5 Finn
I put a bullet through the first guard from around the corner.
He went down screaming, bullet through the knee. The three behind him didn’t stop for him—they never do, the Conclave breeds its guards to step over the fallen—and I moved into the blown doorway.
Two rounds. A third. I don’t waste them. The corridor became a thing I read the way I read a burning stairwell—where the smoke rolled, where the pressure pushed, which throat the panic would drive forward first. The lead man’s weapon came up. I dropped him before it cleared his hip.
“Drive in hand?” I didn’t look back. I couldn’t look back. Looking back was a bullet in her spine.
“Working on it—” Her voice came ragged off the floor behind me, stripped raw. “The port’s fighting me—your three o’clock, they’re stacking on the service side—”
I pivoted and put two into the service doorway, and something fell to the floor on the other side. Good. I swung back to the main hall.
Her scent was everywhere.
That was the thing I couldn’t shoot, couldn’t flank, couldn’t drop with a clean round. Violets. A hot spark of clove riding over the top, and it wasn’t a smell anymore, it was a hand around my throat.
The map. Santos’ damn dormant map. This place was supposed to have been safe. No dormants. No danger.
I had walked into this building absolute in my certainty that I was keeping my mate safe.
Now she was here. She was right here.
The shock of seeing her, smelling her, had ripped the air from my lungs. I’d had a list. I’d had a holy, solitary mission to clear the board from a distance so she could survive.
All of it had now turned to dust.
And then the joy had hit.
The wolf had slammed against the inside of my ribs. Mate. Here. Ours. I had starved for this.
There. Cover her. Cover her with your whole body and let them break their guns on your back.
“Can you walk?” Another round down the hall. A man in the stairwell mouth folded.
“I can crawl, does that count—” A crash of glass. A sharp indrawn breath she tried to swallow and couldn’t.
I risked a half-second to look.
She had her hand flat on the rug for balance and the rug was a field of broken bottle-glass, amber ground to razors, and her palm was open on it and bleeding, dark threads of it running down into the wool, and she hadn’t so much as flinched.
Because she couldn’t feel it. Because every nerve she owned was already screaming about something worse.
The urge went through me like a hook set behind the sternum and yanked.
Her hand. Take her hand.
The bond will heal her and close the cut and you’ll get to touch her, you’d have finally—
Finally killed her. That’s what the touch buys.
A mating frenzy with fifty rifles pointed at both our skulls.
And it was already starting.
The air carried the heavy, frantic charge of a suppressed dormant reacting to her mate. Reed’s warning rang in the blood rushing past my ears: The moment the bond tries to seal, the chemistry turns to poison.
Reed’s mate had died because he hadn’t know what was happening. Because his mate had been taken from him before he’d been able to anchor her through her Heat.
Panic tasted like old pennies on my tongue.
Her Heat was coming, tearing through the suppressants because I had walked through the front door with a match.
I had to get her out. I had to get her somewhere safe.
But there was no safe. There was only a building full of executioners between us and the night.
I looked away. I made myself look away from my mate’s bleeding hand and I shot the next monster coming through the service door. My blood ran cold with a new clarity. The list in my pocket was trash. There was only extraction now.
“Finn.” She said my name like she was testing whether her mouth still worked.
She’d caught it—when had I said it? Had I said it?
“Finn. Left flank, they’ve got a—” The terminal beside her head exploded.
Not a bullet meant for her. A wild round, a guard firing blind around the doorframe, and it caught the console dead center.
The screen went to sparks and shrapnel and the drive port with it, and the little completion tone I’d heard chime a minute ago meant nothing now if the drive fried in the seat.
She lunged for it.
Her knee slid on the glass and her balance went, and she pitched sideways toward the wreck of the desk. My body was already moving—already crossing the gap, already reaching, both hands out and open and sure, the surest thing they’d ever done, catch her, catch my falling mate—
I stopped my hands in the air a foot from her shoulders.
Every tendon in my forearms locked. It felt like tearing them off the bone. She fell past my open, useless, screaming hands and I could not touch her. I stood over my mate while she crashed to the floor and I ripped my hands back through the air like they were the ones on fire.
I turned and shot the man who’d fired the wild round through the base of the throat.
He was dead before he understood he’d done anything.
