Gunfire met me at the door.
“They’re here! Fire at once!”
Two hunters stationed at the entrance, rifles up, already aimed.
They’d been waiting which only meant one thing.
Fuck.
Thiago knew everything.
His people were positioned and prepared and the element of surprise we’d planned for had died with that flare.
I dropped low.
The first round passed over my head and I closed the distance before the second trigger pull. My hand caught the rifle barrel and redirected it into the wall. The hunter behind it stumbled and I put him down with a blow to the temple that was harder than necessary and exactly as hard as I wanted.
The second hunter fired wide. Solomon materialized from my right and disarmed him with efficiency.. Lucian came through the entrance behind us, black eyes scanning the corridor, his wolf so close to the surface that his features had gone angular.
“Where?” Lucian’s voice was gravel.
The bond. I reached for it, past the panic and the noise, searching for Mira’s frequency beneath the chaos. Solomon was doing the same, his eyes half-closed, processing data the way he processed everything.
“Below us,” Solomon said. “Sublevel.”
He led. Through corridors he’d memorized from Mira’s descriptions and the maps she’d brought back during rotations. Left, right, down a stairwell, past a set of blast doors that should’ve been locked but hung open with the casual invitation of a trap that wanted to be walked into.
More hunters in the corridors. Organized. Positioned at choke points. Prepared for exactly this breach.
We went through them.
Three alphas with their mate’s terror pouring through the bond, moving with a violence that I’d spent months trying to outgrow and now embraced with every fiber of my body.
Solomon broke a rifle in half. Lucian threw a man into a wall hard enough to crack the concrete. I moved between them, fast, faster than either, clearing the path that Solomon mapped in his head.
The sublevel stairwell was reinforced steel. The door stood open.
We descended.
The smell hit first.
Unwashed bodies, chemical antiseptic, blood both old and fresh, and underneath it all the unmistakable musk of captive lycans. Dozens of them. The scent was so concentrated it coated the back of my throat and made my wolf snarl.
The corridor opened into a containment level that made my chest cavity compress.
Cells lined both walls. Floor to ceiling, reinforced glass and steel, each one holding a lycan in various states of destruction.
Some paced in their confined space, naked, feral, eyes glazed with the vacant stare of wolves who’d been purified into mindlessness. Some sat motionless against the walls, broken in ways that didn’t require chains to maintain. Others pressedagainst the glass when they sensed us, hands flat, mouths moving without sound.
And in the larger containment units at the corridor’s end, feral wolves. Full shift. Massive, emaciated, teeth bared, eyes rolling with a hunger that had nothing behind it.
No intelligence or recognition. Just the Purifier’s final product: weapons that used to be people.
My stomach dropped to the floor and kept going.
This was what Mira had been fighting to end.
These cells, these wolves. These bodies that had names and families and kingdoms waiting for them, reduced to specimens in a madman’s collection.
