I open the part of my mind I’ve been holding shut and shove everything at him. The fluorescent tube. The eyes above the mask. The voice saying sample four-seven-two. The sound Mia made against Conner’s neck. The straps on wrists too small for the buckles. I push the feeling of it — the rage, the grief, the terror.
When the next wave hits, I let that through to him, too.
This is yours, you bastard. Your people took her there. Feel it.
There’s a long period where nothing happens. Then what comes back isn’t what I expect.
No wall. No reframe. No alpha tucking it into a box he can manage.
A flinch. Deep. The unprotected response of a man hit somewhere he didn’t know he was soft. And then — this is what makes my hands shake on the doorframe — he stays open. He doesn’t retreat. He sits in it. The way Conner is sitting in it, with Mia’s nightmare pouring through him.
It’s not what I want. I want him to give me a fresh reason to hate him.
Don’t. Don’t you dare take this like it matters to you. Don’t you dare feel this and make me watch you feeling it.
Mia’s broadcast fades.
The images lose their edges. Blur. Go dark. Her body softens against Conner’s chest. The fists in his shirt ease open. Her breathing changes — rough to smooth, shallow to deep. Sleep. Real sleep, not the nightmare kind.
The room is quiet.
Conner pulls a blanket up over Mia, tucking it around her without disturbing her sleep.
“Same time tomorrow night, I expect,” Sable says. “Until Brenna can teach her to close the door.”
“We’ll be here,” Conner says. His voice is hoarse. His hand is on the back of Mia’s skull, his fingers spread through her hair, and the hold isn’t a rescuer’s hold anymore. It’s the grip of a man who’s understood that saving her from the building was the easy part. Saving her from what the building left in her is where things get hard.
Willow leans into him. Her hand on his knee. She’s stopped crying, but her face is a mess.
I push off the doorframe and walk back through the compound.
Cameron is still on the steps, arms around his knees. Dane has stepped away from the barn wall but hasn’t moved far. Nobody is talking.
I return to my cabin and shut the door. I mix the herbs again and drink them. I don’t need it right now, but the bitterness cuts the chalk-and-antiseptic taste Mia’s broadcast left in my mouth.
I lie on the cot. I stare at the ceiling.
He’s still there. Still sitting in whatever the images did to him. Not pushing it away.
I wanted him to feel it. He felt it.
What came back was not what I wanted. What came back was a man who absorbed it and owned it, and I don’t know what to do with that. Because the version of Garrett Forrester who lets a child’s pain in without shielding doesn’t fit inside the version I built the rabbit around.
The heat simmers but doesn’t overwhelm me.
It’s really not the time.
Chapter 13
Garrett
The images hit somewhere past Little Rock. I’m four hours in, the highway flat and empty, the country station playing something I’m not listening to. Her heat has been riding me since I left — manageable, directional, the pull of closing distance. My wolf has been settled since the state line, his attention forward, no more argument about whether to go.
Then the flood arrives.
Not her anger — I know her anger, it’s been a flavor I’ve carried for days, familiar enough that I’ve built a kind of tolerance for it. This is different. A table. A light fixture, fluorescent, flickering. Hands in latex gloves reaching toward something small.
“Fuck!” I get the truck to the shoulder before my hands stop working.