“Never have,” I gritted through my teeth.
I unloaded what was left of my strength in one final push. With a groan of pain, I managed to break his hold, throwing my weight so I had him pinned against the wall. From the white spots in my vision, I guessed it may have worsened the break in the bone, but that would have to wait.
I pressed the barrel of the pistol to the shifter’s heart. A single tense of my finger, and this would be over.
“Wait,wait!” he pleaded.
And suddenly, it wasn’t Cliff I had pinned. There was a glint of light like shifting scales—and then it was Sylvia cowering against the wall, those perfect eyes wide with horror as she gazed up at me.
My breath caught. The illusion was staggering. She appearedhumanand as breathtaking as I’d ever seen her. She was shaking under my arm, where I had her pinned by her throat, her pale hands gripping me pleadingly.
“Jon, please,” she whispered, her voice wobbling through tears. “Please don’t hurt me.”
The urge to sweep her into my arms and apologize nearly overwhelmed me. But those swirling black runes on her cheek were distorted, a mere mimicry of the traitor mark Sylvia had earned when she had saved my life at the cost of her own sanity all those months ago.
This fucker wouldn’t survive to make the mistake of stealing my girl’s face twice.
I readjusted the barrel over her heart and fired.
A soft, broken gasp left Sylvia’s lips.
Just another monster. Just another fucking monster.
Even knowing it wasn’treallythe woman I loved, every nerve ending in my body revolted. The chest wound oozed blood down her chest in thick rivulets, soaking the bodice of the glittering midnight-blue gown that the shifter had seen fit to cloak itself in. My throat closed painfully around a guttural apology as her pleading faded into an incoherent whisper.
The shifter slumped onto me, motionless. The final cruelty was cradling Sylvia’s limp body in my arms. Still warm. Stillreal.
Labored grunts across the hall made me tear my eyes away from the glassy eyes resting on my shoulder.
“Some help?” Lee called.
I hastily knelt and laid the shifter’s body on the floor. Red, tousled hair fanned out, and her limbs splayed limply. I paused just long enough to grab the rifle and reclaim the iron cuff from the shifter’s pocket before moving toward Lee.
Numbly, I knelt behind him and sliced through the zip ties. Every movement with my left arm sent white-hot thrills of agony through me. Definitely fractured, if not broken. It was swelling rapidly under my blood-stained sleeve, but at least it wasn’t my dominant arm. Small blessings.
Lee’s sigh of relief morphed into a grimace at the residual splatter of the shapeshifter’s blood on his hands. He wrenched Delilah’s amulet out, turning it this way and that to inspect the enchanted color.
“She’s still alive,” he said. “How much of what he said was bullshit? I mean… If he charged in looking like Cliff, shit hit the fansomewhere, right? Someone knew enough to send him like that.”
I chewed it over, still breathing raggedly. Delilah was still alive, and shifters typically kept the source of their stolen face alive for information, so that put optimistic odds in Cliff andSylvia’s favor, too. For how long, I couldn’t be sure. Every instinct screamed for me to run, to find Cliff and Sylvia and make sure they were safe.
I cast a peripheral glance at the fallen shifter, nauseous still at how much it looked like Sylvia. The puddle of blood slowly grew along the tile floor. How long until Eros’ crew sent someone else to collect us when the shifter didn’t return?
“Whoever sent him doesn’t want us in this loading bay,” I said, pressing the iron cuff back into Lee's hands for safekeeping. “We keep to the plan. Maybe raising a lot more hell in there will give us the distraction we need to get back to them and get the fuck out of here.”
Lee hesitated, then nodded.
“How’s your arm?” he asked, frowning at how I held it tenderly near my side.
“Fucked, but I’ll manage,” I said gruffly.
I mopped blood and sweat on my sleeve as I armed myself as thoroughly as possible and strode through the open steel door. I forced myself not to look back at the motionless shifter’s body one last time.
The loading bay seemed to stretch for a mile, square garage shields shut tight. Good. If I could pull off what I had in mind, those things needed to stay locked.
We lay low as we passed through the door, pausing behind a concrete pillar to get a good look at what we were up against.
Dark vans were lined in a neat row, back doors standing open to give view of the inventory within. Tanks, cages, crates—almost every enclosure contained some level of movement, and looking at it all at once made it feel like a swarm. Lee’s breath stammered as he took it in.
