Page 73
“Front door. You take anyone who runs.”
“And DeSanto?”
“DeSanto isn’t here. Lex confirmed. Only three heat signatures plus Sophia.”
“Then these three.”
“Mine.” I look at my brother. “All three. Mine.”
Roman holds my gaze. He sees what I am right now, what the wolf has become in the minutes since Sophia was taken, and what he sees doesn’t frighten him. It satisfies him. This is the alpha he wants. Not the strategist, not the businessman, not the man who chooses precision over force. The wolf. Pure and absolute and uninterested in anything except the retrieval of his mate and the elimination of every obstacle between them.
“Yours,” Roman says. “I’ll be outside.”
I get out of the vehicle.
The night air hits my face and I can smell the warehouse from two blocks away. Engine oil, stale cigarettes, concrete dust, and underneath all of it, faint but unmistakable, vanilla and warm skin and the dark amber that I would recognize in a crowd of ten thousand.
Sophia.
I strip off my jacket. My shirt. My shoes.
The old steel stays on my right hand. I flex my fingers. The scarred metal catches the streetlight. The concrete is cold under my bare feet and I don’t feel it.
I walk toward the warehouse in my jeans and nothing else, and with each step the wolf comes further forward, my senses sharpening. The darkness resolves into movement, scent, and the details that matter: the door, the hinges, the bolt, the three bodies between me and her.
I don’t shift. Not yet. I want them to see the man first. I want them to see a man walk through their door and understand, in the seconds before it ends, that the man is worse than anything they imagined.
The rolling door is steel, bolted from the inside with a padlock and a crossbar. I grip the handle and pull. The bolt tears free from the frame with a scream of metal, and the door folds inward like aluminum foil, the entire structure wrenching off its track and collapsing onto the concrete in a cascade of noise that echoes through the building like a bomb.
I step through.
Three men. Two by the fallen door, scrambling for weapons they were not expecting to need this quickly. One near Sophia, fifteen feet from her, already pulling the gun from his waistband.
I move.
The first man, the one closest to the door, has his hand on a shotgun leaning against the wall.
His fingers close around the stock.
I am on him before the barrel reaches horizontal.
I catch the gun with my left hand.
And squeeze.
Metal folds beneath my fingers. The mechanism crushes inward with a sharp metallic crack, and his expression changes as he watches a human hand destroy something made of steel.
He has just enough time to understand that I’m not human. Then my right fist hits him. Old steel meets his chest.The sound is different from a normal punch. Metal. Bone. Breath. One compressed crack.
He leaves his feet. His body hits the shelving hard enough to buckle it, and the entire unit collapses around him. He doesn’t get up.
The second man fires. A handgun, small caliber, three shots in rapid succession. Two miss. One catches me in the side, a hot punch below the ribs that I register and dismiss. The wolf’s healing is already working, the flesh closing around the bullet, the pain a distant signal drowned out by the fury that’s driving me forward.
His eyes widen when I keep coming. I close the distance in two strides. I take the gun from his hand, peeling his fingers back until the bones give.
He screams.
My right fist comes up. The old steel catches him across the jaw. Once. His head snaps sideways. His body hits the concrete and stays there. I don’t need a second punch.
