20 Tommy
My boot caught the door to Finn dead center. The hinges screamed and the whole slab buckled inward off its frame. I came through the gap with the gold blazing full in my eyes and the wolf finally, finally driving the body it had been locked inside of for too long.
Four Wardens waited inside. They saw me and expected a confused dormant, good old California Tommy, who was always babbling about towels.
They got something else.
The closest one had his shock-baton halfway up when I took the pipe I’d torn off the corridor wall and brought it across his jaw. The wet crack of it traveled up the metal into my hands, and he dropped like his strings had been cut.
The second came in fast on my flank. I let him. Stepped inside the swing, hooked the pipe behind his knee, and drove him face-first into the edge of the door I’d just caved in. He didn’t get up either.
This wasn’t a brawl. My grandmother used to say the Midnight line didn’t fight, it finished, and I’d never understood the weight of that until right now, watching my own hands move through angles a hundred generations had drilled into the blood. No wasted motion.
The third one got a shot off. The baton caught me across the ribs and lit me up with a current that would’ve folded a normal man, and I felt my own skin try to knit the burn shut and let it this time, let the wolf heal me mid-stride, because there was no cover left to protect.
The Inner Circle knew what I was now.
The whole point of pretending was gone, burned up in a hallway three floors above me where I’d left—
Kaia.
The hook in my ribs yanked, and it had nothing to do with the baton.
Mate. Go back, go back, go back.
She was up there. Behind a gate she’d fused shut herself, in the crushing dark of the Saint’s pressure, blood running down her chin and that impossible gold drowning her eyes, and I had let go of the bars and turned to run in order to save her.
The distance between us was a wire pulled to the snapping point, every stair I’d put between her body and mine a fresh degree of wrong, and somewhere under the fighting my cock still ached—heavy, low, unfinished—the half-claimed throb of a mate-bond that had cracked wide open and never been allowed to close.
Faster. The word came up through me with the next swing. Clear the room, free my packmate, drop the doors, go back to her. Faster.
I broke the third Warden’s wrist on the backswing and put him down.
The fourth one ran.
Smart. He made it three steps toward the antechamber before I crossed the room and caught him by the collar and introduced him to the floor, and then the basement was quiet except for the strobing emergency lights and the wet rattle of breath that wasn’t mine and wasn’t any of theirs.
I turned.
And there was my packmate.
Finn hung from the rig where I’d seen him an hour ago, except now they’d opened him up worse.
That was the thing that stopped me cold.
The hex-leads ran into him at the chest and the wrists, fat copper cables sunk into his skin, and where they entered him his whole chest glowed a sick violent gold, pulsing, the refined aurum latens bridging his active wolf blood into the rig the way Sloane had described—a battery the machine knew how to drain.
With every pulse a meter on the console behind him climbed, and somewhere out past these walls, Reed’s fire was crashing against a dome powered by my brother’s heart.
His head came up.
His face was a ruin—blood crusted black at the hairline, one eye swollen half-shut, a split lip—and through all of it he opened his eyes and looked at me, and the gold in mine, and the storm-and-stone scent that was rolling off my skin now that the potion was dead, and—
He grinned. A red, broken, feral grin, blood on his teeth.
“You found your mate,” he rasped. “Didn’t you?”
The wolf in me lurched toward him. Pack. Brother. Hurt.
“Finn—”
“Fuck you, brother.” A wet cough cut him off, doubled him against the chains, and he came back up still grinning.
“I’m so fucking happy for you. Smelled it on you the first time you walked into this room.
Whole place stinks like a chemical fire and you come strolling in reeking of her.
” His ruined eye fixed on me. “Some woman cracked you wide open. Best smell I’ve had in three days. ”
I crossed to the console and started reading it, because if I let the rest of it in—the lacerations, the leads buried in his sternum, the meter climbing—I was going to do something feral and stupid and useless.
Compartments. Put the fear in one. Put the love in another. Keep the hands working.
“Bro.” I found the lead housing and started tracing the cables back to the rig, hunting for the extraction points.
“How did you keep a straight face? I was down here an hour ago doing the single greatest performance of my life. Allergic to wellness. Worst Yelp review of all time. I was crushing, and you just hung there with your blank wall-face giving me nothing.”
