12. Annabella
Chapter twelve
Annabella
Idreamed I was warm.
Not the sick heat of fever eating me from the inside—actual warmth.
A body against mine. Arms locked around me, one under my knees, one behind my shoulders, cradling me, keeping me safe.
A heartbeat under my ear, hard and steady.
And a scent cutting through the silver stink of the Kennel: wood smoke and rich chocolate with a touch of lime.
Whatever it was, it made my wolf lift her battered head and whimper.
Mate, she breathed. The first word she’d managed in days.
I tried to open my eyes. The lids were gummed shut, heavy, and the world kept tilting sideways. Red light pulsed beyond them, strobing, rhythmic, painting the inside of my eyelids the color of blood.
Alarms. Alarms were screaming.
There was the sensation of movement. Of being carried. Fast, each footfall sending a jolt through my broken ribs that whited out my vision, but I didn’t care. It felt good.
Not real. Can’t be real.
Sam had said he was real. Sam had said—
Because you’re my mate. And I’m not losing you.
Had he said that? Or had the fever cooked those words up from nothing, giving me exactly what I wanted to hear before I died? Wouldn’t be the first time my brain had lied to me.
Arms tightened around me as they adjusted their grip, so my ribs took less of the impact. Like he knew. Like he could feel exactly where it hurt.
“Just hold on, Moonbeam,” Sam’s voice murmured against my hair.
If this was dying, it wasn’t the worst way to go.
The corridors blurred.
Strobing red. Concrete. The wail of alarms bouncing off walls and coming back distorted, layered over shouting and the thunder of boots somewhere distant. I caught pieces, fragments that my fever-soaked brain assembled wrong, like a jigsaw someone had shaken in the box.
Silver in the air. Silver in the walls. I could taste it in the back of my throat, metallic and wrong, but it was fading.
Getting weaker the further we moved. Or maybe that was my wolf, stronger now with Sam’s scent filling my lungs.
She’d been silent for days, but now she was stirring with something that felt dangerously close to hope.
Don’t, I told her. We don’t know if this is real yet.
She ignored me. Pushed closer to the surface and breathed him in.
I faded. Came back. The corridor was different now—wider, the ceiling higher, the red lights spaced further apart so the darkness pooled between them. Sam’s breathing was controlled, even, but I could feel the tension in every muscle he held me with.
I tried to speak. Managed something that wasn’t quite a word.
“Quiet.” His mouth was close to my ear. “Almost through.”
Through to where? I wanted to ask. But the fever pulled me sideways again, and for a while there was only warmth and motion and the drum of his heart under my ear, and I let myself believe, just for a minute, that someone had come for me.
A sudden stillness jolted me back to the surface. Sam’s arms locked tighter—fractionally, an involuntary squeeze—and his scent changed. The chocolate scent sharpened. Turned acrid. His whole body went rigid against mine, and underneath my cheek, his heartbeat kicked up.
Voices ahead.
“Stop right there! Put McGrath down and step away.”
My wolf snarled, faint and ragged. She recognized something. My brain was too slow, too full of fever and static, still trying to sort real from imagined.
Sam knelt. The motion was smooth, controlled, but I felt the reluctance in it, in the way his hands lingered before releasing me, in the way he arranged me against the wall, so my ribs took the least pressure.
My head lolled sideways. Hair fell across my face.
Through the dark strands, the corridor swam in red pulses.
“Stay with me,” he whispered.
His hand brushed mine—there and gone—and then he stood and stepped away from me.
The loss of his warmth was physical. Immediate. Like having a blanket stripped in winter. My wolf keened.
I forced my eyes open. Blinked against the strobing light, trying to make the shapes ahead resolve into something that made sense. Two figures. Guard uniforms. Weapons drawn.
Human. Even with my wolf half-crushed by silver and infection, I could tell that much. One positioned center, weapon raised. The other flanked left, hand on a baton.
Sam was talking. His voice was flat, authoritative, the words clipped and professional. Something about prisoner transport. Medical attention.
The center guard said something back. Dismissive. Final.
And then I saw his face.
The strobe caught him mid-word. Lit him up in crimson.
That mouth. That sharp, hungry smile, the one he’d worn while he stabbed the silver knife into my side again and again.
Brennan.
And next to him, his partner in crime, Drummond.
Everything in my body locked. Joints, muscles, lungs, all of it seizing at once.
My breathing fragmented into short, shallow gasps that I couldn’t control.
Somewhere behind my sternum, my wolf went from keening to a low, continuous growl, and my hands were shaking, my whole body was shaking—
“Brennan.” The name scraped out of me like broken glass.
I pushed myself up, but my right arm buckled, too weak; the infection had eaten the strength out of it, and I slammed back against the wall. Tried again. Got halfway, my shoulder screaming, blood rushing too loud in my ears.
“Come to finish what you started?” I paused, swallowing blood where my lip had split. “I’d like to see you try. Even like this, I’ll still snap your fucking neck.”
Sam turned.
