“So Cormac and Lena.” I held his eyes. “You had them killed.”
Something moved across his face. Fast. Too fast to name—a flash of something raw beneath the composure, there and gone before I could classify it. “They were taking her to Braham. My cousin chose his side. That was her decision.”
The wind shifted. The trees murmured. The amber gate lights flickered once, caught a gust, steadied.
“She was running from you.” My voice stayed level. The kind of level that carries more threat than shouting ever could. “She hid her daughter in a cardboard box in an alley because she was more afraid of you finding Grace than she was of leaving her alone in the cold. Think about what that says.”
Declan’s voice went flat. The flatness that happens when a man stops negotiating and starts executing. “I think we’re done talking.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think so too.”
I didn’t wait for him to signal his men. I didn’t wait for the shapes in the tree line to move. I closed the distance fast—three steps, gravel crunching under my boots—and dropped low, driving my shoulder into Declan’s midsection before the bigger man had fully registered that the human was attacking.
The impact traveled up my arm and into my shoulder with a jolt that my body catalogued and filed under “expected.” Declan was heavier by sixty pounds and he recovered faster than a human would have—his hand found my jacket collar, grip iron, and he threw me sideways with a force that would have sent a normal man into the gravel face-first.
I rolled with it. Hit the ground on my shoulder, came up on my feet, and the switchblade was already open in my hand. The metal caught the gate light along its edge, a thin line of amber, and the checkered grip was warm and familiar against my palm.
The shapes in the tree line moved. Two of them. Dark against dark, the particular wrongness of bodies that weren’t fully human anymore—limbs too long, movement too fluid, thepredatory economy of something that had stopped pretending to be civilized.
Declan shifted. Not all the way. The partial shift—forearms elongating, claws extending into the half-form that gave him reach without sacrificing coordination.
The change ran through him in a visible wave, muscle rearranging under skin, and the sound it made was wet and wrong and not something I wanted to hear twice.
His first swipe came fast. Too fast. I got my weight left, but not enough—his claws caught me across the ribs, opening a line of fire through my side that my brain registered as white-hot and my training registered as survivable.
The fabric of my jacket parted with a sound like tearing paper, and the warmth that spread beneath it was my own blood, running hot and fast down my flank.
I feinted left. Dragged his next swipe wide, his momentum carrying him forward half a step, and drove my elbow into the side of his knee with everything I had.
The crack was audible. Not a pop. A crack. Bone or ligament or both, and Declan went down on one knee with a sound that wasn’t human—a ragged, furious snarl that lived somewhere between pain and rage.
His claws dug into the gravel, fingers splayed, and when he came back up his face had gone feral, pale eyes burning with something that had nothing to do with reason.
His next swipe tore through my jacket and the shoulder underneath. The pain was immediate and bright, a singing heat that traveled from collarbone to elbow in a wave that made my vision gray at the edges. Blood ran freely down my left arm, warm and slick, and I could feel it soaking through the fabric and pooling at my wrist.
He hit me in the face. One clean shot, his fist connecting with my jaw hard enough to snap my head back and split my lip openagainst my teeth. Copper flooded my mouth—bright, metallic, the particular taste of your own blood when someone’s knuckles have found the right angle.
I spat it out.
A fine red mist hit the gravel between us, and I kept moving because stopping meant dying, and I had not survived seven years as an Army Ranger by being sentimental about my own tissue.
I worked in close. Where his reach was a disadvantage. Where the half-shifted limbs were too long for close quarters, the joints vulnerable, the throat exposed.
I targeted pressure points with the fast, dirty efficiency of a man trained to end fights rather than win them—elbow to the solar plexus, knee to the groin, thumb driven into the soft tissue beneath his jaw where the carotid lived.
He caught me twice more. A backhand that rang my bell hard enough that the gate lights blurred for a second, and a claw strike that opened my forearm from wrist to elbow, the skin parting like fabric under a seam ripper.
The blood ran hot. The pain ran hotter.
I catalogued both and kept moving because the alternative was lying down, and lying down meant he would finish it, and I was not in the business of letting men like Declan Morrow finish anything.
When he got his hand around my throat, I felt it coming. His grip closed—five points of pressure, thumb digging into the hollow beneath my jaw, fingers pressing into the sides of my neck—and he drove me into the gravel road with the full weight of his body behind it.
The impact knocked the air out of me completely. My lungs emptied in a controlled exhale that sounded more like a choke, and the gravel bit into my back through the torn jacket, sharppoints pressing into skin that was already busy registering other, more urgent damage.
Declan’s weight pinned me—one knee on my sternum, the pressure enough to make my ribs creak, his claws pricking at my collar where the artery pulsed.
His face was close. Close enough that I could see the individual stubbled hairs along his jaw, the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the pale irises gone flat and satisfied in the amber gate light. Close enough that I could smell his breath—cold, clean, the faint copper note of his own adrenaline working through his system.
