Its arms tighten around me just a fraction, not crushing, not painful, just… anchoring.
Our eyes meet again.
Up close now.
Too close.
The glow in his eyes brightens a hair, like a dimmer switch being nudged upward by an invisible hand.
His jaw locks.
Hard.
Every muscle in his body goes rigid like he’s bracing against something internal and violent.
“Oh,” I whisper again, because my vocabulary has officially left the building.
He swallows.
I hear it.
It’s loud.
Human.
Wrong, somehow, in a body like this.
“No,” he breathes.
The word is wrecked.
Ripped out of him like it hurts to say it.
The ceiling cracks.
A long, splintering sound rips through the room as a support beam finally gives up on life.
Debris rains down in a choking cloud of dust and sparks.
He turns without dropping me and starts moving, fast, toward the blown-out kitchen doorway.
“Hey,” I croak weakly, because apparently I am now the kind of person who talks to monsters in the middle of a firebombing. “I don’t know if you noticed, but my restaurant is actively dying back there.”
He doesn’t answer.
He just moves.
Smoke whips past my face.
Heat roars against my back.
My vision is collapsing inward again, dark creeping in from the edges like someone is closing curtains around my consciousness.
The pressure in my chest pulses harder, matching his heartbeat, and the sensation is so intimate and invasive and wrong that a sob rips out of my throat without permission.
“Stop,” I whisper. “Please… stop… whatever that is.”
He flinches.
