The patch is warm. The bonds are bright. The pack is waiting.
I open my eyes.
"I have been on the receiving end of this program for weeks," I say. "They took me off a gravel road in February. They strapped me to a table. They dosed me. They built cells for you and me. And they have a list of twenty-three other women who have not yet had their February."
The room is silent.
"I am not running. I am not waiting. I am not sitting here for three days while my body sorts itself out and the Syndicate sends a van to a gravel road in someone else's town."
I look at Thaw.
"They don't get to make more cages."
He does not answer immediately.
His hand at my neck stills. The bond carries his alpha math — the operational risk, the medical risk, the chance the patch destabilizes mid-raid, the chance Fen breaks, the chance Theresa has more security than Reyes is saying — and then it carries the moment he sets the math down.
"Okay," he says.
"We go tonight. Dean briefs in an hour. Reyes maps the floor plan for us in the next thirty minutes. Crull and Daron prep the trucks. Harek sweeps the perimeter again. Fen sits with Jen. Jenrests for three hours and eats a real meal and tells me at hour two if her body is not stable enough to ride."
"Okay."
He looks at the rest of them.
"Pack."
They move. Crull goes back to the doorway and clears it. Daron pushes off the counter. Dean pulls a notebook from his jacket and starts making notes on a map. Harek crosses the kitchen and stops at my chair on his way to the door. He puts his hand on top of mine — once, quick, his brand warm against my brand. Then he is out.
Daron does not leave with him.
He is supposed to be prepping the trucks. He is at the counter. He is looking at me. The forming thread is pulled tight enough that I can feel his pulse in my own wrist, and his ice-blue eyes are doing the thing they did on the porch step before he shifted.
Thaw reads the thread before I do.
"I have Fen," he says, low. "Go."
I get up.
The barn behind the cabin smells like motor oil and old cedar.
"If I go in tonight with the thread not sealed," he says. Flat. "And something happens to you — you get hurt, you get taken, you get pulled across a building from me — I have a thread to you and that is all. I want to feel you. I want the line closed before we go. I want to know where you are tonight. I want you with me." Patting his chest. “Here.”
I stare into his ice blue eyes.
It is the most real thing he has ever said to me. The dry banter is gone. He is telling me he wants to be sealed to me before I walk into a building where something could happen to me.
"You want to be bonded to me before the raid."
"I want you to seal it when you want to. I want you to know I am asking. I do not want to walk into a building with you tonight and for you to not be able to call me."
I cross the barn.
I stop a foot from him. He does not move. The forming thread is so taut I can see him feeling it — the small tic at the corner of his jaw, the way his pupils have blown wide in the cold barn light.
"Take your hands out of your pockets," I say.
I take his wrist. His pulse is loud in it. I press my thumb against the inside, over the place a brand would go, and I push warmth down the thread and the thread takes it.
