16. Leo
LEO
The moon roses close over the place where she stood, and I’m already running.
The garden’s empty. No portal. No light. Just the smell of bent magic and her perfume hanging where her body was a half-second ago.
Gone.
She was right there and now she’s gone.
Something inside me tears loose.
I don’t decide to shift. My wolf decides for me.
It comes up through my spine like a flood breaking a dam, and the cold control I’ve worn my whole life goes under in one breath. My vision drops into silver. The garden sharpens. Every scent the night was hiding lays itself out in front of me like a map.
Her trail. The wrong magic wrapped around it. And under both, a third thing. A witch I almost recognize.
I throw my head back and the sound that comes out isn’t a man’s.
It’s a summons.
My brothers come fast like they always do.
Tristan first, mask gone, shirt half open, the playboy stripped off him completely. Then Evander, already scanning the ground. Dominic drops out of a shadow between two hedges like he was never anywhere else.
“Leo.” Tristan grabs my arm. “Talk to me. Where’s Brynn?”
“Taken.” The word comes out wrong, too low, too much wolf in it. “Portal. Here. Her own symbols opened under her feet.”
Evander crouches where she vanished. Presses two fingers to the scorched stone. “This isn’t Fairmont work. Someone hijacked her magic and rode it open.” He looks up. “They used her against herself.”
My wolf wants to put him through the wall for saying it so calmly.
I lock that down. Barely.
“Can you track it?”
“I can track her.” I’m already moving. “Every second she’s further away the bond burns hotter. I can follow the burn.”
Dominic falls beside me. “Then lead. We’ll keep up.”
The trail runs down.
Through the staff corridors. Past the kitchens. Into the service tunnels someone forced open from the inside, the same tunnels Dominic found scratched and resealed.
The deeper we go, the worse the bond gets.
It’s a wire pulled through the center of me, and the far end is being dragged away into the dark, and every step that doesn’t close the distance is a blade dragged down the inside of my ribs. I’ve never felt anything like it. I didn’t know I could feel anything like it.
“You’re bleeding,” Dominic says.
I look down. My knuckles have split where my hands keep trying to become claws. I hadn’t noticed.
“Keep moving.”
The tunnel opens into a chamber that shouldn’t exist.
Old stone. Older magic. A ring of dead lanterns and a circle scarred into the floor, and in the center of the circle, Brynn.
On her knees. Wrists bound in light. Three figures around her in Covenant gray, hoods up, hands raised, and her magic is pouring out of her into the circle whether she wants it to or not.
She lifts her head. Sees me across the dark.
“Leo, don’t.” Her voice cracks. “It’s a trap, they want you to...”
One of the gray figures backhands her, and her head snaps to the side, and my wolf takes the last thing I had left.
I don’t remember crossing the room.
One moment I’m at the mouth of the tunnel. The next I’m inside the circle and a body is coming apart under my hands, and I’m not Leo anymore, I’m the thing my bloodline keeps behind seven centuries of suits and treaties and cold reasonable words.
Blood Shifters don’t fight like wolves. We don’t snap and circle.
We dismantle.
The first one goes down before he finishes his spell.
The second gets a shield up. It lasts half a heartbeat against me.
I hit the magic and it shatters like glass and I keep going through it because there is a girl bleeding on the floor behind me and nothing in this world is going to be allowed to stand between her and the next breath she takes.
“Leo.” Tristan’s voice, somewhere far away. “Leo, the third one’s running.”
I let him run.
I don’t care about the third one.
I care about the one still standing over her.
He’s good. I’ll give him that.
He pulls something from his sleeve, a blade humming with curse-light, and he gets it across my forearm before I take it from him. The cut burns wrong. Black at the edges. It’ll matter later.
It doesn’t matter now.
I get a hand around his throat and lift him off the ground and his hood falls back.
I don’t know him.
