“What do you want?”
The question catches me off guard. What do I want? A week ago, the answer would have been simple: serve my clan, follow orders, do my duty. But now...
“I want you safe,” I admit. “I want to complete our formal bonds, build a home, maybe start a family someday. I want the peaceful future we’ve been fighting for.” I meet her eyes. “But I also know that future isn’t possible if there are more facilities like Crane’s, more victims suffering, more madmen trying to force evolution through torture.”
“So we can’t have peace until we’ve dealt with all the threats.”
“Or we accept that there will always be threats, and we choose to live our lives despite them.” I pull her close, resting my forehead against hers. “I don’t know the right answer, Lyra. I just know I want you in whatever future we choose.”
She kisses me softly. “Then we’ll figure it out. After we’ve both rested, after the immediate crisis is handled, we’ll sit down with the council and decide what we can reasonably commit to.”
She’s asleep within minutes, exhaustion finally claiming her. I hold her while she sleeps, watching the rise and fall of her chest, feeling the steady beat of her heart through our bond. My mate. My partner. The woman who changed everything.
I must have drifted off too, because I wake to alarms shrieking through the stronghold.
Lyra jolts awake beside me, immediately alert despite her exhaustion. “What’s happening?”
I’m already moving toward the door, pulling on boots and weapons. Through the bond, I reach for the clan’s emergency network, feeling the surge of panic and confusion flowing through every Mountain Cat in the stronghold.
A guard appears in our doorway, breathing hard. “Breach in the prison level! Crane escaped—he’s loose in the stronghold!”
“That’s impossible,” Lyra says, already gathering her medical supplies. “He was guarded, restrained, his chimera form barely functional?—”
“He had help,” the guard gasps. “Someone from inside. They disabled the wards, freed him, armed him. He’s heading for the upper levels, toward—” The guard’s eyes widen with horror. “Toward the healing dens. Where the freed prisoners are being treated.”
My blood goes cold. “He wants his test subjects back.”
Lyra and I exchange a single look, and then we’re running.
The stronghold is chaos—warriors mobilizing, civilians being evacuated, alarms echoing off ice and stone. We race through corridors toward the healing dens, my ice magic reaching ahead to sense threats, Lyra’s precognitive gift flashing warnings through our bond.
We’re two levels away when I feel it—a massive surge of wrong magic, chimera power that shouldn’t be possible given Crane’s degraded state. Through my ice magic, I sense multiple heat signatures in the healing dens, some moving naturally, others jerky and aggressive.
“He brought Broken with him,” I realize. “Guards from the facility that we didn’t find, or prisoners who weren’t fully reversed. He’s using them as weapons.”
We burst into the healing dens to find carnage.
Three Broken are attacking the medical staff, their malformed bodies moving with coordinated purpose. Crane stands in the center, and he’s changed—his degraded form has been... stabilized somehow. Not improved, but functional in ways it wasn’t before.
“Did you really think restraints could hold me?” Crane says, his layered voice echoing through the chamber. “I’m the world’s leading expert on transformation. I know every trick, every vulnerability, every way to escape confinement.”
He gestures, and the Broken move to surround the beds where freed prisoners are recovering. Hostages. He’s taken hostages.
“Let them go,” Lyra says, her voice steady despite the fear I feel through our bond. “Crane, you’ve lost. The facility is destroyed, your research is gone, the integration council knows everything. Killing these people won’t change that.”
“Not killing,” Crane corrects. “Reclaiming. These were my subjects, my experiments. Their reversals were premature, incomplete. I need them to perfect the process, to prove that my methods work.”
“Your methods torture people,” I snarl, ice magic crackling around my hands. “You’re not taking anyone.”
“Then they die.” Crane signals, and one of the Broken raises its claws over a sleeping prisoner’s throat. “Back away, or I start executing them one by one.”
Through our bond, Lyra sends me a flash of vision—the decision point she’s been seeing, the moment where everything branches. We can retreat, try to negotiate, save most of the prisoners but let Crane potentially escape again. Or we can fight now, risk the hostages, but end this permanently.
Neither option is good. But one path leads to transformation, to the evolution she saw in her visions.
“Do it,” she sends through the bond. “Trust me. I see the path.”
I don’t hesitate. Don’t question. Just trust her completely and move.
