They pull the cage door open and dump him inside.
This time, the lock goes on.
Rex tries to get up immediately—pure instinctual alpha, his body refusing to stop even though it has nothing left—and his arms strain against the chains and the tendons in his neck stand out like cables and he makes it to his elbows before his strength gives out.
He collapses.
Face down.
His breathing is ragged. Harsh, wet, labored sounds that tell me the bullet is doing things bullets shouldn't do inside a body. His back is soaked through, the blood spreading into the chains.
But the worst part, the part that absolutely guts me, is what he does with his face.
He turns it away from me.
Grinds his forehead against the stone floor, tucking his chin, angling his scarred side down and his dark hair falling forward in a tangled, bloody mess to cover the rest.
Even now, even chained and bleeding out and barely conscious, even though the guards are leaving and closing the door behind them and Rex and I are alone, his first instinct is to hide.
"Rex…" I choke out.
His body goes rigid.
"Don't," he growls into the stone. "Don't fucking look at me."
"Rex," I say again. Softer this time. "Please…"
"Don't."
His voice is a wreck. Barely a whisper scraped across broken glass, the word half-muffled by the stone floor where he's pressing his face like he can grind himself into nonexistence.
My hands are zip-tied behind my back. The plastic bites into my wrists every time I move.
But I can move.
And right now, moving is the only thing that matters.
I wriggle across the cold stone floor toward him. It's ungraceful as fuck—shoulders hunching, knees digging, my bound arms wrenched at an angle that makes my rotator cuff scream. Blood smears under my hip. His blood. There's so much of it.
"I said don't?—"
"AndIsaidlook at me, so we're at an impasse."
He growls.
I get close enough. My thigh presses against the top of his head. He flinches—a full-body jerk that makes the chains rattle and clank against the stone—but I don't pull away.
I shift my weight. Tuck my legs underneath me. Angle my body until his head is resting against my thigh, then I lean forward and nudge his hair aside with my nose.
Just my nose.
No hands because I can't fucking use them.
I nuzzle into the crown of his head, breathing him in. Sweat and blood and underneath all of it, his clean, frigid scent.
My scent match.
Mymate.