Dorian’s breath was warm on her shoulder.“You don’t have to be anything except with us.”
The words undid her.
She reached for them at the same time, fingers curling into Rafe’s shirt, into the solid line of Dorian’s arm.Their mouths found her—first Rafe, unhurried and consuming, then Dorian, slower, deeper, as if he were memorizing her.The contrast made her knees soften.The heat of them, the weight of them, the way they closed around her without trapping her—only choosing her, again and again.
Rafe rested his forehead against hers.“You’re ours because you choose us,” he murmured.“Not because we take.”
“And we’re yours,” Dorian added quietly.“Forever and always.”
The emotion was thick in her throat, desire threading through it until she couldn’t separate the two.“Then take me to a place where I don’t have to be afraid,” she said.“Where it’s just us.”
They drew her close, hands warm, mouths still lingering, bodies fitting as if the world outside had never existed.Her heart was still pounding—but now with want, with certainty, with the aching, dangerous sweetness of belonging.
What followed was not gentle.It was not hurried either.It was heat and hands and breath, the kind of intimacy that left no part of her untouched, no part of them held back.Whatever shape the night took, it was theirs—claimed not by force, but by choice, by need, by the quiet, devastating truth that she had fallen for both of them at once.Hard.
****
The city slid pastin streaks of grey and sodium light, Seattle already falling away behind them.
Christian sat in the back seat, one arm braced against the door, fingers flexing slowly as the car ate up the miles.The engine purred beneath them, smooth and powerful, driven by one of his creations.The hybrid didn’t look back.It never needed to.Its focus was absolute, attention locked on the road ahead, reactions sharpened beyond anything human.
They had taken it.
Not Chimera’s facility—his.
Christian let out a short, humorless breath.“Idiots.”
There was no reason to stay in Seattle now.The facility had served its purpose until it hadn’t.He had turned his back on Chimera long before tonight, taken what he needed and left the human bastards behind.That facility had been his crowning glory, it had never been theirs—not really.It had been a proving ground.
A pivot point.
Where he had stopped making monsters for men who thought in terms of control, and started making something else entirely.
Gods.
Like him.
Power without permission.Evolution without restraint.A future where he and his kind bowed to no one.
The screen embedded in the back of the seat glowed softly as Christian’s fingers moved, calm and precise.The shadow network he’d threaded through the facility’s systems was already awake.They’d missed it.Of course they had.It had been designed to survive a raid—to sleep, to wait, to rise only when the bait was taken.
“There you are,” he murmured as the signal bloomed into view.
The digital marker pulsed steadily, woven through the data they were so carefully siphoning into Command.Not a virus.Not a trace.Nothing anyone would notice until it was far too late.
A door.
And it was opening.
Coordinates began to resolve, bleeding through layers of encryption he had engineered to be irresistible.They thought they were harvesting intelligence, cataloguing evidence, dismantling something dangerous.
In reality, they were carrying him straight to her.
Christian leaned back as the car accelerated, fury coiling tight in his chest, satisfaction cutting through it like a blade.“You took the wrong thing from me,” he said softly.“And now I know exactly where you’ve put her.”
The hunt was no longer theoretical.
It had momentum.