That’s the wrong thing. That’s the thing that lands cold even through my wolf. A face I’ve never seen. A nobody. Cheap Covenant gray and a hired blade and eyes too frightened to belong to anyone running this.
A pawn. Somebody pointed him at her and let go.
“You touched her,” I tell him. My voice has stopped being mine entirely. “You put your hands on my mate.”
His feet kick at nothing.
“Leo.” This time it’s Brynn. Right behind me. Her bound wrists are free, the light around them snuffed, and she’s swaying but she’s up. “Leo, stop. Don’t kill him. We need him to talk.”
My wolf doesn’t want him to talk. My wolf wants him to stop existing.
“Leo.” Her hand lands on my back. Bare palm to torn shirt to skin. “Come back. Come back to me. I’m here. I’m right here.”
And the bond, the burning wire, goes quiet.
Not gone. Quiet. Like a hand laid flat over a struck bell.
I drop him.
Evander has him pinned before he hits the ground.
The chamber empties of everything but the two of us.
My brothers handle the rest. Tristan binding the prisoner. Dominic sealing the tunnels. Evander crouched over the man, asking quiet questions and getting nothing but a name that isn’t real and a terror that goes deeper than us. Whoever hired him made sure he had nothing to give.
They know to leave me this.
I turn around.
Brynn’s face is bleeding. There’s a cut high on her cheek and a bruise blooming dark along her jaw and her beautiful red dress is torn at the shoulder, and looking at it does something to me I don’t have a word for.
I’ve negotiated with men who run countries. I’ve sat across tables from things older than this resort. Nothing has ever frightened me.
This frightens me.
“You came,” she says.
“Of course I came.” My hands are shaking when I lift them to her face. I make them stop. “You think there’s a version of this where I don’t come?”
“You were so angry with me.” Her eyes fill. “On the balcony. You looked at me like I’d ruined everything, and then I was just... gone, and I thought...” She breaks off. “I thought you’d let me stay gone.”
My wolf and I agree on exactly one thing at this moment, and it’s the truth.
“I was halfway across that garden before the roses closed.” I press my forehead to hers. We’re both filthy, both bleeding, both shaking. “I will always come. Do you understand me? There is no anger big enough. There is no secret big enough. There is no version of me that doesn’t come for you.”
She makes a sound, half sob, half laugh.
“That’s very romantic for a man who’s currently covered in someone else’s blood.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“You contain at least one murder.”
“He’s alive.” I tip my head at the prisoner. “Disappointingly.”
She laughs for real this time, and it cracks straight through me, because she shouldn’t be able to laugh.
She was on her knees in a curse circle nine minutes ago.
And now she’s laughing in the wreckage with a split cheek and dust in her blonde hair, and I have never in my life wanted anything the way I want to keep her doing exactly that forever.
“You’re staring,” she whispers.
“I know.”
“Why.”
“Because I almost lost you tonight.” The words come out low and rough and completely honest, and I’m done hiding from them.
“And somewhere between the garden and here I stopped being able to lie to myself about it. I don’t want the bond.
I don’t care about the bond. I want you.
The bond can burn down for all I care, and I’d still walk into that tunnel a hundred times for the woman who keeps setting my life on fire. ”
She goes still.
“Leo.” Her voice has changed. “Leo, my skin...”
I feel it before I see it.
Heat. At the curve of her throat, in the place where a mark would go. It climbs from a single point, gold under the skin, rising toward the surface.
I look down at my own forearm. At the cursed cut going black.
And next to it, racing up from the inside, the same gold light.
“That’s not possible,” I breathe. “It takes the rite. The ceremony. The bite. It takes both of us choosing, out loud, in front of witnesses. It doesn’t just...”
“Leo.” Her hand flies to her throat. “What is happening? What is this?”
The gold reaches the surface.
And there, blooming across her skin like ink in water, half-formed, half-finished, raw as a wound and bright as a vow, is the beginning of a mating mark.
Mine.
We never said the words.
We never chose.
And the bond is sealing itself anyway.