3 Reed #2
“I know,” he said again, softer. “And I’m asking you to do the hardest thing you’ve ever done, which is nothing.
You’ve been the shield for this whole pack for over a decade, Reed.
You put your body between us and every fire that ever came for us.
So put your body somewhere else this time.
Give her the one thing your blood can’t give her up close.
” His thumb dug into the tendon of my neck.
“Distance. Room to breathe. Space to not die.”
Listen to him.
And this—this stopped me cold, because my wolf never took the far side of an argument against getting to her. This was the animal, and even the animal had gone quiet and terrible and certain. He lay down in me like a fire banked under ash.
He’s right. We are the match. We are always the match. We burned her once. Not again. Never again. Let the others carry her out of the dark, and we will stand at the door and kill anything that tries to follow.
I closed my eyes.
Twenty years of arrogance had put her in a cage. I would not let twenty more seconds of it put her in the ground.
I opened my eyes. “Del, Kenji, Bowie, Cal—the east corridor is yours. Get every woman out of that block. Gentle. Slow. Nobody with a strong bond-scent goes near the dormants—hang back, run the extraction cold. If any of them starts to purge, you isolate her and you call for Nadia.” I stepped back out of Del’s grip because if I stayed in it one more second I would break.
“I’ll take the northern access alone. Secure the loading bay.
Hold the escape route open. That’s my LCES. That’s my job.”
I looked at Del.
“Bring her out. Bring her out and I’ll be at the door and I swear on my life I’ll make sure I’m nowhere close enough to hurt her.”
Del held my eyes one more beat. Then he nodded and squeezed my neck once more and let go.
“On it, boss,” Kenji said, already moving. “We’ll have her out in ten.”
They flowed down the east corridor into the dark, and I stood alone in the junction and listened to the sound of my own pack going to get my mate while I turned and walked the other way.
It was the hardest thing I had ever done.
I did it anyway.
There is a kind of firefighting you do when you’ve stopped being a person—when you’ve locked the man in a box and thrown the crew the key and let the machine take the line.
I did that.
I shut the wolf down under the ash and I clamped the man in the dark behind the obsidian. I moved through my enemy’s fortress like a scratch line cut fast and clean.
And I killed everything that stood in my way.
Two Wardens at a security checkpoint, reaching for their hex-rigs.
I took them before the rigs cleared the holster—one, then the other, efficient, emotionless, the way you drop a snag before it drops on you.
A Tender in a doorway who saw my eyes and opened his mouth to scream.
He didn’t. A third Warden who ran, and whom I let run until I snapped his neck and threw him away.
I would kill everyone behind Severance with my bare hands.
If I let myself feel for even one step I would turn around and go back down the east corridor and do the thing that would kill her, so I did not feel, I only worked, and the corridor emptied out ahead of me the way fuel burns away ahead of a wind-driven front.
We are walking away, the wolf rasped, his claws dragging across my ribs like burning coals. We are leaving her to the pack. If they hurt her, I will tear our own skin off.
They won’t hurt her, I answered into the dark. Del has the line. We hold the door.
Then kill faster, the beast snarled. Clear the way!
She’ll be so small.
The thought got through, between one body and the next, and once it was through I couldn’t stop the rest of them.
She’ll be small, and gray, and hollowed out.
Twenty years of the dark does that. She’ll be catatonic, or close to it—furniture, the way they treat the ones they’ve broken all the way down.
She won’t know me. Why would she? I’m not the boy from the fence rail anymore.
I’m forty-five and scarred and covered in Warden blood and my eyes don’t even hold gold anymore.
She’ll look at me and see a monster, and she’ll be right.
I clubbed a locked door off its frame and kept walking.
I’ll be gentle. That was the promise I made myself, down there in the dark, stepping over the monsters I was killing to keep her escape route open.
I’ll spend the rest of my life being gentle.
I’ll learn her all over again from nothing.
I’ll build her a quiet house and I’ll never raise my voice and I’ll wait as long as it takes, years, decades, however long, until one day she smiles and it’s real.
I don’t need her to know me. I just need her alive.
I just need to know she’s breathing and warm and free and I will ask for nothing else for the rest of my life.
I reached the loading bay.
The blast doors were still closed—heavy outer doors, the ones that needed to open onto the escape route—the wash Del had said would run like a highway once we got the dormants through.
They were locked from the inside. Bolted.
And behind them, I could hear it: movement.
Bodies. The scrape and shift of a group massing in the dark on the far side of our only exit.
Enemies, my wolf said, and came up out of the ash snarling. Massing to cut off the escape route. To trap us in the corridor. Pack is bringing her right into a kill box. Open it. Open it and hold this door with our teeth.
I set a breaching charge on the locking bars. I laid my hand flat against the cold steel and I let the Founding blood pour down through my arm, into the metal, into the bolts, warping them, softening them, and I stepped back and blew the charge and drove my magic into the ruined steel all at once.
The blast doors shrieked and tore and blew inward on a cloud of ash.