I didn't give her a chance to recover or argue. I slammed my fist into the secondary door control panel on the wall.
"Get on a shuttle, Ms. Sorenson," I said, my voice barely a whisper beneath the wail of the alarms. "Go back to your safe, quiet life."
The heavy blast door hissed violently, surging forward on its pneumatic tracks.
Tove stood frozen in the corridor, her dark eyes wide and shining with unshed tears, staring at me as the thick steel barrier slid between us.
The door slammed shut, the heavy magnetic locks engaging with a definitive, ringingclack.
I was alone. The inferno instantly closed in around me, the Rebirth cycle roaring in my ears as I collapsed to the scorching floor, waiting for the fire to finally consume me.
Chapter 9
Tove
The heavy, reinforced blast door slammed shut with a deafening, metallicclack.
I stood perfectly still in the empty corridor of the Obsidian Wing sub-levels. The air out here was cool and aggressively sterile, carrying the sharp scent of chemical antiseptics, but it didn't register. All I could feel was the massive, agonizing void in the center of my chest.
Did you truly believe a fragile, broken tourist could ever handle a real Warden?
His voice echoed in the hallway, harsh and dripping with venom. The words had hit with surgical precision, striking every single insecurity I had spent the last year desperately trying to bury beneath a thick layer of ice. The cruelty of it burned far worse than the freezing cold of the cave or the abrasive wind of the Exclusion Zone.
Above me, the Tier-1 Evacuation klaxons wailed, an unrelenting, high-pitched mechanical shriek that vibrated against my teeth. The resort was emptying. The shuttles were launching. Survival was just an elevator ride away.
I took a slow, trembling step backward, my bare foot slipping slightly on the smooth, polished walkway between the cold floorgrates. My survival instinct, honed by years of walking away from volatile, explosive situations, was screaming at me to run. The heavy, invisible tether in my ribs pulled painfully, but the rejection was a physical wall I couldn't cross.
He didn't want me. It was just biology. Just a chemical urge to survive.
I took another step toward the turbolifts.
Then, my foot stopped.
I squeezed my eyes shut, my chest heaving. The sheer, overwhelming pain of the rejection was clouding my judgment. It was blinding me, forcing me to react purely on emotion. But I wasn't just a fragile tourist. Before I had built the ice, before the burnout had consumed my life, I had been one of the top Crisis Negotiators on the eastern seaboard. My entire career had been built on looking past the immediate trauma response and identifying the underlying truth of a hostile situation.
I forced myself to stop feeling for exactly three seconds. I stripped away the emotional devastation of his words and coldly, analytically evaluated his physical behavior.
He forced his body to step backward.
If I was truly a pathetic, unwanted burden, he would have brushed past me. He would have left me in the hallway and walked away. Instead, he had backed himself into the corner of the containment cell like a cornered animal trying to put distance between itself and a threat.
But I wasn't the threat.
His veins were flaring brightly with need, not dimming.
When I had stepped into the doorway, the ambient heat rolling off his body hadn't felt like a defensive wall. It had felt like a desperate, starving pull. The fire running beneath his skin had been blindingly bright, surging with a terrifying energy that perfectly matched the agonizing, heavy pull of the tether buried in my own ribs.
He hadn't been looking at me with disgust. He had been looking at me with the profound, devastating grief of a man watching the only thing he loves walk away forever.
My eyes snapped open.
It was a lie.
It was the oldest, most desperate isolation tactic in the book. He was trying to push me out of the blast radius. He believed that if he claimed the bond, his supercharged biology would incinerate me. He was deliberately executing his own heart just to ensure I made it onto one of those evacuation shuttles.
A fierce, incredibly potent spark of adrenaline ignited in my chest, completely burning away the lingering shock of his rejection. The cold, analytical fury of clarity settled over me. He wasn't a monster pushing me away; he was a terrified protector who didn't understand that I was stronger than I looked.
I spun around and marched directly back to the containment cell door.
