“Thomas—”
He brought it down.
The impact was wet and cracking all at once, pain flaring bright across my face as something split open. My vision fractured, red spilling into one eye as heat poured down my cheek. I tasted blood instantly—thick, metallic, choking.
The world tilted.
I barely felt myself hit the ground again, but I felt the blood. Warm. Fast. Sliding down into my eye, blinding me on one side.
Thomas didn’t pause. His hands were on me before I could even orient myself, fingers locking around my throat with brutal familiarity.
I remember the pressure first.
Those big, solid hands crushing down, thumbs digging into the soft space beneath my jaw as the air vanished from my lungs like it had never been there at all.
I tried to breathe and got nothing. Tried to drag air in and felt my throat close under his grip.
My hands came up automatically, clawing at his wrists, nails scraping skin that didn’t give. Thomas had been a police sergeant for years. He knew exactly how to hold someone, exactly where to press to take control.
My vision tunnelled, already half-blinded by blood. The edges of the world dimmed, sound pulling away like it was being dragged underwater.
I remember thinking—absurdly—that this was it. That after everything, after surviving the rift and this world and everything in it, this was how it ended.
On my back.
Under him.
Again.
And then the forest exploded.
It didn’t build. It didn’t warn. One second there was choking silence, the next something tore through the undergrowth with the force of a storm given flesh. Branches snapped. Leaves scattered. The ground itself seemed to shake.
Thomas barely had time to turn.
Varek hit him like a weapon.
I didn’t understand what I was seeing at first. My vision was half gone, the world smeared red and shadow. There was just movement and violence. Something large and fast and utterly unstoppable.
Claws.
The sound?—
God.
The sound of tearing flesh.
Varek ripped Thomas off me like he weighed nothing, dragging him away with a force that snapped branches and sent them both crashing through the undergrowth.
I sucked in air that wouldn’t quite come, my throat screaming, lungs burning as I rolled onto my side and coughed blood and dirt.
And then I saw it clearly.
Saw him.
Saw what he was doing.
The memory cuts there, edges clean and deep. I squeeze my eyes shut because the truth of it has never changed.
