21 Kaia #2
Her eyes were bone-dry and blazing. “This is one rig, Kaia. One node. I’ve spent years mapping a network that runs under nine states.
If I close this bond today to hold a man I’ve never met, I lose the war to win the morning.
Hundreds more end up on rigs just like the one your mate is pulling his brother off of right now. ”
The glass behind the door went quiet.
We both heard it. The frantic tearing stopping, which meant he’d found it, which meant the clock had just run out of numbers.
“Stay and help us fight this battle. Meet your mate.”
Her hand fisted around the token until the worn edges bit white into her palm. “No.”
Goddess help me, I understood it all the way down—I’d thrown the only man who ever touched me like I was holy down a flight of stairs and fused the gate shut to keep him alive, and I’d done it in half a second without one ounce of regret, and this was the same thing wearing a different face.
Love was not the thing you protected. The mission was the thing you protected.
You set the love down, gently, in the dark, and you walked into the fire alone so it could keep living.
“Tell him—” She stopped. The dry eyes flickered. “When he catches my scent. When he asks.” She dragged in a breath that shook the length of her. “Tell him I heard him. That’s all. Tell him I heard him, and I’ll come find him when it’s safe to want things.”
Her mouth twisted, bitter and grieving, and she put her hand on the hatch.
“Sloane—”
One fluid motion, she was gone, the hatch swung shut behind her.
The vault door kicked open.
It came off its frame with a boom that shook the dead terminals. Joss came through it backward, hauling, and what he carried turned my stomach.
Not the small syringe he wept into his tear ducts drop by careful drop. The full glass barrel, fat with refined aurum latens, the blue-gold light of it so bright it threw his shadow huge and warping up the wall, and there was enough in that barrel to stop a heart ten times over.
“You think I’ll run.” His weeping eyes found me, and the wax of his face had gone slack and rapturous. “You think I’ll abandon three hundred years of sacred work because a Steward grew teeth. You want to know what your grace is really for, little rose?”
He raised the barrel, and the light streamed down his arm.
“This. It was always for this.”
I felt it before I understood it—a pressure climbing the building’s bones, the same vibration I’d felt run up through my boots when the doors released, except wrong now, overloaded, a wave of magic surging up the conduits with nowhere clean to go.
The dead terminals woke. Every screen in the junction blazed white at once.
The hum under the floor climbed to a shriek.
The consoles blew.
Glass sprayed outward in a spitting fountain, the master terminal first and then the bank of monitors down the wall, sparks showering up into the ruined ceiling and raining back down through the smoke, and the surge ran the length of the room hunting for ground—
And found Joss.
It found the gold pouring through his cracking skin, the live alchemy he’d just flooded into his own blood, and it arced into him in a single white lance that doubled him over and lifted him off his feet and threw him into the center of the junction.
He hit the floor on his back, convulsing, the feedback pouring through and lighting him from the inside, his body swelling faster now, fed, supercharged, the two weeping eyes blowing out into solid orbs of corrupted radiance with nothing human left in them at all.
The building shuddered head to foot.
And the fused stairwell gate exploded inward.
The whole slab tore off its melted frame and clanged across the floor, and through the smoke and the raining sparks came Tommy and Finn, together, and the sight of them stopped my heart in my chest.
Soot and blood head to foot, both of them, Finn’s bare chest a ruin of half-healed lacerations and Tommy’s forearms blistered black and already knitting, and they moved through the wreckage in perfect lethal synchronization—fangs dropped behind their lips, claws out and slick and red, gold blazing full in four eyes, two Sovereign wolves who’d been bled and burned and finally, finally let off the leash.
Finn’s arm rode across Tommy’s shoulders, and even battered to nothing he held himself like the prince his blood had hidden, and they cleared the threshold as one body, two halves of the same predator, the air bending around them.
Tommy’s gold eyes swept the junction—the boiled bodies, the convulsing monster, the smoke—and found me.
Everything in him changed.
He crossed the room in three strides, ignoring the ceiling raining down, ignoring everything that wasn’t me, and his hands came up and seized my face and he kissed me.
There was nothing gentle in it.
A claiming—desperate, furious, I-thought-I’d-left-my-own-heart-locked-behind-a-gate-to-die—his mouth crushing down on mine, his thumbs streaking through the blood on my chin, and he tasted it, tasted my blood and didn’t flinch, drank it like proof I was still breathing.
His scent crashed over me with no potion left to mute it, warm sunbaked stone and that green storm note, and it braided into my own pouring off my skin until the whole junction smelled like weather breaking, and the bond between us—no mask, no pretending, no last bitter drop of Nadia’s potions under either of our tongues.
“You locked me out.” He snarled it against my mouth, the words shaking with fury and something so much larger than fury.
His forehead dropped to mine, gold blazing an inch from gold.
“You threw me down a flight of stairs and you fused the gate, Kaia, you locked yourself in with that thing and you sent me away—”
“You saved your brother.” I had his blood-streaked face in my hands now too, both of us holding each other up. “You opened the doors for your pack. I’d do it again.”
“Never again.” His claws were careful against my jaw even shaking with rage, even half-shifted, careful, always careful with me. “You hear me? We die at the same time or we don’t die at all. Never again.”
Over his shoulder, Finn had pulled up short in the wreckage of the gate.
His battered head came up. His nostrils flared, gold eyes sweeping the room, Joss writhing on the floor, the dead terminals, the closed service hatch—and his bruised face tightened, a flinch running through it that had nothing to do with his wounds, his lacerated chest going still as he caught the lingering trace of someone who’d been standing here a minute ago and was already gone.
His jaw worked once. Something raw and uncomprehending moved behind his eyes.
I’ll tell him, I thought, even now, even here. I heard her, and I’ll tell him.
The thing that had been Joss got its feet under it.
It rose up out of its convulsions into the strobing red light and it threw back a head that no longer fit its body and roared.
The sound shattered the last of the ceiling, brought half the panels down in a rain of dust and wire, and the blue-gold light blazed up so bright it bleached the junction white. His two corrupted orbs fixed on the mated pair holding each other in the wreckage.
Tommy and I broke apart.
We turned in the same instant—no word, no signal, the bond between us clean and singing—and our wolves aligned, his storm and my stone braided into one weather system.
We faced the monster who’d built this place and bled Tommy’s brother and boiled his own men and trimmed my whole bloodline down to nothing, side by side, gold-eyed, fangs bared.
Ready to finish this.