The female in the back seat carried his blood now. Given at the edge of death, it would do more than heal. His blood marked what it saved, and the connection already existed whether he liked it or not.
She was his.
To contain.
To question.
To destroy if the heretic taint inside her demanded it.
Not gently. Not in any soft human sense of the word.
Whatever command had been buried in the blood wanted him to believe otherwise.
Rhen refused to trust it.
Chapter 4
The compound loomed ahead, a dark, hulking shape swallowing the fog as its black stone walls rose against the night. Its silhouette stood like a grave marker beneath the storm-heavy sky, all jagged roofs, narrow windows, and wrought iron. The gates groaned open with a sound like splintering bone, dragging silence in their wake.
Rhen’s truck rolled through the entrance, its engine rumbling low beneath the suffocating mist. He kept his eyes fixed on the looming façade as he pulled into the courtyard, the pressure beneath his ribs tightening with every second.
He stepped from the truck and moved immediately toward the back seat, lifting the female with exacting control. Her body hung limp against his chest, her skin cold beneath the drying blood. Her heartbeat had weakened to an uneven flutter that barely registered against his senses.
She hovered on the edge of death.
A corpse would give him no answers.
The scent hit him.
Blood. Sweat. Fury.
Dax.
Of course it had to be him.
The male’s presence rolled through the courtyard before he appeared, carrying heat and hostility with it.
Rhen didn’t flinch.
Dax stalked out of the fog shirtless and furious, the blood-stiffened clothes from Bar X discarded somewhere inside. Sweat still slicked his skin, dark runes and ink twisting across the hard planes of his chest and arms like battle scars given life. Everything about him radiated violence. He looked forged for war, broad-shouldered and lethal, the kind of male who carried it in his bones.
Dax’s ice-blue eyes locked onto Rhen.
“Start talking.”
His voice was low and rough with restrained rage. His fists clenched hard enough for the tendons in his forearms to stand out beneath tattooed skin.
Rhen shifted the female in his arms as her head lolled against his chest. Beneath the courtyard lights, she looked almost translucent. Bruised skin. Drying blood. A pulse fluttering weakly beneath it all.
He had no intention of handing her over until he knew what had drawn them both onto that road.
“Busy,” he muttered, brushing past.
Dax moved immediately, stepping into his path until there was nowhere left to go.
“Tell me you didn’t give her enough to start a turn.”
Rhen said nothing.
