Jess grabs my arm, pulling me toward the hallway. "Now, Sarah. Move."
But I see Diesel crumpled on the floor, his breathing shallow and uneven, a cut on his forehead where he struck the edge of a table. Twenty-five years old. A kid who makes waffles from Betty's recipe and calls me ma'am when he forgets himself.
I plant my feet.
"Sarah." Jess's grip tightens on my arm. "We need to go."
"No, we can't leave him." The word comes from somewhere deep, somewhere Peter spent our entire marriage trying to kill. "I'm done hiding while other people bleed for me."
Jess stares at me. Whatever she sees makes her release my arm and step back.
"Then at least let me cover Diesel." She drags him behind the bar, out of the line of fire, presses two fingers to his neck. "Pulse is strong. He'll come around." She looks up at me. "Go. I'm right behind you."
The front door shudders. Once. Twice. A shoulder slamming against reinforced wood. Then a voice from outside.
"Open up, monster-lovers. We know you're in there."
Humans First.
The front door shudders again, the frame cracking, and I pick up Diesel's baseball bat.
Peter comes through on the next hit—not alone, but first, shouldering through the splintered frame while two men in dark clothes hang back on the porch. He looks wrong. Thinner than the man I married, gaunt in a way that presses the bones of his face against his skin. His eyes burn with a light I recognize—the look he'd get after drinking for three days straight, when rage consumed everything human in him. Except there's no alcohol on him now.
I stand between him and the bar where Jess crouches beside Diesel. The bat sits solid in my grip.
"Go away, Peter."
His face twists into something I remember from a hundred late nights when he came home looking for a fight. "There you are." He steps through the ruined doorway, glass crunching under his shoes. "Did you really think you could escape me? You'reMINE, Sarah. You've always been mine."
"I was never yours." My voice holds. My hands don't shake. "And I never will be."
He lunges.
Before the claiming bite, I'd have frozen. Peter's charge would have pinned me to the wall the way it always did—his weight driving the fight out of me, his hands finding my throat or my hair until I stopped resisting.
But now I sidestep him.
My body reads his trajectory before my mind catches up. He stumbles past, off-balance, his momentum carrying him three feet beyond where I stood, and I swing the bat into his ribs with everything I have. The impact jars up through my arms and into my shoulders and he staggers sideways with a grunt that sounds like all the air leaving his body at once. He catches himself on the edge of a table, bent, staring at me with an expression I've never seen him wear before.
Fear.
Peter Mitchell, afraid of me.
"What did that monster DO to you?"
"He set me free."
Peter's hand goes to his jacket. Metal flashes in the red emergency light—a folding knife, the blade snapping open with a flick. He straightens, the pain in his ribs fueling his rage instead of slowing him down, and comes at me again. The knife slashes in a wide arc and I lean back, but not far enough. The tip catches my forearm and pain sears bright and hot, blood welling through the torn fabric of Knox's shirt.
Knox's rage hits me through the bond so hard my vision whites at the edges. He felt the cut. He felt my pain. And he's close now—closing the distance.
Peter sees the blood on his knife and grins—that sick, satisfied grin I know from every time he landed a hit and watched me crumble. He expects me to fold. He expects me to make myself small the way I always did.
I shift my weight and raise the bat.
His grin falters.
He feints left and grabs a fistful of my hair, yanking me backward so hard my neck snaps with the force of it. The knife presses against my throat, cold steel dimpling the skin below my jaw.