“Took everything I had.” Another cough. “You said the thing about the mud mask and I almost lost it. Almost blew us both.”
“See, that would’ve been a real shame. Dying because you couldn’t appreciate good improv.”
“Tommy.” His voice dropped under the banter, dropped all the way down to something raw.
“The smell of her. That’s the only reason I’m still in this body.
” He let his head loll toward me, and the leads tugged, and fresh blood welled up around the copper at his sternum.
“I was ready to let go an hour ago. Then they dragged you in here looking for towels and I got a lungful of mated wolf and I thought—”
His jaw worked.
“If that idiot found his, then maybe I’ll find mine. There’s still something on the other side of this worth hanging on for. So I hung on. You did that. Just by walking in stinking of her.”
The hook in my ribs pulled so hard I had to brace a hand on the console.
She’s up there alone. The thought came up white and total.
The Saint’s cold pressure, the fused gate, blood on her lip.
I’d left her in a room with the whole machine that built her and I was standing here trading jokes while a meter counted down my brother’s life, and every cell I owned was screaming up through multiple floors of concrete toward the woman who’d thrown me down a flight of stairs to keep me breathing.
“Then let’s get you off this thing,” I said, “so I can go get her.”
The comm in my ear crackled to life.
“Tommy.” Sloane. Tight, fast, the words coming clipped. “I have the sequence loaded. I’m bleeding the feedback voltage now but it’s slow—his blood is burning at a frequency the protocol wasn’t built for. It’s reading Sovereign. Do you understand me? The rig thinks it’s draining a king.”
Finn went still against the chains.
Not from the pain. From the voice. His swollen eyes came open and something moved across his ruined face that I’d never seen on my brother in all the years of running fire with him—a flinch, a lean, the look of a man who’d just heard a sound he’d been waiting his whole life for without knowing he was waiting.
“Who is that?” He said it low.
“That’s Sloane. She’s on our side, she’s been undercover in here and she’s the reason the gates are open.” I went back to the cables. “Why?”
“Nothing.” But his voice had changed. He shook his head hard, like he was trying to knock water out of his ear, and a muscle jumped in his jaw. “Nothing. Keep working.”
“A Sovereign frequency,” I said instead, to keep him here, to keep him talking. “Finn. Buddy. Is there something you want to tell me about your blood?”
He laughed, and it cost him, and blood flecked his lip. “Treaty Court,” he said. “Royal line. Way back. My grandmother’s grandmother.” A cough. “Didn’t think it mattered. It’s not like there’s a throne to sit on anymore.”
“Of course you’re royal.” I barked it out, half a laugh, working the housing loose.
“Of course. Because Reed is the smartest bastard who ever drew breath, and he built his whole pack out of secret royalty and just never mentioned it. A Founding Alpha, a Midnight Wolf, a Treaty Court prince all running a fire line in California. We’re a deck full of face cards and our boss let us think we were the joker hand. ”
“He knew.” Finn’s grin came back, faint. “Reed always knows. Smug son of a bitch.”
“Smug son of a bitch,” I agreed, and got the lead housing open.
I reached for the first extraction lead and the feedback arced off it and slammed up my arm to the shoulder.
I jerked back with my palm smoking, the skin blistered black where the aurum latens had bitten me.
The healing came up fast and I let it, but the meter on the console was still climbing, and Sloane’s voice was in my ear—
“Don’t grab it raw. The aurum latens reads any active wolf as a load.
You touch the lead with bare hands and it tries to bridge into you, and then I’ve got two batteries and a dead protocol.
” A breath. “There’s a sync window. You have to match Finn’s resonance before you pull, get your blood riding under his so the rig reads you as one source instead of two.
Then it lets go. But I don’t know how you—”
“I know how.” I flexed my smoking hand. “It’s the only thing my line is actually good for.”
Because that was the truth of the Midnight Wolf.
We were the ones who walked into dark rooms and dark magic and felt the shape of it—the bloodline that read the secret pathways under a thing, the spies the old courts sent in when they needed someone to map a fortress from the inside without ever being seen.
The aura that let me count cameras and clock the dead air in a corridor and know, on day one, exactly where every heavy door in this building was buried.
I’d used it to hide.
Now I was going to use it to reach into my brother’s burning blood and tell a machine a lie it would believe.