Chapter 26 #2
I force myself forward. Past two more closed doors.
Through a section where the fluorescent tube has blown, and the corridor goes dark.
My wolf reads it in night vision, the details sharper in the absence of artificial light.
Scuff marks on the floor. Small ones. The height and stride of a child being walked somewhere she didn’t want to go.
The voices are close now. Right around the corner.
I round the corner. A holding area: a large room with a barred gate, and behind the gate, wolves.
Small ones. A teenager pressed against the wall with two younger children behind her.
A toddler on the floor, crying, reaching for someone who isn’t there.
And two men—guards, human—unlocking the gate, reaching for the children.
“Step away from them.”
The guards turn. See me, half-shifted, clawed, teeth bared, eyes burning in the fluorescent light. Whatever they expected tonight, it wasn’t this.
One reaches for a weapon. Too slow. I’m across the room before his fingers close on the grip, and the wolf’s strength does what ten years of enforcer training refined: a single strike that lifts him off his feet and puts him into the wall. He crumples. Goes still.
The second guard backs against the gate. His hands go up. He’s staring at my fists—the claws, the fur, the fingers that are no longer entirely human.
“On the ground. Face down.”
He goes. I zip-tie his wrists with a strip from my pocket—old habit, always carry restraints—and step past him to the gate.
The teenager stares at me through the bars. Seventeen, maybe. Dark hair, hollow cheeks, the eyes of someone who’s been here too long. She’s positioned between the younger children and me: a shield, a wall, the last defense a teenager can offer. She’s not moving.
“I’m not with them,” I rasp; the partial shift distorts my voice, makes it deeper, more animal. I pull back. Let the shift recede enough that my face looks human, my voice sounds like a man’s. “I’m with the team hitting the main building. We’re here for you.”
She doesn’t believe me. Why would she? A girl her age, in a place like this, has learned that no one comes to help.
“My name is Conner. I’m going to open this gate and take you out of here. All of you.”
I look at the guard on the floor. “Code.”
He sets his jaw, lips pinched together. I step on his throat with a booted foot.
“Code.”
He tells me. I punch it in. The gate opens.
The teenager moves. She scoops up the toddler. Grabs the five-year-old’s hand. Behind her, two more children emerge from the back of the room. Seven altogether. All young. All thin. All carrying the silence of wolves who’ve learned that quiet keeps you alive.
The youngest of them looks at my hands, still clawed, the fur not fully receded. She doesn’t flinch. She reaches up and wraps her fingers around one of mine, and the grip is so small and so deliberate that something inside me breaks clean in half.
I lead them into the corridor. Past the medical room. Past the equipment I don’t look at. Toward the side entrance I broke open. Behind me, seven children follow because the alternative is staying in a cage.
The radio is dead. Has been since I entered the building. Something in the structure—shielding, dampening, whatever the Syndicate uses to suppress their captives—has killed the signal. The team doesn’t know where I am.
But I know where Willow is. Not through the radio, not through sight. Through the pull. The same pull that’s been connecting us since that very first night; the bond I’ve been calling attraction and obsession and everything except what it might actually be.
Mate.
The word surfaces, and I don’t push it back down. Not tonight. Tonight I’m half-shifted in a Syndicate facility with seven children behind me and the woman I’m bonded to somewhere in the building next door, and there’s no room left for denial.
The thought doesn’t scare me. It settles. Like a fact I’ve been circling that finally stopped moving long enough for me to see it whole.
We reach the side entrance. The compound outside is noise and fire; smoke from the depot, shouts, the distant roar of Jericho making another pass. I check the route. Clear for now. The south exit is two hundred yards of open ground.
I pull the shift back further. Not all the way. I keep the strength, the speed, the wolf’s senses. But my hands need to hold a child, and claws aren’t built for that.
“Stay close to me,” I tell the teenager. “Don’t stop. Whatever you see or hear, keep moving south.”
She nods. Once. No questions. A wolf who knows how to take orders when survival depends on it.
I pick up the toddler. She clings to my torn shirt with both fists and buries her face against my shoulder. She’s shaking. Warm. Lighter than she should be.
We go.
Out the side entrance. Into the firelit compound—smoke and noise and the distant shape of Jericho banking against the stars.
The teenager is beside me, the five-year-old’s hand locked in hers, the other children close behind.
We move south, past burning vehicles and scattered guards, toward the extraction point.
My radio is dead. My team doesn’t know I’m here.
But the bond is alive. A warm line running through the facility’s suppression, connecting me to the woman inside the main building. Faint. Dampened by whatever shielding fills these walls. But there.
She’s alive. She’s fighting. She’s doing what she came to do.
And I’m carrying the children out of the place I helped fill.
The toddler buries her face against my neck. Her heartbeat is fast and small against my chest.
We keep moving.