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Drip.

It’s the longer pause before the final drip of each droplet that has my gaze swiveling sluggishly down.

Holy fuck.

Down below, probably twenty feet underneath the metal grating I’m lying on, is an ocean of red.

A lake of it. A pool.

The sharp metallic scent of copper invades my senses. Then, slowly, I realize what I’m looking into.

It’s a giant, industrial-sized vat for engine oil, or industrial waste, or even water. Like the one from the night Bella and I crossed paths, filled with neon-green acid.

But this one is filled to the fucking brim with blood.

Suddenly I’m thirteen again, wrestling with Dr. Bathory on a catwalk before I go tumbling in. Before I’m floating in the crimson. Drowning in it. Swallowing it down like an unholy communion as it fills my lungs.

My baptism in blood.

I wrench my eyes away, my vision swimming as I force myself to breathe and try to understand where the fuck I am. My wandering gaze stills when it lands on rows and rows of flayed carcasses hanging from metal hooks like the one through my shoulder.

Cattle.

I'm in a slaughterhouse.

"...Dame?"

My heart stops.

Bella.

Instinctively, I roll toward the sound of her voice. The movement is pure agony as the hook through my flesh grinds against bone and bare nerve endings. A haggard, choked roar rips from my throat when I manage to roll all the way over onto my other side.

My eyes land on her, and my heart wrenches.

Bella is lying on her side facing me a few feet away on the metal grating. Her hands are bound behind her back like mine. Someone’s torn her hoodie and her shirt half off, exposing the bloody, raw hole in her shoulder, a similar vicious metal meat hook puncturing her body.

My face pales as I see all the blood—so much fucking blood—soaked into her hoodie and shirt and dripping from her wound into the vat below.

Her face is gray and her lips are trembling as her unfocused eyes land on me. She smiles weakly.

“Hey…” she croaks in a dry rasp.

My heart breaks in two.

I’ve had things go wrong on hunts before. I’ve been stabbed. I’ve taken a bullet. I’ve had to fight for my life when it was four of them and one of me.

But nothing has ever hurt as much as seeing her like this.

"Bella.”

I don’t realize how similarly broken and raw my own voice sounds until I hear it saying her name. I try to drag myself closer to her, my arm extending to try and touch her. But pain explodes through my shoulder, twisting my face in agony.

"Don't," she groans, shifting and then wincing. “Don’t try to move. I—I’m okay, Dame.”

“No, you’re not,” I grit through clenched teeth, trying to reach for her again.

Her eyes close for a second. “I’m…mostly okay?” Her breath catches and she coughs raggedly as she exhales, her face crumpling in pain.