What the fuck
are
you?
The question came and went without an answer because just then, the shadow reached over his back and began lifting something…heavy. When the weapon became visible, Tate could hardly believe his eyes.
An ax. A two-handed, two-sided, Spartacus-fucking-battle-ax.
The arching swing came down so fast Tate felt it slide through his fur as he leaped out of the way. The second swing came almost immediately afterward, crashing into the ground and spraying the water like a geyser. Tate took advantage of the time needed to lift the long-handled blade, darting forward to clamp his hand around the bastard’s exposed wrist.
Blood, bitter as piss, gushed in his mouth.
The ax dropped, but another arm came crashing down on Tate’s head. Hard enough to make his vision flash white for a second and make his mouth go slack. He let go, retreating before another blow came down. The shadow took a step back as well, looking down at his hand bleeding freely into the water below. Almost as if he didn’t know what it was like to be wounded.
Tate shook his head to get the taste of the bastard out of his mouth.
First blood, asshole.
But this battle was hardly over. The bleeding hand simply curled into a fist. The shadow crouched defensively, edging himself step by step closer to the river’s edge. Tate snarled, taking a threatening step forward. That ax was still there on the ground. He wasn’t about to let it be brought back into the fight.
“You can’t win, Wolf.” A digital voice garbled out. Damaged by the water, maybe? It didn’t matter, the flat tone didn’t make for a convincing argument. “We’re mates. I die, she dies. You can’t win.”
Tate only wished it was the wind in his fur sending that cold shiver through him. Instead it was the memory of Lia’s question.
Wh-what makes you think I’m not mated?
No. She wasn’t. He knew it. He’d all but reveled in her scent the past two days. There was nothing else on her…
But there was nothing to this bastard’s scent either.
The distraction slowed him enough that the shadow leaped on him, hands grasping, digging into his fur as if he meant to rip it right off. No escape, no dodging this time. The only option left was more instinct than thought. He lurched upward to grip his teeth around the shadow’s throat. Even there, the shadow was armored, but the plates were small. Thick enough to keep Tate from ripping the shadow’s throat out…but no match for his jaws if he chose to crush the windpipe beneath.
Crush it the way this son of a bitch had crushed Lia’s.
That instant, the knowledge was clear. He was no mate to her. A mate could never do the things this asshole did to a female he considered his own.
Tate ground down harder, uncaring at the rush of his own blood as his teeth dug against the resisting metal. The shadow roared, an oddly comical noise when converted to the damaged voice box. He yanked at Tate’s body, ripping at his fur, but Tate could ignore the pain. Would ignore it, if only to make sure this fucker died.
Died
begging,
if he had any say.
Punches sent his body to the side, his ribs threatening to break from the blows. But still he hung on. He let his weight fall to the ground, keeping the bastard from rising. The giant crouched on his knees, unable to breathe or even make that garbled noise any longer. The punches slowed. Lost strength. The shadow fell onto its back, giving Tate the chance to fit his teeth deeper over the monster’s neck.
If he could just hold on a little longer, it would be over.
A little longer…
And he would have, if he hadn’t heard Lia screaming, her fists landing on his back in desperation. “Stop Tate! I need him alive. You’re killing her! Please, God, Tate,
stop!
”
All it took was a flinch. A half-second of lost focus.
A knife he never saw slid into his belly.
“No!” But her scream came too late. Asher was already shoving Tate’s limp form off like a sack of refuse. She stumbled back, scrambling to find her footing but only managing to drag her ass in the dirt.
He’ll kill me this time. He won’t care and he’ll kill us both. Then it’ll only be a matter of time for Laurel…
But for the first time since they’d told her she was mated, she wasn’t sure she believed it. The scientists had told them repeatedly they were a symbiotic relationship. If she killed her captor, she killed herself. The law of mates. Even Tate had said as much, but his other words were what echoed in her mind now.
…he can’t take your bond or your soul. That can only be given…if you never learn another thing about mating, learn that. We always have choices.
What if Tate was right? What if, somehow, it was all a lie?