“Drive.” Her voice, from the floor, gone to gravel and grit but moving, already moving, that was the thing that undid me—she was already up on one elbow with her arm buried to the wrist in the shattered console.
“Got it. It’s out. It’s—goddess, it’s warm but it’s whole, I’ve got it.
” She pulled it free in a fist gone red at the knuckles and shoved it down the front of her collar.
“You’re bleeding.”
“Don’t you dare look at my hand. I mean it. Just shoot and find us a way out of here.”
We moved.
I put myself in the doorway first and took the hall in a rolling advance.
She came up off the floor behind me and fell into my wake like she’d trained for it her whole life, and maybe she had, maybe we both had, two people who’d spent decades learning to survive alone suddenly discovering their bodies already knew the shape of the other one.
I gave her the wall. She gave me the doors.
“Freight lift, southwest,” she said at my shoulder, close, too close, the heat of her rolling off her in waves that hit the back of my neck like standing near an open furnace. “Behind the pallet racks. Old lock. I can crack it faster than the badge doors.”
“Lead.”
“You clear.”
I cleared.
Two more at the junction. I read them off the way the air moved around the corner—the small displacement of a man holding his breath to aim—and I took the first before he leaned out and the second while he was still deciding whether his partner was dead.
The corridor filled with the burnt-sugar reek of Conclave wards cooking off somewhere below, the whole protective lattice unraveling in the heat of the breach I’d brought through the front door, and under it, over it, drowning it, her.
Mate. Ours. Protect.
No shit, wolf. What do you think I’m doing?
Her lungs dragged and hitched behind me.
She was getting worse. The scent was thickening.
The clove had gone from a spark to a blaze.
Her proximity was stripping the last of my control, leaving the beast raw and exposed.
My wolf had stopped slamming the ribs and started simply keening, a note under everything, a sound I’d never made in all the years of the worst nights a man can have.
Every instinct demanded I turn around, snatch her up, and run, but we had to fight through this labyrinth first.
Mine and dying and I did it. I walked in and I did it. The one thing I swore I wouldn’t do. I lit the match.
“Here—” She peeled left at the pallet racks and dropped in front of a gray steel door older than the others.
Her fingers went to the keypad and her badge came out.
She started talking to the lock the way I’d heard her talk to the empty room, low and fast and furious.
“Come on. Come on, you antique. Mag-lock’s warded, it’s a nasty little sequence, give me five seconds—”
Boots at the far end of the racks. A lot of them. The whole flow of the building turning back toward us now that the breach downstairs had spent itself.
I stepped past her into the lane between the racks and gave the oncoming dark everything I had left in the magazine. Muzzle flash strobed the shelves. Men shouted and fell and were shoved aside by the men behind them.
“Warded deeper than I—hell—”
“Sloane.”
“Don’t rush me while I’m—bypassed.” The lock coughed green. The door dragged inward on a shriek of old hinges. “Move. Move, move—”
I backed into the freight lift after her, still firing, and slammed the gate. The ancient thing lurched down into the dark of the shaft with a groan that I felt in my teeth.
Then it was just us. A box of rattling steel and one bare bulb and three feet of nothing between my body and hers. No more gray coats to shoot, nothing to do with my hands or my eyes or the animal roaring behind my sternum, and the proximity closed over me like water over a drowning man.
She was pressed into the far corner with her back to the steel and her bleeding hand cradled against her stomach, her chest heaving. Her eyes were open, and I made the mistake of looking into them.
The brown was gone.
Underneath them her eyes were the pure gold I’d spent years catching in dreams and losing before waking, gold like the low heart of a fire. She was looking at me out of a dormant’s true eyes, and she was the most beautiful and most terrifying thing I had ever failed to save.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m already gone.” Her jaw set. Even now. Even like this. “I’m not gone yet. So stop it.”
“Your eyes.”
“I know what my eyes are doing.” She pressed her head back against the steel and squeezed them shut, and her throat worked, and when she spoke again the fury had cracks in it.
“It’s you. Every second you’re this close it’s like—it’s like you’re pulling the plug out of the drain and everything I spent my whole life bailing is just—going.
All at once. Down.” A breath that shook the whole way down.
“I built that wall brick by brick, do you understand? Years of undercover work. Do you know how many dormants we got out—”
“We?”