The impact punches up through my boots and straight into my knees, knocking the breath from my lungs as the entire tunnel shudders around us.
My head snaps up just as a crack rips across the ceiling ahead. Not a small one. The kind that tells you something is about to go very, very wrong.
“Shit.”
Dust starts raining down, then chunks of concrete. A second later, the whole section gives way with a deafening roar, stone and dirt crashing into the tunnel in a wave that turns the air thick and gray.
“Move!” Raze’s voice cuts through the collapse from somewhere ahead, raw authority that doesn’t wait for a response. He doesn’t need one because everyone is already moving.
Coil has Ruckus slung over one shoulder, the road captain’s face ash gray, and his leg held at an angle that makes my stomach clench when I catch a glimpse of it.
Flux darts ahead in a form that barely looks human anymore, something sleek and low to the ground, threading gaps in the debris that none of the rest of us could navigate upright.
Maul is in his wolf form and enormous, a barrel-chested shadow running flank.
Wreck takes up the rear beside him, his wendigo bulk punching through any rubble that blocks the path, gaunt face utterly expressionless while the tunnel caves around him like it’s afraid to slow him down.
Roxy moves with Raze’s arm locked around her shoulders, her hands alive with magic that flares outward each time another chunk of ceiling tries to bury us, buying us another two feet.
Another five.
Raze never steps more than a half pace from her side.
I am not moving.
I am standing in the middle of collapsing hell, with a vampire draped across my shoulders, and my legs are on fire.
Scar weighs nothing like a man his size should.
He weighs everything. His arm is slung across my back, mine hooked beneath his to keep him upright, but he isn’t helping me carry it.
His head has dropped forward, chin nearly to his chest, and there’s no tension left in him at all, no adjustment, no instinctive correction, nothing that says he’s aware of where he is or what’s happening around him.
He’s just… gone under.
Completely out of it, like whatever holds him present has been forced down into something deeper than sleep, something that doesn’t respond when I shift him, drag his weight with mine, or try to pull him back into this.
Every step is me carrying him.
Every second, he gives me nothing back.
The pauses between them are the worst. In each one, something in me locks down, and I count, silently, my teeth ground together, waiting for something in him to shift, to give me even the smallest sign that he is still in there.
Come on. Come on. Don’t you dare leave me.
A crack splits the wall to my left and water floods through, cold, black, ankle-deep within seconds. It hits my boots, and my legs scream louder.
I shift my grip on him and move. Every step is a negotiation between my body and the floor that keeps trying to swallow me.
My ribs are damaged, at least two, possibly three, and every breath I draw pulls a white-hot wire through my left side.
My shoulder, the one that took the wall when Mordain threw me, has gone beyond pain and into a kind of distant, throbbing numbness that I know better than to trust. I am covered in blood that is only partly mine.
My hair is matted with dust and something darker, and the tunnel air is so thick with smoke and concrete particles that each inhale tastes like ash.
I haul him forward anyway, because no one else is close enough. After all, the ceiling is still coming down, and because somewhere underneath the animal mechanics of survival, something in me has decided very quietly and completely that this man does not get to die in a tunnel.
Not today.
Not on Mordain’s poison.
Not like this.
A section of wall explodes inward ten feet ahead, about to fall directly on Rhett, and for one gutting second, I think he’s done. Then Bennett’s wings snap open from nowhere, white, blazing, and fully manifested without a trace of the irony he usually wears them with.
Bennett drives himself beneath the collapse and catches it. Concrete groans overhead. Dirt rains down. The entire tunnel trembles around him as he braces against the weight, wings spread and shaking under the strain.
Across the rubble, Rhett hauls himself to his feet. Hellfire burns across his knuckles, his chest is heaving, and blood streaks one side of his face.
None of it seems to matter.
His eyes never leave Bennett.
The look on the hellhound’s face hits harder than the collapse did.
“You saved me,” Rhett communicates telepathically, though we all hear it.
Bennett doesn’t look down. His wings are shaking with the effort, divine light bleeding from every feather into the dark. “We’re brothers,” he replies, through his teeth. “That’s what we do.”
Rhett is quiet for a moment. Then, with a voice stripped of all its usual sharp edges, he smiles, though it’s in hellhound form, so it’s more baring his teeth. “Brothers… I like that.”
I don’t have time to watch what passes between them after that as I push through.
Daylight hits me like a physical blow. I stagger through the tunnel mouth, and my eyes water so hard I’m blind for three full seconds, blinking against the pale, early-morning sky that has no business being this beautiful right now.
My knees buckle on the uneven ground outside, and I go down hard on one, Scar’s weight pitching forward with me, and I catch him, barely, both arms shaking with the effort, muscles screaming their objection.
He doesn’t make a sound.
He hasn’t made a sound since he fell.
I lower him to the ground carefully, hand at the back of his head, and then kneel over him for a moment with my chest heaving and my vision swimming at the edges, listening to the distant, structural groan of the compound finishing its collapse behind us.