What if she still had a choice?
Asher stood, uncaring that Tate had shifted back into human form with a ripple of shadow. He simply stepped over him, like a broken toy abandoned on the ground. “You should have been loyal to me, Aurelia.”
She’d thought his digitized voice wrong before, but now it gargled. Water trapped in the circuits instead of his lungs. Or Tate had done enough damage with his jaws to actually ruin Asher’s throat.
“Y-you promised to l-let him l-live,” she said through numb, trembling lips. “You p-promised.” She kept scooting back, every foot she moved, he ate up, stalking her, enjoying her fear. Feeding on it like a damn parasite.
Unexpected pain sliced cleanly into her palm. She jumped, realizing the cold metal there could be only one thing. Asher’s axe. Hand already slick with her own blood, she reached blindly for the handle, angling it out in front of herself to hold him off. She’d never touched it before, terrified of this thing more than any of his other weapons, had no idea how heavy it really was. It took all her strength to lift it with both hands on the textured black handle beneath the blade head.
“Even if you could swing it, are you truly going to sacrifice Laurel…for
him?
” Strange that despite the damaged mechanical voice, she could still sense his derision in referring to Tate.
She didn’t dare take her eyes off Asher, though, not because her stare would stop him, but because he was right. She could barely pull it up, much less swing it. There was no protection here.
“They’ll kill her if we don’t report in. You know that, but you’re not thinking again. Letting that Instinct of yours do the thinking for you. That never works out for you, Aurelia. Remember?”
“I’m thinking just f-fine.” Or she would be if he’d just stop talking.
“Give me the ax so I can finish this.” He even held out his hand for it.
Her mouth was dry. Her hands shook and she was so cold she thought her bones might be frozen, but she couldn’t let go. Tate might already be dead, but she couldn’t hand over the weapon that would make sure. “N-no.”
Asher’s extended hand curled into a fist before he brought it back to his side. “What has he ever done for you? I’m the one who keeps you safe.
I’m
the one who keeps you alive, or are you forgetting that too?”
“No.” She stayed alive on her own.
Despite
him.
“Does he know what you’ve done? How many of his kind you’ve killed?”
“Y-you killed them.”
“But you brought them to me. Just like you brought him. They’ve all died because of you.”
“No…” She refused to sob. Wouldn’t buckle under his words, but she was weakening. They
had
died because of her. Every single one of them, especially the innocent ones, who never meant anything more than to help.
All she wanted was for him to stop, but he was relentless. “And what about Laurel? Do you want her blood on your hands too? Didn’t you hurt her enough when you abandoned her? Now where is she? Because you were selfish—”
“No!” She’d run
for
Laurel. For
her.
“You’ll leave her again for a Wolf I can gut without even thinking about it?”
Lia shook her head, his voice almost mesmerizing. She could feel the cold silence starting to form around her. The fear starting to take control again. Her hands started to turn slack on the handle.
But just then, she felt something. Something…warm. Something that pulled at her, even as it enveloped her. Strength infused her, the feel of it something she’d sensed before. In that moment before she’d ruined everything.
Tate.
She let her gaze move, for the briefest moment, to the man lying naked in the dirt. Tate was awake, his eyes glowing with an eerie yellow-green fire, reflecting the moonlight back at her. His fist enveloped the handle of the knife still in his belly, gripping it so that the metal ball at the end was all she could see. Something flickered in her mind, recognition she didn’t have time to unfold. He raised his chin, his mouth a grim line of determination.
Don’t give in.
She didn’t hear him say it, but she could almost…feel it, the shivers and the silence receding beneath that imperative.
He fisted the grip and she knew what he was about to do. Couldn’t believe he would try it. But this was Tate. He didn’t know how to stop fighting.
He didn’t understand. This wasn’t his fight.
She took his strength in, accepted it in the same way it was offered—a demand for survival—and abruptly dropped the angle of the blade back to herself, fitting the wicked top arc of it beneath her chin. “Take another step and I’ll end this right now.”
