8. Stellan
STELLAN
The hum becomes a roar the moment the first explosion hits.
I'm at the front gate when it happens, posted with Roman and three other brothers, watching the pre-dawn darkness for the attack we knew was coming.
The explosion tears through the compound behind us, fire blooming against the sky, and the hum that's been my constant companion for fifteen years turns into something I haven't heard since I was seventeen years old.
The beast is waking up.
"Contact front!" Roman's voice cuts through the chaos as dark shapes pour out of the tree line. Bloodtusk. Dozens of them. Armed with military-grade weapons and the kind of coordinated precision that speaks to months of planning. This isn't a raid. This is an execution.
I don't have time to count. Don't have time to breathe or ground myself or do any of the things I've learned to do when the pressure builds. There's only violence, sudden and overwhelming, and the hum in my head is getting louder by the second.
Protect. Protect. Protect.
The word echoes through my mind like a heartbeat as I engage the first Bloodtusk who reaches our position.
He's big, almost as big as me, but I'm faster than anyone expects from someone my size.
My fist connects with his jaw and I feel bone shatter, feel him crumple, and I'm already moving to the next one before he hits the ground.
Bodies. Blood. The rage building.
I'm holding it together. Barely. The red is creeping into the edges of my vision, and my skin feels too tight, too hot, like the beast is trying to claw its way out through my pores.
But I'm still me. Still counting in the back of my mind, still making tactical decisions, still fighting with purpose instead of pure destruction.
Then I hear her scream.
It cuts through the chaos like a knife through flesh, high and terrified and unmistakably hers. Esmerelda. Somewhere behind me, somewhere in the compound that's burning and crumbling and falling apart. She's screaming, and I'm not there, and the beast doesn't ask permission anymore.
It takes control.
The transition is instant, brutal, absolute. One moment I'm fighting at the front gate, holding on to sanity by my fingernails. The next, I'm gone. Not unconscious, but not present either. I'm a passenger in my own body, watching through a red-tinted window as the thing inside me takes the wheel.
Threat. Protect. Destroy.
The thoughts fragment into single words, repeating endlessly, drowning out everything else.
I can feel my body moving, faster than I should be able to move, stronger than any reasonable limit would allow.
The pain from the cuts I've already taken registers somewhere distant, irrelevant, a data point that changes nothing about what I'm doing.
I'm running through the compound. Bodies in my way. They fall. I don't know if they're enemies or brothers or civilians. I can't process faces, can't read colors, can't do anything but follow the sound of her scream and destroy everything that stands between us.
Protect her. Protect her. Protect her.
The beast has a single purpose, and for the first time in fifteen years, it's not trying to kill everything in sight. It's trying to get to her. The violence is incidental, a means to an end, the fastest route between where I am and where she is.
Time distorts. Minutes feel like seconds, or maybe seconds feel like hours. I can't tell anymore. There's just the red and the rage and the distant sound of someone screaming to stop, and I don't know if that voice is outside me or inside me but either way I can't listen.
I reach the east side of the compound. Fire everywhere. Smoke so thick I can barely see. But I can smell her, that soft floral scent cutting through the burning and the blood, leading me forward like a beacon.
And then I see him.
The Bloodtusk enforcer is massive, scarred, holding something in his grip that makes the beast howl with fury.
A body. Human. Small. Limp in his hands like a ragdoll, and for one terrible moment I think I'm too late, think he's killed her, think I've lost the only good thing that's happened to me in fifteen years?—
But she moves. Struggles. She's alive.
The enforcer sees me coming. His eyes go wide, and I watch fear replace the cruelty in his expression. He knows what I am. He knows what's about to happen. He tries to use her as a shield, pulling her in front of him, putting her body between us like she can stop what's coming.
Three seconds.
That's all it takes. Three seconds for the beast to close the distance, to tear her from his grip, to put itself between her and the threat.
Three seconds for the enforcer to die, and I don't know exactly what I do to him but I know it's worse than anything I've done before.
I can feel his blood on my hands, hot and wet, and the beast is roaring with satisfaction even as some small part of me is screaming in horror.
She's on the ground. I put her there, I think. Shoved her aside to get to him. She's covered in blood that isn't hers, her copper hair dark with it, her eyes huge and shocked as she stares up at me.
At what I am.
The rage doesn't stop. That's the thing about the berserker, the thing no one understands until they've lived with it.
The violence doesn't end when the immediate threat is gone.
The beast doesn't distinguish between past and present danger.
It just wants to destroy, and there are still enemies everywhere, still fighting all around us, still?—
Stop. Stop. You'll hurt her. STOP.
The voice inside me is screaming, but I can't make my body obey. I'm turning, looking for the next threat, and she's still on the ground behind me and what if I turn around and she's the closest thing and the beast doesn't recognize her as safe and I?—
"Stellan."
Her voice. Cutting through the red like a blade through smoke.
I freeze. The beast freezes. For one heartbeat, everything stops.
"Stellan, come back."
She's standing now. I can see her in my peripheral vision, can feel her moving closer instead of running away. Every instinct screams at me to turn, to protect her from the threat—but I'm the threat, I'm the danger, I'm the thing she should be running from.
Her hand touches my arm.
Small. Warm. Steady against my skin, against the blood and the violence and the beast that's still howling inside me.
She's touching me like I'm not a monster.
Like I'm not standing in the middle of destruction with bodies at my feet and blood dripping from my hands.
Like I'm just a man who needs someone to hold onto.
"Come back to me," she says, and her voice is shaking but her hand isn't. "It's okay. You're okay. Come back."
The red begins to recede.
It happens slowly, like surfacing from deep water.
First I hear her voice more clearly, the words separating into meaning instead of just sound.
