Chapter 18: The Scent of a Mate
Rowan had left her sleeping.
It felt like a physical separation, peeling himself away from the warm weight of her curled in his bunk. He’d covered her with the wool blanket, tucking it around her shoulders. The gesture was foreign to his hands. He stood in the doorway for a full minute, just watching the even rise and fall of her breath in the dim light, before forcing himself to turn and walk out.
The ops room was a cathedral of focused rage. The others were there, faces lit by the blue glow of monitors. Maddox was running facial recognition on the security stills they’d pulled. Kael was tracing shell companies with a ferocious concentration. Sloane was sterilizing her kit, the clink of metal instruments methodical and sharp.
No one spoke. The air was thick with the need for vengeance.
Rowan dropped into his chair, the leather groaning. He pulled up the schematics of the Rhinehart lab, his jaw working. His mind, however, kept drifting down the hall. The quiet felt wrong. He was accustomed to the quiet after ops—tense, waiting—but this was different. It was a fragile quiet. A held breath.
He’d been staring at the same ventilation shaft diagram for twenty minutes when he heard it.
A whimper.
It was so soft, so thread-like, he thought he’d imagined it. Then it came again, higher, laced with panic. From the bedroom.
He was moving before his chair stopped rolling.
The door was still ajar. In the gloom, he saw her. Lily was tangled in the blanket, her body rigid. Her head thrashed once, twice, on the pillow. A low, desperate mumble spilled from her lips.
“No… please… the door… the door’s locked…”
Her voice was a child’s, terrified and lost. It sliced through him.
“Lily.” He said it firmly, from the doorway. “You’re dreaming.”
She didn’t hear him. The mumble crescendoed into a clear, agonized plea. “Don’t put me in there. Please. I’ll be good. I’ll be so good.” Her hands came up, pushing at an invisible barrier. “I can’t see. Why can’t I see?”
The words were hooks in his flesh. The empty eyes. Her nightmare was weaving their horror with her own.
He stepped into the room, his bulk making the space feel smaller. “Lily. Wake up.” He reached for her shoulder.
His fingers barely grazed the fabric of her shirt.
She exploded.
A raw, glass-shard scream tore from her throat, so sudden and violent it felt like a physical blow in the small room. She flailed backward, scrambling across the mattress until her back hit the wall, her eyes wide and unseeing, flooded with a blind terror that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the ghosts in her head.
“Stay away! Get back!”
She was louder than he’d ever heard her. The sound was ragged, shredding her vocal cords. It was the sound of pure, animal survival.
He froze, his hand still outstretched. “It’s Rowan. Look at me. You’re in the safehouse. You’re safe.”
But ‘safe’ was a word that meant nothing here. She was back in the lab, in the factory, in every dark room that had ever held her. She drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around them, rocking. The screams dissolved into choking, hyperventilating sobs. “They’re coming, they’re coming, they’re coming…”
She was a live wire, sparking and lethal to herself. The thrashing started again, her elbow cracking hard against the plaster wall. A fine dust sifted down.
He couldn’t watch her break her own bones against the bricks.
“I’m sorry,” he growled, the apology meant for both of them.
He moved fast, a controlled pounce. He didn’t grab. He enveloped. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he banded one arm across her back, the other under her knees, and pulled her into the cage of his body, turning her so her back was against his chest. He trapped her thrashing legs between his own, wrapped his arms around her middle, and held on.
She fought him. God, she fought. She was all sharp angles and desperate strength, bucking, twisting, her cries muffled against his forearm. “No! Let go! Let GO!”
He just tightened his hold, a steady, unyielding pressure. “I can’t do that.” His voice was a rumble in her ear, straining against her screams. “You’re here. With me. Breathe, damn it. Match me.” He took an exaggerated, loud inhale, his chest expanding against her spine. “Feel that? Now breathe out.”
She whimpered, the fight starting to bleed out into sheer exhaustion. A violent shudder wracked her.
“Again,” he commanded, softer this time. He breathed in, held it, let it out slow. “Follow the sound, Lily. Just follow the sound.”
Her breath hitched, caught, and then she tried. A stuttering imitation. Then another. Her clenched fists slowly uncurled, coming to rest on the heavy forearms locked around her. The tension began to leach from her muscles, leaving her boneless and trembling.
The nightmare’s veil was lifting. The awful, blank terror in her eyes receded, replaced by a dazed, swimming confusion. She went very still, listening to the solid thump-thump-thump of his heart against her back.
“Rowan?” Her voice was a ruined scrape of sound.
“Yeah.”
“I was… I couldn’t get out.”
“I know. But you are out.” He didn’t let go. The fear that she might slip back under was too acute.
She shifted slightly, turning her head just enough to press her damp cheek against the cotton of his shirt. A single, hot tear tracked through the fabric to his skin. “I’m sorry.”
The apology, whispered and broken, wrecked him. It turned his lingering anger into something else, something vast and helpless.
“Don’t you fucking apologize,” he said, the words rough but the intent gentle. He rested his chin on the crown of her head. “You scream the whole goddamn place down if you need to. These walls have heard worse.”
She let out a shuddering sigh that seemed to come from the soles of her feet. The last of the resistance faded. She was pliant in his hold, utterly spent. The scent of her fear was fading, replaced by the salt of tears and the quiet, exhausted warmth of her skin.
He held her like that, anchored in the quiet dark, long after her breathing settled into a deep, slow rhythm. The fear of her hurting herself was gone. Now, he just didn’t want to move. The weight of her was a counterbalance to the chaos, a solid truth he could grasp.
Her personality, that spark of stubborn light he’d seen flicker before, was submerged under the trauma. Seeing it extinguished, even temporarily, was a worse violation than anything he’d witnessed in the lab. It was a theft. And he, a man who dealt in the currency of retrieval, had never wanted to steal something back so badly in his life.
He knew then, with a clarity that was both terrifying and absolute, that his mission parameters had just been irrevocably rewritten. This wasn't just about destruction anymore. It was about restoration. And he had no goddamn manual for that.