Chapter 15: Vengeance
The silence of the forest was not peaceful. It was a held breath. Kane stood in the center of the cabin’s main room, motionless, his eyes closed. The fire had died to embers. The scent of JT—fear, sweat, and the unique, bright signature of his soul—was everywhere, but it was tangled now with the acrid stink of holy water, etched silver, and the particular sweaty aggression of other hunters.
They had taken him.
The bond in his own chest, a live wire of connection he had forged over weeks of proximity and possession, thrummed with a discordant, painful frequency. It wasn’t just distance. It was contamination. He could feel a cold, scraping sensation along the tether, as if someone were trying to scour it clean with steel wool and lye.
A low growl built in his throat, vibrating the still air. They were trying to purge him. To scrape his claim from the boy’s very essence. The arrogance of it burned hotter than any hellfire.
He opened his eyes, the gold glowing in the dimness. He walked to the bed, the dark fabrics still rumpled from their last time. He pressed his face into the pillow, inhaling JT’s fading scent. His fist clenched, claws digging into his palm, drawing black blood that sizzled faintly as it hit the wool blanket.
“Mine,” he whispered, the word a vow.
Tracking was usually a complex art. Footprints, broken branches, the residual energy of fear. This was simpler. This was an ache. The bond was a compass needle pointing into a deep, specific agony. He closed his eyes again, focusing past the scraping sensation, down to the core of the connection. It was still there, bright and furious. JT was terrified. He was in pain. And beneath that, a new, sickly emotion: shame. A shame that tasted of another man’s words, poisonous and convincing.
Kane’s lip curled. Marcus. It had to be. The righteous patriarch, weaving his lies. He’d warp the boy’s mind, twist every memory of the cabin, of their time, into something ugly and wrong.
He would not allow it.
He strode to the heavy door, not bothering to open it. He simply placed a palm against the ancient wood and pushed. The timber around the iron lock splintered with a sound like a gunshot, the door flying outward to slam against the exterior wall. The cold night air rushed in.
He didn’t take the paths. He moved through the trees like a shadow given purpose, a primal force cutting a straight line toward the source of the discordant signal. The forest blurred around him. He remembered the first time he’d laid proper claim, the night the boy’s resistance had finally crumbled into desperate, hungry submission.
JT had been trying to clean a rabbit by the fire, his hands clumsy. Kane had watched from his chair, the desire a slow, hot coil in his gut. He’d stood, the movement fluid, and JT had frozen, knife in hand, watching him approach with wide, uncertain eyes.
“You’re making a mess,” Kane had rumbled, taking the knife and the carcass from his hands and tossing them aside. He’d backed JT against the rough-hewn log wall, caging him in. “You’re thinking too much.”
“I’m not—”
“You are.” Kane had leaned in, breathing in the scent of him—woodsmoke, clean sweat, and that undeniable human warmth. “Your mind is always running. Let me quiet it for you.”
He’d captured JT’s mouth in a bruising kiss, all tongue and teeth, a claim staked. JT had stiffened for a heartbeat before melting, a muffled sound escaping his throat. Kane’s hands had roamed, pulling at clothes, not undressing but exposing. He’d turned JT around roughly, pressing his chest to the wall, the rough bark against his cheek.
“Kane, wait—”
“No more waiting.” His voice was a gravelly promise. He’d freed himself, his cock thick and heavy in his hand, the broad head already slick. He’d spat into his palm, slicking himself, not with ceremony but with intent. He’d pressed against JT’s entrance, feeling the tight, hot clutch of him. “This is what you need. What you’ve been begging for with every look.”
He’d pushed in, not slowly, a single, relentless invasion that stole JT’s breath and drew a raw, torn cry from his lungs. Kane had groaned, the sensation exquisite, a perfect, vise-like heat swallowing him whole. He’d stayed there, buried to the hilt, feeling JT tremble around him.
“See?” he’d growled into JT’s ear, biting the lobe. “No more thoughts. Just this. Just me inside you, filling you up.”
He’d begun to move, a hard, driving rhythm that shook JT’s body against the wall. Each thrust was a punctuation mark. Mine. Mine. Mine. JT’s cries had morphed from shock into something guttural and needy, his own hips pushing back, meeting the force. Kane had gripped his hips, fingers leaving bruises, holding him still to take every inch, every pound of force.
“Tell me,” Kane had demanded, his pace becoming brutal, animalistic. The cabin filled with the sound of skin slapping skin, ragged breaths, and the creak of wood. “Tell me what you are.”
“Yours!” JT had sobbed, the words breaking. “God, Kane, I’m yours!”
The climax had torn through them both like a storm, Kane spilling deep inside with a possessive roar, marking him internally, as his teeth had marked the skin of JT’s shoulder. He’d held him there, pinned, until the shaking subsided, until the only sound was their shared, ragged breathing. That was the night the bond had truly snapped into place, irrevocable and deep.
The memory fueled him, a beacon of truth against the lies they were pumping into his boy. The scraping on the bond intensified, a sharp, sanitizing pain. They were performing a ritual. He could feel it.
He broke into a clearing. In the distance, nestled against the base of a granite mountain, lights glowed from narrow, fortified windows. The compound. It reeked of sanctimony and fear. The ward-glyphs carved into the surrounding stones pulsed with a defensive, blue-white light, feeling his approach.
He stopped at the tree line. The wards were strong. Ancient. Designed to repel his kind.
But they were not designed for this. They were not designed for a demon who had not just tasted a human’s blood, but had shared his essence, who had a living tether of claimed and claimed soul running directly into their sanctum. The bond wasn’t just a connection; it was a backdoor.
Kane smiled, a cruel, dark gesture. He focused on the bond, on the raw, messy, beautiful truth of it. The memory of JT’s body, open and willing beneath him. The sound of his broken, honest cries. The taste of his skin. He fed that down the tether, a torrent of visceral, unchaste reality against their cold purification.
Deep in the compound infirmary, JT would jolt, a phantom heat flooding his veins.
Here, at the tree line, the wards flickered. The light stuttered, confused. The sanitizing energy scraping at the bond recoiled, met with something too primal, too intimately real to be purged.
He took a step forward. The ward-light dimmed, sputtered, and died in a ten-foot radius around him. A hole. Their defenses were meaningless. They had his heart, his only point of vulnerability, locked in a stone box. And he was coming to collect it.
He would burn this righteous fortress to the ground to get him back.