“I’m asking,” she said.
Every instinct I’d ever learned screamed at me to bolt and vanish into the maze of London’s backstreets and leave this strange, dangerous girl behind.
Instead, I did the one thing I told everyone else not to do.
I told the truth.
“I’m trying to get someone out,” I said. “A kid.”
Her gaze flicked over me again.
Then she surprised the hell out of me.
She stepped closer, boots splashing softly in the blood-tainted water, and said very quietly, “Show me.”
I led her down into the sewer without another word, every step a small agony. The tunnels were narrow and slick, echoing with the distant shouts and gunfire above us. She moved behind me like she’d done it a hundred times, efficient, ruthless, eyes always scanning the dark, knife always at the ready.
When the kid started to cry, panic breaking through the haze of hunger and fear, she didn’t coddle him.
She crouched in front of him, met his gaze, and said calmly, “Breathe. You can cry later.”
And the kid listened.
That was the moment I knew she wasn’t just another smuggler or rebel playing at heroics. She had authority without raising her voice. Control without cruelty.
After we got the kid clear, my legs finally gave out. I slid down against the wall, vision tunneling hard as the pain caught up with me. Blood soaked my sleeve, my fingers numb and clumsy.
She crouched in front of me without hesitation and pressed her hand to my wound, unbothered by the blood coating her skin.
“You do this often?” she asked.
“Get shot?” I rasped.
She shook her head slightly. “Risk your neck for other wolves.”
I stared at her, genuinely confused. “Why do you care?”
For half a second, something shifted behind her eyes. A shadow. A memory. Like she was looking past me at a faraway fire in a very different place.
Then she said, “Because if we don’t care, London wins.”
A few days later when I woke up stitched and bandaged in an abandoned flat, the pain dulled to a manageable throb, she was sitting in a chair across from me with her knife still in her hands.
Recognition bloomed, sudden and absolute, slamming into me without warning.
Mine.
It wasn’t possession, not hunger either, but a much deeper, older thing. The kind of knowing that doesn’t ask permission or wait for logic to catch up.
She was my mate.
I didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just lay there, staring at the woman who had rescued me, knowing with terrifying certainty that whatever came next, I wasn’t walking away from her.
Ever.
She turned the blade once, testing the balance, then held it out hilt first.
I took it, the weight settling into my palm.
