I didn't make it two steps before the heavy oak door was shoved open from the hallway.
Hayes filled the entire frame.
He'd shed the tailored gala jacket, his dark dress shirt clinging to a sheen of cold sweat. The diplomatic mask was gone — replaced by the terrifying, unsuppressed visage of an apex alpha preparing for a bloodbath. The feral gold in his eyes burned so brightly it cast a faint yellow glow into the dark hallway behind him.
"Boots on. Now," he ordered, a low, concussive rumble that vibrated through the floorboards.
He didn't wait. He crossed the room in three silent strides, grabbed my boots from the corner, and threw them onto the bed beside my shaking hands.
"Hayes, what's wrong? Did the tribunal summons arrive?"
"It's not a tribunal. It's a magical siege," Chris answered from the dark hallway — deadly calm, clinical. "Trent bypassed the legal route. He used the magical spike from the artifact's attempt to lock tonight to track our location. He's contracted a armed mercenary extraction team. They're attempting to shatter the outer perimeter wards with brute force."
The floor shuddered. A deep boom echoed through the stone foundations. Plaster dust drifted from the ceiling.
Panic seized my throat.
Trent wasn't playing legal games anymore. He'd brought a mercenary army to our front door in the middle of the night.
"We have to leave," I cried, struggling with the boot laces. "We have to get back to campus. The human authorities?—"
"The human authorities have no jurisdiction over an active Northern heritage claim, and the campus security is locked out by an illegal communication blackout," Hayes said flatly, crushing that hope. "We're cut off."
He grabbed my upper arm and pulled me to my feet.
The comfortable safehouse had transformed in the three hours I'd been asleep. Iron tactical shutters had dropped over every window. The warm lighting was gone, replaced by the harsh red glare of emergency tactical strips.
Tristan stood in the center of the main room, slamming a magazine into a combat shotgun. The ozone rolling off him was so thick the fine hairs on my arms stood up in static alarm. He looked slowly up as Hayes pulled me in — frat-boy smile gone, replaced by a cold, dead stare that promised indiscriminate violence to anything that came through the door.
"Primary outer ward is at fifteen percent integrity," Chris announced from a glowing command console built into the far wall. "They aren't using surgical strikes. They're using concussive siege magic. Old World, restricted stuff — likely illegally smuggled across the Northern border for this extraction."
"How long do we have?" Hayes demanded, placing my trembling body behind his broad back.
"Three minutes until structural breach of the front doors," Chris replied, hands flying across the archaic rune keyboard, desperately rerouting power to the failing shields.
Three minutes.
In three minutes, professional paranormal killers were going to break through those steel doors and drag me back to the monster who'd carved his name into my neck.
"We stand and fight," Tristan said simply, racking the shotgun. "We hold the front entrance corridor. If Trent's mercenaries want the Pack-Heart asset, they wade through a legacy bloodbath to get her."
"No," I grabbed the back of Hayes's sweat-soaked shirt, terrified by the lethal certainty in the room. "You can't fight an entire armed extraction team. You'll all die. They'll kill all three of you just to get to me."
"They won't kill us easily," Hayes said — a dark, feral promise layered in his voice. "But you're right. Brute force isn't enough to guarantee your safety if they swarm the house. Their primary objective is to incapacitate the three of us and remove the asset intact."
He turned around and gripped my shaking shoulders, golden eyes locking onto my face with desperate intensity — ignoring the shrieking alarm.
"Listen to me carefully," Hayes said, his voice dropping an octave, communicating with the primal instincts buried in mycore. "The emergency artifact Chris wove in the basement is temporary. It keeps your magical core from bleeding out, but it doesn't give you any biological access to our combined strength. If they breach that door in three minutes, you have the fragile physical durability of an unbonded human girl. A single stray concussive blast will kill you."
"What are you saying?" I whispered, fresh tears blurring the red light.
"We have to initiate a partial legacy claim right now," Chris stated from the console, still not turning from the flashing screens, voice tight with the strain of holding the failing wards. "If we seal the tether — even partially — the magical conduit connecting us opens. You'll be able to draw on our combined legacy strength, speed, and durability. Enough to survive an extraction attempt if the perimeter falls."
"And," Tristan added, voice low and ragged, "a partially sealed claim is a continental legal status. If they breach the house and find a sealed legacy mate, the extraction contract is immediately voided. Neutral mercenaries won't abduct the bonded mate of three seated Southern heirs. The political bounty on their own heads wouldn't be worth all the Northern gold in the world."
The floor shuddered again. Louder. The red lights flickered.
A partial claim.
