The bond thread in my chest detonates. A flare of wild, ferocious, barely-human energy that hits my nervous system like a freight train and makes every hair on my body stand up.
My eyes snap to the corridor behind Stephen's shoulder.
The flickering lights strobe.
Dark.
Light.
Dark.
Light.
He's there.
At the far end of the corridor, moving toward us at a striding clip that eats distance like a predator covering open ground. No mask. The lights strobe off the destroyed side of his face—the melted cheek, the exposed teeth, the lidless eye blazing feral blue in the dark like a flame.
He looks like a nightmare.
Mynightmare.
He doesn't slow down.
He doesn't make a sound.
Stephen doesn't see him.
Stephen is watching me. My face. My eyes. And whatever he reads there—the relief, the savage fuckingjoy—makes him hesitate.
"What are you?—"
Rex's hand closes over Stephen's skull.
His fingers splay wide, thumb hooked under the jaw, four fingers gripping the crown, and helifts. Stephen's feet leave the ground for a fraction of a second like he's just levitating before Rex slams him into the concrete wall face-first with a sound I've only ever heard from a watermelon hitting pavement.
Stephen rebounds off the wall, blood spraying from his already ruined face, and Rex catches him before he hits the floor and does it again.
And again.
The third time, Stephen's legs give out. Rex lets him drop and Stephen crumples to his hands and knees, blood pouring from his nose and mouth and destroyed eye, and tries to crawl.
Rex kicks him in the ribs.
Stephen folds sideways with a choked scream and Rex is on him, grabbing a fistful of hair and wrenching his head back.
"You—" Rex's voice is barely human. A shredded rasp dragged across gravel. "—don't—" He slams Stephen's face into the floor. "—touch—" Again. "—her."
"Rex!" I yell.
His head snaps toward me.
Both eyes.
The good one and the damaged one, both of them burning with something that has nothing to do with the man I've been falling in love with and everything to do with the animal underneath.
He's feral.
Full, complete, no-one-fucking-homeferal.