His gaze swept to the right and spotted Kol.
His Beta was half inside the overturned SUV, hauling a dazed older man—Winslet’s father—through a shattered window with one hand while his other held a knife, fending off an attacker with vicious, economical swings.
Kol is saving Winslet’s family.
The relief was a spike of clean air in his smoke-filled lungs. That weight, at least, lifted.
Then his eyes snapped forward.
Bracken had Winslet by the open door of the second SUV. And she was a storm in human form.
Every move he’d drilled into her in his gym, she used now not for practice but for survival. She wasn’t just fighting. She was dismantling. A sharp elbow broke Bracken’s grip on her arm. A stomp of her boot crushed his instep. She wrenched her body with a torque that would have dislocated a lesser man’s shoulder, her face a mask of cold, focused fury.
Pride and terror collided in Korrak’s chest, a dizzying cocktail that stole his breath.
That’s my fierce mate.
Bracken, bleeding from a cut above his eye, roared and yanked her back against him. But then his eyes locked with Korrak’s across the blood-stained snow.
And the bastard grinned.
No words. No grand speech. Just that triumphant, possessive smirk as his bones began to crack into his grizzly form.
Korrak didn’t think. He answered.
The shift ripped through his body, and the world exploded in size and scent and fury. His clothes tore, bones cracked and reformed, muscles expanded and coiled, snow-white fur emerged across his skin, and a polar bear’s roar soon silencedthe chaos for half a heartbeat. He hit the ground running as Bracken’s grizzly form slammed down, a mountain of dark, rippling muscle and malice.
The fight was not a duel. It was an ending.
Bracken fought with the chaotic, grinding brutality of a rockslide. He used his weight, his thick claws designed for tearing, the very ground itself, hurling chunks of ice and frozen earth. He fought to maul, to humiliate, to conquer.
Korrak fought to stop the threat to his mate.
He was precision to Bracken’s chaos, but the grizzly’s raw power was staggering. A clawed swipe he couldn’t fully avoid raked across his ribs, slicing through fur and flesh. White-hot agony bloomed, and hot blood streamed down his flank, matting the snow-white fur crimson.
He snarled, but suddenly, the mate bond flared in alarm. Winslet wasn’t running away. She was circling.
Get back,he projected through their telepathic link as he angled his body to shield her.
She ignored him.
Then he saw the glint in her hand. A hunter’s knife, long and wicked, clearly scavenged from the SUV. Her green eyes were locked not on him, but on the grizzly’s exposed throat, on the rhythm of the fight, calculating an opening only she could see.
No. Too close,he projected to her.
Fear, colder than the Arctic night, speared him. But beneath the fear, vibrating through the mate bond, was her absolute, unshakable certainty.
Hold him still, she projected back.
He dug deep, past the searing pain in his ribs and past the ebbing strength. He gathered the last dregs of his power, his Alpha will, and focused it into one task. He lunged, not to attack, but to pin. His massive forelegs wrapped around Bracken’s grizzly chest in a crushing embrace, his jaws clamping on thethick ruff of the bear’s neck, locking him in place just for a moment. An opening.
Winslet moved like a speeding bullet.
She didn’t scream. Didn’t hesitate. She darted in with all her strength, and she drove the knife up and deep into the soft hollow at the base of Bracken’s grizzly throat.
The roar that tore from the beast was a wet, gurgling choke. The massive body shuddered, the fight flooding out of it along with its lifeblood.
The balance of the fight had shifted. Korrak felt it in the sudden slackness of the muscles against him. With a final surge of strength born of rage, love, and the primal need to protect, he tightened his jaws and twisted.