Then my vision starts to sharpen, the red fading to pink and then to normal colors, the world coming back into focus.
Then I feel the weight of my body again, the ache in my muscles, the sting of the cuts I've taken, the exhaustion that always follows an episode.
I'm standing in destruction. Bodies around me, at least six that I can see. The enforcer is in pieces. I did that. I don't remember exactly how, but I did that, and she saw it, and she's still touching me.
She's still here.
"Stellan." Her voice again, gentle now, patient. "Are you okay?"
The question is so absurd that I almost laugh.
I've just murdered at least six people in front of her.
I've just revealed the monster that I've spent fifteen years trying to hide.
I'm covered in blood that isn't mine, shaking with the aftermath of the worst episode I've had since Mira, and she's asking if I'm okay.
"You're asking if I'm okay?" My voice comes out rough, guttural, barely human. "I just—you saw what I?—"
"I saw you save my life." She steps closer, and I flinch back instinctively, afraid to let her get too near. But she doesn't stop, doesn't let my flinch push her away. She just moves with me, keeping her hand on my arm, keeping that small point of contact between us. "You protected me."
"I killed them."
"You stopped them from killing me."
"You don't understand." I'm shaking now, the adrenaline crash hitting me hard, and I can't stop staring at my hands. At the blood on them. At what I am. "The beast, it doesn't stop. It doesn't discriminate. If you hadn't—if I hadn't?—"
"But I did. And you did." She's standing right in front of me now, so small compared to my bulk, so fragile and soft and everything I don't deserve. "I called your name and you stopped. I touched you and you came back. Do you know what that means?"
I don't answer. I can't.
"It means you heard me." She reaches up with her other hand, and before I can stop her, she's touching my face. Her palm against my cheek, gentle and warm, and the beast inside me doesn't growl or snarl or try to destroy. It settles. It goes quiet.
It recognizes her.
"Stellan." My name on her lips sounds like a prayer. "I'm not afraid of you."
"You should be."
"Maybe." She holds my gaze, and there's no fear in her warm brown eyes. Just compassion. Just understanding. Just something that looks terrifyingly like acceptance. "But I'm not. I saw what you are, and I'm still standing here. I'm still touching you. Does that count for anything?"
It counts for everything. It counts for more than she could possibly know.
I break.
The sob that tears out of me is ugly, raw, the sound of fifteen years of loneliness cracking open all at once.
I pull her against my chest, gently, so gently, terrified of hurting her even now, even when the beast is quiet and my control is returning.
She comes willingly, wrapping her arms around me as much as they can reach, pressing her face against my blood-soaked shirt like she doesn't care about the horror that covers me.
"It's okay," she whispers. "I've got you. It's okay."
I hold her like she's the only solid thing in the universe.
Because right now, she is. She's the anchor I didn't know I needed, the lighthouse in the red fog, the voice that called me back from the edge.
Fifteen years of running from this moment, and here I am, standing in blood and destruction, holding the woman who just saw the worst of me and didn't run.
Around us, the battle continues. Gunfire and explosions, screaming and chaos. But in this moment, in this small pocket of stillness, there's just her heartbeat against my chest and her arms around my waist and the quiet settling of the beast inside me.
She reached for me. After everything she saw, after everything I did, she reached for me.
I don't deserve her. I know that. I've known it since the first time I watched her from across a room and felt the beast go quiet. But she's here anyway, holding on to me like I'm worth keeping, and for the first time in fifteen years, I let myself believe that maybe I am.
The smoke clears just enough for me to see the compound around us, the destruction the attack has wrought. The east wing is fully engulfed, flames reaching toward the sky. Bodies everywhere. Brothers and enemies and people I might have killed myself in the red haze of the berserker.
"Marcus," she says suddenly, pulling back just enough to look at me. Her face is tear-streaked, blood-smeared, beautiful. "There was a brother, he saved me before you got here. He fought the enforcer so I could run. Did you see?—"
The name hits me like a physical blow. Marcus. The kid with the easy smile and the ridiculous optimism who spent two years trying to make me laugh. The only brother who consistently treated me like a person instead of a weapon.
"Where?" My voice comes out steadier now, more controlled, but underneath the calm exterior the grief is already building, pressing against my ribs like a physical weight. "Where was he when this happened?"
She points with a trembling hand, her arm extending back toward the deeper recesses of the compound.
"Back there, near the corridor before I made it to the garage.
There was so much fighting—screaming and metal on metal—and then this awful silence, and I didn't—I couldn't make myself go back to check?—"
I reach out and take her hand, feeling how small and warm it is enclosed in mine, how her fingers remain steady and sure even when the rest of her body is shaking with shock and adrenaline.
"Stay here," I tell her, my voice low and firm. "Stay with the others who made it out. I'll go find him and bring him back."
"Stellan, you don't have to?—"
"Stay." I lift her hand to my lips, pressing a deliberate kiss to her scraped and bloodied knuckles, and I watch her eyes go wide and startled at the unguarded tenderness of the gesture. "Please. I need to know you're safe while I do this."
She nods mutely, and I release her hand with reluctance, forcing myself to turn away from her and toward the thick smoke and scattered destruction where Marcus fell defending her.
I already know with grim certainty what I'm going to find there.
The silence she described, the complete absence of continued fighting, the way she couldn't force herself to go back and look.
Marcus was only twenty-three years old, barely more than a kid really.
He threw himself directly at a trained enforcer to save her life.
And I wasn't there in time to save his.
The beast stirs in my chest, not with rage this time but with grief. It recognizes the loss even before I confirm it. This boy who brought me coffee and cracked jokes and refused to give up on me.
I walk into the smoke to find his body, carrying the weight of everything I couldn't protect, and behind me, Esmerelda watches me go with tears streaming down her face.