My vision tunneled. The air turned heavy, charged with a snapping, electric energy that was alien and yet felt like a homecoming. It flooded every hollow place Jude had left inside me. Bones groaned. Tendons stretched. A grinding growl vibrated up from my chest as heat and pressure built behind my eyes, tilting the world into a sharp, predatory focus.
Blood and spit dripped from my jaws onto the stone. When I lifted my head, I stood eye to eye with Victor and the others. Not as a man, but as something colossal. Something that belonged to the shadows between. And it was utterly, terrifyingly, out of control.
The beast was free. And it was furious.
Wade whispered, “Oh, hell.”
I saw their faces in the swirling dark. Wade, stricken. Victor, grimly resigned. And the twins, falling into defensive stances, magic flickering at their fingertips.
They weren’t my target. There was no target. There was only the crushing need to get out, to find Jude, to break the walls holding me back.
I coiled, ready to lunge through them, through the stone, through anything in my way. Consequences be damned. The shadows around me felt like liquid, like a path. I could slip into them; slip past this cage they were so determined to keep me in.
Sylas and Keanan threw themselves aside in a perfectly synchronized dive.
From the space between them, a shape exploded forward.
A wolf the size of an SUV hit me like a freight train.
Massive paws slammed my shoulders to the floor, driving the air from my lungs. The impact cracked stone beneath my spine. Before I could roar, before I could thrash, fangs, cold and sharp, pressed against the side of my throat.
One bite. That’s all it would take.
A warning.
His weight settled over me, unyielding, holding me down as though I were nothing more than a kitten pinned beneath the paw of a lion. Power radiated from him in waves, an alpha’s dominance, yes, familiar enough to make my cat want to obey. While the new thing inside of me longed to snarl and snap, as if it had any actual power here.
Stop.
The word cracked through my mind with the force of a collapsing star. His will poured over me, not as a suggestion, but as a law. The energy radiated from him like a tangible leash of undiluted dominance.
The elevator dinged as I mentally struggled with the need to rear up and fight until he killed me. The doors slid open. Ivan stood there, pale and breathless, one hand braced against the frame. His gaze swept over the wreckage, the shatteredlights, the glass glittering on the stone, and me, a monster of nightmares held in thrall by Xavier’s command.
His gaze landed on Xavier, pleading, “Please. Don’t hurt him.” The twins appeared on each side of him, arms up to keep him back. Xavier huffed as if the choice wasn’t really his, though he pulled back his teeth, holding me down with one massive paw.
“Angel, please. I miss him too,” Ivan begged.
The fight bled out of me all at once. The shadows peeled from my skin like a second hide being ripped away, retreating into the corners where the broken glass glittered like fallen ice. My bones groaned and snapped, realigning with a series of sickening cracks. A ragged sound tore from my throat, not a roar, not a howl, but the raw scrape of a shift being forced.
After what felt like a lifetime, I lay on the cold stone, gasping, hollowed out.
Xavier shifted back in a ripple of impossible mass. One moment, a primal god-beast, all fur and fang and fathomless power. The next, a man in a flawless suit, crouching beside me as casually as if checking a fallen sculpture. His hand settled on my shoulder to ensure I stayed down. Not that it mattered. I didn’t have the strength to get up, to shift, to do anything but lie there and remember how to breathe.
“Please,” I begged, the word barely a whisper. I wasn’t even sure what I was asking for. Mercy? A way out? An end?
He sighed; the sound weary. “You bargained with the Fae. What will they force you to do with this new power?”
Fuck.The pact. What would they want? Control of this shadow beast? My soul? Not that I had any of that left to give. It belonged to one man already.
“I won’t give him up,” I rasped.
“I’m not asking you to.” A faint, almost imperceptible softening touched his eyes. “But they might.”
“Never.” I refused, thinking I’d find a way to follow him into the beyond if necessary.
“We will speak when you are no longer a danger to yourself, Angel. Rest.”
Sleep walloped me like a fist to the jaw, consciousness vanishing into dreamless sleep.
