“This will hurt,” he told me softly.
“Everything hurts,” I whispered back.
A shaky sound left him. Then he leaned in and bit my other shoulder almost tenderly. The pain bloomed…and then the strangest thing happened.
The heat inside me shifted, like a storm changing direction.
The wolf inside me surged up. The lycan venom screamed and fought, but it didn’t have as much room anymore. It couldn’t stretch my mind open quite as wide as it could only minutes ago.
Because there were anchors in me now.
Five tethers pulling me back every time the lycan part tried to drag me under.
Elias.
Griff.
Nox.
Bishop.
Eamon.
All five of them were holding me.
My breath faltered.
My vision cleared for half a second, and in that sliver of lucidity I saw them all five of them around me.
Then the room lurched.
Heat spiked one last time, hard enough that I screamed, back arching as the two beasts clashed in my veins, one trying to burn me into something monstrous, the other trying to hold me in a shape that still resembled me.
Griff’s hand cupped the back of my head.
“Breathe, Tam,” he whispered. “That’s it. Come back to us.”
I sucked in a ragged breath.
The fire roared.
Then, like a wave cresting, something inside me snapped and finally released. My muscles went slack so suddenly that it felt like I almost fell off the edge of the world.
“Tam!” Griff’s voice was distant now, frantic.
Hands caught me.
The ceiling rushed away.
My eyelids fluttered.
For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, the heat stopped climbing.
It broke like a storm finally deciding it had done enough damage.
I exhaled, long and shaking, and as the darkness took me, the last thing I felt was Griff’s mouth brushing my forehead.
“Stay with us,” he whispered. “Please… just stay.”
