"I said—" Bane's voice drops another register. The fluorescent tube above us buzzes, flickers. "Get. Your hand. Off him."
The guard's forearm lifts off my chest. He doesn't decide to do it. His body does it for him—muscles obeying a command that bypasses his brain entirely. He steps back. One step. Two. His face is white. His hand is shaking.
"Now." The guard reaches for his belt—a baton, a taser, something. "Listen—"
Bane closes the distance in one stride.
I've never seen anyone move like that. Fluid and violent and precise in a way that doesn't look human. It looks designed. Engineered. The way a true predator moves. The way a blade falls.
His zip-tied hands come up in a single arc. The hard plastic edge catches the guard under the chin. His head snaps back. Blood sprays—teeth, lip, something cracking. The guard staggers. Bane doesn't let him stagger far. His bound hands close around the guard's throat. Not squeezing—positioning. He pivots, swings, and slams the man headfirst into the concrete wall.
The sound is enormous. Wet and hard and final-sounding. The guard drops.
The second guard lunges. Too slow. Bane is already turning—spinning on the ball of his foot, low, compact, his bound hands swinging in a lateral arc that catches the shorter man across the temple. He goes sideways. Hits the mattress frame. Bane is on him before he can recover—knee on his chest, bound hands pressing into his throat.
"You watched." Bane's voice is barely recognizable. Raw. Guttural. The voice of something that has shed its skin and found something older underneath. "You sat in a room and watched him on a monitor. You watched what we—" His bound hands press harder. The guard's face goes red. Purple. "And you came here to—"
The guard under his knee is choking. Clawing at Bane's wrists. Feet kicking against the concrete. His eyes are bulging.
"Bane." I touch his shoulder. My hand is shaking. "Bane, stop. You'll kill him."
He doesn't hear me. Or he hears me and doesn't care. His face is a mask I've never seen—not the polished youngest brother, not the boy who kissed me in my room, not even the man who held me last night and whispered you're perfect against my hair. This is something from before all of that. Something that lives in the basement of what alphas are.
"Bane." Harder now. Both hands on his shoulders. I press my face against the back of his neck—the spot where his scent is strongest, where the ozone-and-metal smell is pouring off him in waves. I breathe him in and press my lips against his skin and say his name into the knob of his spine.
"Bane. Come back. Come back to me."
His hands loosen. Fraction by fraction. The guard sucks in a ragged, wheezing breath. Then another.
Bane's shoulders shudder. Once. The tension breaks like a wave cresting—not dissolving, just retreating. Pulling back from the edge.
He releases the guard's throat. Stands. Sways once—the sedative ghost still in his system, trying to reclaim territory his biology just scorched. I grab his arm. Hold him steady.
The first guard is on the floor by the wall. Not moving. Blood pooling from somewhere above his ear. Breathing—I can see his chest moving—but his eyes are closed and his jaw is wrong. Dislocated or broken. Maybe both.
The second guard is on his back, coughing, hands at his throat. Red marks already darkening where the zip ties pressed into his skin.
Bane stands over them. His chest heaving. His knuckles split open, blood seeping down over the zip ties. His eyes still carrying that flat, ancient thing that I don't have a name for.
Then he looks at me.
And it shifts. The predator doesn't disappear—it retreats, pulling back behind his eyes like a tide going out. What's leftis Bane.MyBane. Hazel eyes, sharp jaw, blood on his hands, looking at me like I'm the only thing in the room that matters.
"Did he hurt you?" His voice is wrecked. Shaking. The alpha register gone, replaced by something fragile and desperate and human. "Max, did he—"
"No." I touch his face. Blood on my fingers from his knuckles. "No. You got here first."
He pulls me against his chest. Crushes me there. His heart is slamming—I can feel it through his sternum, fast and hard and irregular, the heart of a man whose body just did something it wasn't supposed to be able to do. His breath comes in sharp, ragged bursts against my hair.
"I heard you." Muffled. Into my hair. "Through the fog. Through all of it. I heard you say my name and everything else just—burned."
I hold him. Let him shake. Let the adrenaline run its course while his body recalibrates and the ozone smell fades back to amber and sandalwood and the room stops vibrating with whatever frequency his voice was generating.
Then the door opens.
Ellis.
He stands in the doorway in a charcoal suit and Italian shoes. His eyes move across the cell—the guard on the floor in a pool of blood, the second guard wheezing against the wall, Bane standing in the center of the room with split knuckles and murder in his posture, me behind him with a swelling cheek and a torn collar.
