They wanted to seal the Pack-Heart tether — the exact connection that had terrified me in the dark car just hours ago.
"It's a biological bite," Hayes said, stripping away the academy euphemisms entirely. He tightened his grip on my shoulders, golden eyes searching my face in the red light. "It's irreversible, Wren. If we seal the perimeter now, you belong to us permanently."
An impossible choice. Not a choice at all. An ultimatum delivered at gunpoint.
I looked at the three legacy alphas in the red light.
They were offering me their mythic power to ensure my physical survival. They were willing to permanently bind their pristine bloodlines to a publicized outcast just to keep her out of Trent's hands.
But it required me to surrender the last shred of my autonomy. To bare my throat and let another dominant alpha sink his teeth into my skin, permanently rewriting my biology.
I closed my eyes. A sob tore through my chest. The phantom agony of Trent's public rejection throbbed against the silver lines glowing on my skin.
"Wren," Hayes pleaded, his deep voice cracking with the strain of watching me suffer the decision. "I swear on my bloodline I will never intentionally hurt you. I will never carve you up. Let me seal the perimeter."
The outer wards finally shattered with a deafening crash. The sound of splintering oak and screaming structural steel echoed through the safehouse as the reinforced doors gave way.
"Do it," I gasped, opening my eyes and tilting my head back — baring the pale, rapidly pulsing line of my throat to the Heir. "Seal the claim. Now."
22
WREN
The perimeter alarms faded to a distant buzz, superseded by the rush of primal energy surging through the small stone hallway.
"Tristan. Chris. Hold the entrance," Hayes barked, not looking away from my exposed throat for a fraction of a second. His voice was ragged, surrendered to the biological imperative of the looming legacy claim. "Buy me ninety seconds to seal the Pack-Heart tether."
"You have sixty," Tristan snapped over his shoulder, dropping to one knee behind an overturned mahogany table in the sitting room. He rested the combat shotgun barrel on the shattered wood. The ozone rolling off him was blinding — a literal atmospheric storm gathering in the enclosed red-lit space.
Chris moved silently beside him, lifting his hands. The ancient amber magic crackled between his fingertips as he prepared to cast old-world offensive magic the high council had outlawed nearly a century ago.
Hayes didn't waste a single second of the sixty he'd been given.
He swept me off my feet in one massive, fluid motion. I gasped and wrapped my arms around his neck as he carried me three strides into the dark bedroom, kicked the reinforced door shut behind us, and backed my frame against the heavy wood — his body pressing flush against mine, pinning me between the door and the crushing density of his unsuppressed alpha aura.
The sharp scent of winter pine and freezing rain crashed over me, biologically designed to drown the rising panic and force submission.
But he wasn't trying to dominate me. The Pack-Heart claim required willing surrender to properly seal the artifact.
"Look at me, Wren," Hayes said quietly, large rough hands cradling my face, wiping the tears tracking down my cheeks.
I opened my wet eyes.
The feral gold in his irises was unmasked in the dim red light bleeding under the door. Not the polished Southern Heir — the primal wolf, biologically starving for the tether humming against his chest.
The silver lines on the left side of my neck blazed.
Not the quiet, warm pulse I'd become accustomed to — the steady ambient hum of a tether maintaining its framework — but a violent, brilliant, uncontrolled flare that lit my exposed collarbone in blinding white-silver, reacting to Hayes's unsuppressed aura the way dry wood reacts to an open flame. Every line of the intricate pattern pulled taut at once, an enormous biological tension straining toward the overwhelming resonance of his dominant signature pressing me against the door.
Hayes made a low, wrecked sound against my temple.
"Wren." My name, at that register — not the polished heir's tone, not the steady command of an alpha managing a crisis. Something stripped of everything he kept banked and controlled behind the facade. Raw. Desperate. The sound of somethingenormous that had been held back for a long time finally running out of room. "Tell me to stop and I stop. Right now. Tell me."
"Don't stop," I said.
The words came from somewhere deeper than my conscious mind — from the same biological place the silver lines were pulling from. The rebuilt core Chris had woven from the ruins of Trent's destruction, straining toward this permanent anchor since the moment it first recognized Hayes's scent in the dark.
A massive shudder went through Hayes's frame.