To her absolute shock, Asher actually stopped. “If you do that, we both die.”
“Then we both die. They’ll never let Laurel go, if they ever had her at all. You’ve probably been lying to me from the beginning.”
“I brought you that scarf, didn’t I? How could I have gotten it if they didn’t have her?”
“I don’t know, but I do know they’ll never let any of us go free.” She wished her voice didn’t tremor, that she sounded at all convinced, but it was the best she could do.
“For
him?
”
“For
me.
” And she realized she meant it. Tate, the other shifters on the Underground, even the ones in Resurrection, they were distant from this confrontation. Asher deserved to die for every moment, every second of life he’d ever stolen to please the beast within him. Every tear she couldn’t shed, every drop of blood she couldn’t wash off her soul. She’d do whatever it took to wipe him off the face of the planet.
He stared at her for long, empty seconds. His calm would be frightening if she wasn’t sure he was simply incredulous. “I won’t let you end me.”
No arguments about the rest, which meant he must have come to that conclusion a long time ago. And not cared.
“You can’t stop me.” Just saying that gave her a strange kind of rush. Power over him again.
It didn’t last long enough.
“You won’t do it.” He came at her then, stalking forward, moving like lightning.
She closed her eyes, squeezing the handle, trying to make the slashing motion…but he was right. She wasn’t ready to die. Not when she could still feel Tate all around her, reminding her that there were still good and true things in the world. She squeezed her eyes shut and waited.
But the blow never came.
She opened her eyes again, slowly, her heartbeat so hard it thumped in her head like a drum. Asher still stood there, frozen midstep, staring down at his leg, to where the light glinted off the blade tip poking through the front just below the kneecap.
Lia stumbled back, dragging the axe with her, eyes drawn like a magnet to where Tate stood, hand over his bloodied side. His nudity barely registered when compared to his still-extended bloody hand. To the unholy rage in his mirrored eyes.
“Figured you had to have a weak spot somewhere, asshole.”
Asher turned his head toward him, the scoped eye of his mask spinning and whirring.
“All I have to do is get up close and take you out at the joints, Tin Man. Under the arm pit, inside elbow, under the belly plates. Three strikes and you’re dead.”
Lia kept going, circling wide and still dragging the axe, until she was closer to Tate. All the while, Asher watched her progress, unmoving.
“You’d never get close enough, Wolf,” he said, almost conversationally.
“Maybe not on a normal night, but that shit ain’t coming out any time soon. The blade is in the bone. How good are you at fighting unbalanced? Because all I need is one weakness to exploit.
One.
” Tate’s silken tone sent shivers through Lia. “You’re not the only one who can make a man scream.”
“You’re no man,” Asher countered.
Tate smiled, but it wasn’t the kind she knew. This one was nearly a snarl. Predatory. Taunting. “Neither are you.”
Asher turned to her once more, dismissing Tate as if he were some kind of bother. “Come with me now, Aurelia, and you won’t have to see him die.”
But he would die. No matter what. Nothing could change that now. Her gaze slid to Tate, but he kept his steady on Asher. On the threat.
Asher was wrong, Tate
was
a man. More of one than Asher could ever have been. One who risked everything for what he believed in, for those he protected. Even now, he stood there, bleeding, at his weakest. He had no more weapons, she had no idea how he was even standing, but he refused to back down.
To protect
her.
He was everything she wished she’d found so many years ago, before her future was taken from her. Before her choices disappeared. She would have chosen him. Would have seen the man and the Wolf and valued them both. But that choice was gone. Stolen, by the monster demanding her obedience.
“Come
now
, mate.”
“She’s not your mate,” Tate growled, but Asher ignored him.
“This instant or I’ll make you swim in his blood.”
Doubts swam in her head. Not about Asher. He meant what he said. He offered no deal, no mercy. He’d lost whatever mercy he had when the scientists took hold of him. His vengeance for her betrayal would leave her praying for a death that would never come. And Tate’s death would come all too swiftly. Those calculations took no time to ponder.