Data was useful.
The next four came at angles. They had recalibrated. The wedge tightened, two from the front, one from each flank, and the coordination was better, not good enough, but better.
One landed a rib strike that would have cracked bone on a human frame. On mine, it transferred through the intercostal muscle and found nothing soft enough to break.
I used the momentum of the impact to drive my elbow into the closest man’s throat, not a strike, a drive, the kind of force that doesn’t stop at the surface, and felt the cartilage give under the point of my bone.
He went down choking.
My knuckles split against someone’s jaw. The skin opened along the ridge of bone, and the blood was warm and slick between my fingers, and the concrete beneath us had gone dark in uneven patches under the fluorescent lights.
Two more went down—one hard, one harder—and the sixth broke under the dominance pressure. His nerve failed visibly, the collapse of a wolf who had just registered exactly what he was facing, and he turned and ran for the service stairs with the kind of speed that came from genuine terror.
I let him go. A running wolf was not a threat. He was information. He would tell Declan what had happened here, and that was its own kind of currency.
The seventh and eighth were still circling. Caution had replaced whatever plan they’d started with. They moved with the careful, measured tread of men who had just watched five of their own hit the concrete and were recalculating the math in real time.
One feinted left. The other hung back, waiting for an opening that wasn’t coming. I had them both by the forearm and the throat when I caught movement at the far curve of the garage.
A man standing still. Not fighting. Not running. Not doing anything except watching with the patient stillness of someone who had come to confirm rather than to win. Lean frame. Angular features. Close-cropped dark hair going silver at thetemples. Pale gray eyes that held the glint of a man who had seen enough violence that it no longer registered as noteworthy.
Declan Morrow.
Our eyes met across thirty yards of blood-wet concrete. The fluorescent tubes caught the silver at his temples and turned it the color of old nickel, and the expression that surfaced on his face was brief and satisfied—a smirk, nothing more, the curl of a mouth that had just gotten the answer it came for.
He held my gaze for one suspended second. Then he turned, unhurried, and walked toward the exit ramp with the measured pace of a man who had decided his work here was done.
I dropped both men, and then I was moving. Full run across the garage. Blood on my hands, shoulder still bleeding freely, the wolf still pushing me to shift and chase on four legs because four legs were faster than two and the sedan was already pulling away.
I hit the ramp at a pace that would have shattered human knees, the incline nothing against the momentum, and came out onto the sidewalk into gray Portland daylight with my lungs burning and the city noise hitting like a wall after the garage’s muffled acoustics.
The sedan was fifty yards west, already merging into traffic, accelerating toward the on-ramp that would take it onto the highway heading west.
West.
The direction Ashe had taken Jai and Grace.
The sedan’s plates were obscured—mud, or something applied deliberately—and the windows were tinted dark enough that the interior was a smear of shadow. Declan was in the passenger seat. I saw the shape of him through the glass, the lean angle of his shoulders, and then the vehicle rounded the corner and was gone.
I stood on the sidewalk with blood running off my fingers onto the pavement. My shoulder had soaked through the jacket entirely now, the warm wet spread of it registering as a distant fact rather than a problem.
The wolf pushed against the inside of my skin, urging chase on foot, and the rational part of my brain—the part that still functioned when the rest of me was running on instinct—did the math cold.
I could not outrun a vehicle. My staged SUV was in the garage. Declan had a head start measured in minutes, not seconds. The highway offered three viable routes west, and Declan would take the one with the fewest cameras.
I pulled out my phone and called Ashe. The line picked up on the first ring. “Declan is mobile,” I said. “Heading west. Dark sedan, plates obscured. He’s on your vector.”
“I have it.” Ashe’s voice came through clean. No hesitation.
“That’s not good enough.” Blood dripped off my knuckles onto the screen. I watched it bead and slide. “Use the secondary route. The back access road to the estate. Don’t stop for anything. If he’s behind you, lose him before the tree line. If he’s ahead of you, turn around and take the coastal route. Do not bring him to the estate.”
“Understood.”
I terminated the call. The screen was smeared red. I wiped it on my ruined jacket and kept moving.
The staged pack SUV was where Ashe had left it—black, nondescript, the kind of vehicle that disappeared into traffic by design rather than accident.
I got behind the wheel with blood on my hands and my shoulder still leaking freely down my arm, and the leather seat absorbed the wet without comment.