Raze is already counting. Moving from brother to brother with that brutal efficiency of a president running a damage check, one hand still on Roxy’s, grip iron tight.
His eyes find me last, or they find Scar first and then find me after, and something passes through his expression too quickly to read.
“Everyone breathe,” he says to the group, and it’s a command, not a comfort.
Roxy crouches beside me before I ask. Her hands move over Scar without touching him, magic trailing her fingertips in thin threads of amber light that probe the space around him, around the wound, around whatever the toxin has done to him from the inside out. I watch her face while she works.
She knows how to keep her expression neutral.
But she’s not managing it perfectly.
“It’s using him against himself,” she says finally, and her voice is steady even if her jaw isn’t. “The poison opened the door. But he is what’s keeping him there.”
The brothers have gone quiet behind us. Not out of disinterest, but because they’re done pretending this isn’t worth watching
“Can you pull him out?” I ask.
Roxy looks at me, and I can see her measuring how much truth I can take right now, and I appreciate that she decides to give me all of it.
“Not from outside. The toxin is keyed to his bloodline and his… grief. His guilt. Whatever’s in there is something I can’t reach.
” She pauses, threads of magic still moving through the air.
“But there is a way in. If someone with blood that already knows his could create a channel… just enough to reach him, possibly, maybe…”
She doesn’t finish.
She doesn’t need to.
I know exactly what she’s saying.
I have known since halfway through the tunnel, some low, primal part of my dhampir instinct, putting it together while the rest of me was too busy keeping him breathing to let it fully surface.
A blood bond—ancient and irrevocable. The kind of thing my vampire half understands in the same wordless way it understands hunger, not as a concept but as truth.
It will change me. It’s already changed me, if I’m being honest with myself, but this would make it biological and permanent.
Woven into what I am in a way that nothing, not time, not distance, not whatever comes after, can undo.
Even if everything falls apart.
Even if he wakes up and can’t stand the sight of me.
Even if I spend the rest of my life regretting every choice I’ve made in this compound…
It will still be there.
He will still be there, somewhere in the framework of my blood.
I am aware of every man standing behind me.
I am aware of the silence they’re holding, and what it costs men like these to hold it.
No one speaks, moves, or tries to make this decision for me, tell me what it means, or talk me into it or out of it.
This is mine.
I pull the blade from my boot and roll it up my wrist, making the cut clean and quick across the inside of my forearm, no hesitation, no wasted motion, just the necessary thing done. Blood wells dark and immediate, heat slipping away from me into the cold morning air.
Scar doesn’t react when I take his hand.
He doesn’t help.
He doesn’t fight.
His weight shifts with mine as I turn his wrist over, exposing the pale line of skin that should give me something back and doesn’t.
“Sorry,” I mutter, more for myself than him.
The blade flashes again, this time across his wrist—controlled, precise, and deep enough to break the surface and nothing more. His blood doesn’t surge the way mine does. It gathers slower, darker, thicker, as if it’s reluctant to move at all.
I don’t wait for more.
I press my forearm to his wrist, forcing the contact, aligning the cuts until our blood meets.
For a second, there’s nothing.
Then it hits.
Not a gradual shift.
Not something I ease into.
It takes me all at once.
The connection snaps into place like something that’s been waiting for this exact moment, something that recognizes itself in the instant our blood touches.
It floods through me fast and overwhelming, something that feels less like power and more like alignment, like two things finally locking into the shape they were always meant to hold.
My breath catches on it, no, not breath.
A gasp tears out of me anyway, my head tipping back before I can stop it, my body reacting without permission as that surge rolls through me again, stronger this time, sharper, lighting up every nerve it touches.
It’s too much.
Too fucking good.
The kind of euphoria that doesn’t feel safe, that hits hard enough to make me forget where I am, what I’m doing, why this matters, as if I could stay in it. Like I could drown in it and not care what it costs me.
My grip tightens on him, fingers digging in, grounding myself against the pull of it as it tries to drag me deeper, tries to make this the only thing that matters.
No!
Not now.
I force it back, locking it down hard, dragging myself out of it with more effort than I want to admit, my head snapping forward again as the moment fractures around me and the world slams back into place.
Focus.
“Now,” I tell Roxy, my voice rough, edged with something I haven’t fully shaken. “Open it.”
Her magic floods in around us like a rising tide—warm, amber, carrying a deep, rooted weight only real magic has.
I feel it open something in my chest I didn’t know had a door.
And then I lean down, pressing my lips to his, and it is nothing like the other times we’ve kissed, no urgency, heat, anger, desire, or uncertainty tangled up in it.
Just me, choosing him, before I know if he’ll choose me back.
The bond takes, the way a fire takes when you finally give it enough kindling, and somewhere underneath everything, underneath the blood, the dawn, the still-collapsing compound, and men behind me holding themselves very carefully still…
I feel something reach back.