He winds his arms around me and hauls me to my feet, pulling me tight against his chest, and he moves toward Phoenix's voice.
"Raf!" Phoenix roars from somewhere closer now. "RAF, WHERE THE FUCK?—"
"I see them!" Rafael’s voice. Stage right. Close.
The pack bond, fragile and new and incomplete, flares white-hot with their terror. Three points of panic that aren’t mine flooding my nervous system and twisting my insides.
The incomplete mark on my neck flares, too.
What the fuck?—
A gunshot cracks through the chaos.
Sharp. Unmistakable even over the screaming, even over the fire, even over Phoenix’s bellowing voice.
A sound I know from firing ranges and nightmares and the months I spent learning to shoot because I swore no one would ever make me helpless again.
Rex’s body jerks.
The impact travels through him and into me, a full-body shudder that starts at his back and ends at his chest where it’s pressed against mine. His breath leaves him in a wet, surprised choke that doesn’t sound like a growl or a snarl or anything I’ve ever heard from him.
The last thing he does as the entire world caves in around us is shove me into Raf's arms.
A hand closes over my mouth.
Not Rafael’s.
Wrong calluses. Wrong angle. And the cloth pressed against my nose is damp and chemical sweet.
Chloroform.
My brain identifies it the same way it identified the gunshot.
Too fucking late.
I bite down.
Hard.
Through the cloth, into the flesh beneath. I feel my teeth break skin and I thrash—slamming my elbow backward into something solid, a ribcage, a hip—and the grip tightens.
A second hand closes around my throat.
Over myscar, the thumb slipping past my collar and pressing into the raised tissue like it knows the shape. Like it’s been waiting to touch it again.
And then nothing.
CHAPTER 31
RAFAEL
She was right there.
Rightfucking there, close enough that I felt the heat of her body as Rex shoved her toward me, close enough that my hands were already reaching, already closing around?—
Nothing.
My fingers close onnothing.