I could see the change in him even through the fever-haze,the way his body went from still to something else entirely. Something coiled and lethal. His eyes found mine first, and whatever he saw there sent something dark and vast rolling through him.
“Still talking, dog?” Brennan’s smile stretched wider. “Thought we taught you to shut that mouth.”
Sam’s eyes went dark. Not angry-dark. Something older. Something that belonged to the wolf more than the man.
“Step away from the prisoner.” Brennan raised his weapon. Confident. Sure. “This is your last warning.”
Sam moved.
A gunshot cracked and I flinched—a full-body jerk I couldn’t stop. The silver round caught Sam’s shoulder. I smelled the burn from six feet away, that acrid sear of silver meeting Shifter flesh, and my wolf threw herself against my chest so hard my vision blurred.
Sam didn’t slow down. Didn’t even flinch.
He kicked off the wall for momentum and drove into Brennan with everything he had.
They hit the concrete together, Sam’s weight driving Brennan into the floor, and the sound of Brennan’s skull cracking against it was something I’d hear for the rest of my life.
Sam’s elbow came down on his face. Bone crunched. Blood sprayed across the concrete.
Good, my wolf snarled. More.
Drummond came in fast with the baton, experienced, confident, already swinging for Sam’s head. My stomach dropped because Sam’s back was turned, he couldn’t see—
Sam rolled off Brennan as the baton whistled through empty air, and his fist drove into Drummond’s kidney hard enough that I heard the impact from across the corridor. Drummond folded, gasping. Stayed up, but barely.
I knew what Sam was doing. I’d watched enough fighters, trained with enough wolves, to recognize it; he was dismantling them. Systematic. Efficient. Each strike chosen to cripple, not just hurt.
Brennan was scrambling up, blood pouring from his shattered nose, hand reaching for his backup weapon.
Sam grabbed him by the throat one-handed—one-handed, like Brennan weighed nothing—hauled him upright, and locked him against his chest. Arm across Brennan’s windpipe.
Brennan’s body between Sam and Drummond like a shield.
Drummond had recovered. Gun drawn, aimed, but his partner filled the line of fire. His eyes flicked between Sam and Brennan. Calculating.
“Let him go,” Drummond ordered. Steady voice. Steady hands.
Sam tightened his grip. Brennan made a wet, strangled sound.
“Let him go, or I shoot.”
“Then shoot.”
Two words. Flat. Final. Like he’d already done the math and the math didn’t include a version where Brennan and Drummond walked out of this corridor.
Drummond’s jaw clenched. He shifted his aim, trying to find a clean angle past Brennan’s shoulder. There wasn’t one. Sam had made sure of that.
The shot came and Brennan’s body jerked, his own partner’s bullet punching through his shoulder. His mouth opened in a silent scream. Sam grabbed the knife from Brennan’s belt and drove it upward under Brennan’s ribs.
“That’s for Annabella.”
Brennan’s legs gave out. Sam let him drop.
Something inside me—something that had been clenched tight since the first time Brennan had pressed that blade to my stomach—cracked open. Released.
Sam was already moving. Drummond fired. The round caught Sam in the side, silver searing through muscle, and a sound tore out of me, raw and involuntary, but Sam was inside Drummond’s guard before the echo died.
His hand locked on Drummond’s gun wrist and twisted.
The snap was sharp as a branch breaking. The gun hit the floor.
Drummond tried to knee him in the ribs. Sam caught his leg, drove his fist into Drummond’s throat. Drummond choked, gagging, but his free hand was already reaching for his baton; still fighting, still dangerous even with a broken wrist and a damaged windpipe.
Sam grabbed his head in both hands and slammed it into the wall. Once. Twice. Three times. Drummond slumped. Still breathing. Still twitching.
Sam twisted. Sharp. Clean.
Drummond dropped.
The whole fight had taken less than a minute.
Sam stood over the bodies of the men. His hands were bloody. His shoulder and side leaked where the silver rounds had punched through, but his breathing was steady.
He looked at me.
And the thing I couldn’t name—the thing too big for a single word—rose up in my chest until I couldn’t breathe around it. Because nobody had ever done that. Nobody had ever looked at the people who’d hurt me and said, “No. Not her. Never again.”
Sam stalked back to me and knelt. His expression shifted, the killing coldness draining out, replaced by something careful and urgent. He scanned my face, my body, reading damage.
“Can you hold on to me?”
I nodded. Lifted my arms. The movement tore a gasp from me that I would have swallowed if I’d had the strength.
He lifted me against his chest. I tucked my face into his neck, right where his pulse beat fast and warm, and breathed in the scent of him.
“You killed them.” My mouth moved against his skin.
“Yeah.”
“I could totally have taken them.”
I felt his smile. “I’ll leave them for you next time.”
“You do that, Sam Shaw.”
Something rumbled in his chest. Low, almost subsonic. His wolf. I felt it vibrate through me, and my wolf answered—weak, battered, but there—reaching out toward Sam.