Chapter one
Jen
There are two of them.
For one stupid second, with alarms screaming and concrete dust hanging in the air and the front of Crull's cell blown open, that is the thing my brain gets stuck on.
Not the breach. Not the fact that the facility is actively coming apart around us.
Two.
One moves left. One moves right. One is controlled enough to disappear into motion. The other hits a Syndicate guard hard enough to dent concrete.
Twins. Actual twins.
And under my sternum, two new threads are already forming. Bonds. The beginning of the same impossible connection that ties me to Thaw and Crull.
Two more.
Three weeks ago my biggest problem was loose dogs and nuisance raccoons.
Now I am standing in the middle of a prison break with six monsters, a facility full of alarms, and a building that seems determined to collapse around us.
Crull growls.
The sound vibrates through the concrete and straight into my ribs.
I stay behind him.
His back is a wall. Gray, scarred, scorching-warm, angled so that every line of him is between me and the open mouth of the cell where the bars used to be. Dean did something to the lock — a tool, a charge, I did not see — and the gap is full of the noise the twins are making in the corridor.
Dean moves first.
He goes left, toward the north end, toward the boots that have not stopped coming since the door blew. He does not run. He flows — low, fast, economical, a body that has done this a hundred times in rooms I will never see — and the first Syndicate guard who rounds the corner does not get a word out before Dean is inside his reach and the guard folds.
Daron goes right.
He is not economical. He hits the second guard full-body and the sound the guard makes when he goes into the concrete is wet and final.
And then Daron turns fast, his whole body coming around and I think for half a second he is going to scan the corridor for the next threat.
He doesn't.
He comes to me.
Three strides, straight toward us, and his ice-blue eyes are locked on my face and the growl in his chest is not a warning, but a yearning.
There is a thread for him. New. Thin. Forming.
He stops at the edge of Crull's reach.
He does not cross it.
Even now with the building falling, guards down, the growl climbing out of him — Daron stops at the invisible line of another male's claim and waits. His hands come up, open, and hang there. He is vibrating with the need to get to me and he does not take the step.
Crull's rumble shifts. One note. Lower.
Allowed.
