Shock-warm.
Her blood is soaking into the front of my shirt, slick and hot and metallic, and the smell of it finally breaches whatever dissociative wall my nervous system built to keep me operational.
It hits me all at once.
Copper.
Salt.
Something faintly sweet and wrong underneath it.
Her.
My vision fractures.
The world tilts violently on its axis like someone grabbed the planet and yanked it sideways just to see what would fall off.
The jalshagar detonates inside my rib cage.
Not metaphorically.
Not poetically.
It slams into me like a shaped charge going off behind my sternum, a white-hot, bone-deep explosion of instinct andrecognition and ancient, feral certainty that rips the air out of my lungs and replaces it with a single, deafening imperative:
Claim.
Claim.
Claim.
It screams through my nervous system so loud it drowns out the sirens, the fire, the sound of my own boots hitting concrete.
Mine.
The word is not a thought.
It is a biological command.
My knees buckle.
I slam one shoulder into the alley wall hard enough to crater the brick, using the impact to keep myself upright instead of collapsing into the trash-strewn concrete with her in my arms.
“No,” I choke out.
The instinct surges harder, coiling through my spine, clawing up into my skull, demanding I bare my teeth, deploy my spurs, mark her, take her, drag her into some dark place where nothing else in the universe can touch what is mine.
Panic hits harder than any bullet ever has.
This is not the slow, manageable aggression spike I was trained to cage.
This is not adrenaline.
This is not fight-or-flight.
This is something older than language and infinitely more dangerous.
My hands start shaking.
