Black combat fatigues, chest rigs packed with steel and silver, blades strapped high for quick reach, sidearms holstered low. Their boots were scuffed, their gloves bloodied from the fight upstairs. Every one of them wore the Dragic crest stitched in deep crimson over their hearts, the mark of loyalty that didn’t fade and couldn’t be bought.
Troy stood front and centre, his buzzed head glistening with sweat under the failing lights, his jaw set tight. Beside him, Mace leaned casually on the butt of his shotgun, tattoos snaking up his neck like the marks of some other, older war. The others were just as grim-faced, their eyes never leaving the chained door, as if whatever was behind it could come through at any moment.
The chains were thick, industrial grade, wound around the door’s frame and bolted into the concrete like someone had gone out of their way to make sure nothing or no one got out. The steel was dented in places, like it had been beaten from the inside.
“Show me,” I said, my voice cutting through the silence.
Troy stepped aside, picking up the chains he pulled it with both hands, his muscles straining as he snapped the chain in two.
The sound of the first chain snapping was loud in the stillness, sharp enough to make the air itself flinch.
Volken pushed the door open, and the sound hit me next. Not screams, those had been broken out of them long before we got here. Just the muffled, hollow sound of breathing, the kind that comes from people who’ve learned that silence is safer than hope.
They were huddled against the far wall, seven women, chained at the wrists and ankles, their backs pressed to stained concrete like they could vanish into it if they tried hard enough.
Every one of them wore the same uniform of captivity, thin, torn dresses clinging to bodies too thin, too bruised. Faded bruises bloomed across cheekbones, darkened ribs, wrists rubbed raw where metal had bitten into them. A few had split lips, one had a swollen eye, another’s hair was matted with dried blood. They didn’t look at us right away.
Some kept their heads bowed, the habit of survival making them smaller, invisible. Others stared from beneath tangled hair with the empty gaze of people who had been waiting for something worse to happen.
It was a calculated cruelty, keeping them like this. The Irish liked their merchandise broken but not destroyed, pliable enough to sell, still breathing so they could fetch a higher price.
I’d seen this before, too many times. My mind didn’t go to rescue first; it went to retribution. Every injury here, every mark, every bit of fear etched into their bones… I would find theones responsible. And when I did, I wouldn’t just end them. I’d make sure they knew exactly why. I hated men that prayed on innocent women and children.
And then, in the middle of that wreckage of flesh and spirit, something detonated inside me. Not steel, not blood, not the familiar burn of violence, but something hotter, deeper. My senses reeled, an explosion racing through my body, flooding every nerve ending until I swore my skin was on fire. A scent hit me, it was sharp, wild, unlike anything I’d ever known. It slammed into my chest, tearing through my veins like molten lava, igniting instincts I’d spent centuries burying beneath logic and control.
My head snapped to the left, drawn by a pull I couldn’t have resisted if I’d wanted to. And then I saw her.
Chained, looking broken and bruised. But even through the grime and the pain, she was beautiful.
My breath left me in a violent rush, like someone had just struck the air from my lungs. My heart thundered once, hard enough to shake me, then everything stilled. Time didn’t slow…it stopped. For what felt like an eternity, but couldn’t have been more than a heartbeat, I stared at her. At the woman fate had carved out of my rage and my ruin, the one I hadn’t known I was waiting for until she was there in front of me.
She was on her knees in the corner, wrists shackled high to the wall, her head bowed, dark hair tangled and falling into her face. Blood ran from a split lip down her chin, slow and steady, like she hadn’t even bothered to wipe it away.
She wasn’t crying or pleading. She was quietly staring straight at me.
And in that moment, the air shifted. My instincts, the ones that had kept me alive for over a century, flared like fire. She was mine. I didn’t know her name, didn’t know her story, but I knew the truth of it as sure as I knew my own heartbeat.
I moved toward her, stepping over another bound woman who flinched away. She didn’t. Her eyes stayed locked on me, daring me to come closer.
When I reached her, I dropped to a crouch, tilted her chin up with two fingers.
She hissed at the contact, and that alone told me more than words could, she still had fight in her. No whimper, no flinch away, just the sharp warning of a wild thing that hadn’t been tamed.
Up close, she was wrecked and still somehow devastating. A thin cut traced along her cheekbone, already scabbing, and her lower lip was split in two places, one still fresh enough to gleam dark red. Her skin was pale beneath the grime, too pale, but her eyes… Christ. They were a storm…green, fractured through with gold, alive with a stubborn, cornered fire. Her hair was a tangled mass of deep copper waves, clinging to her neck and shoulders like it refused to be beaten into submission.
And her scent, through the blood, the sweat, the concrete dust it cut straight through me. It was wild and sharp with a touch of unbroken. A promise and a provocation all at once.
Something in me shifted then, a brutal, primal thing I’d kept buried for centuries. It was rage, yes…pure, unfiltered, bone-deep fury at seeing what they’d done to her, that they’d dared lay hands on my woman. But it was also something else, something that wrapped around that rage like steel wire. Possession anddeep unfiltered need. The kind of need that burned hotter than bloodlust.
My mind split in two. One half was the strategist, already cataloguing every injury, every enemy name I would drag from her captors before they died screaming. The other half was the predator, the man, who wanted to gather her into my arms right there, cover every inch of her with my body, and swear to her that no one, no one, would ever touch her again.
It was a dangerous mix, rage and passion, and I knew then that whoever this woman was, whatever her story, I wasn’t leaving here without her.
“Mine,” I said, low enough only she could hear, my fangs had lowered, my instinct to take her and bind our souls was now driving me with a vengeance that had my senses exploding into overdrive.
Her brow furrowed, confusion mixing with defiance. “Go to hell.”
I smiled…small, dangerous, it’s the kind of smile that promised nothing good for the men who had done this to her. One smooth motion and my blade sang through the air, severing the chains like they were paper. The clatter of iron hitting concrete echoed in the dim space, sharp and final.
