POV: Rena Vale
Air claws my throat as I stumble backward, chain-link biting my spine. “Lyria—now,” I rasp, dragging her forward with both hands inside my head.
With you, she answers, a rush of heat and teeth. Power surges—too fast, too bright—like a river ignoring banks.
Footfalls scrape concrete. One masked wolf advances slow, savoring fear; the other slides behind me with a hiss of fabric and intent. Arms snake around my waist, pinning elbows to ribs. A forearm cinches across my sternum.
“Don’t scream,” the one behind breathes against my ear, voice muffled, breath rotten. “It’s useless.”
“Useless would be you,” I spit, bucking hard. Pain rips through my shoulder; grip tightens. I slam my heel down on his foot—buy a half second—then twist. He answers with a chokehold threading under my jaw.
Panic detonates. Lights explode behind my eyelids. “Stop—let me go!” My voice cracks. Lyria surges—ears flat, hackles up—shoving silver through my veins.
“Pretty trick,” the one in front sneers, lifting a baton that glints dark. “We end it quick.”
“Back. Off.” My mouth moves before sense catches up. Glow licks my skin—wrists, throat, the edges of sight—uncontrollable. Lockers slam in my memory. Hallway screams re-echo. Not now—not here.
The man behind jerks my arms higher. “Still.” Pressure crushes windpipe. Spots bloom. Lyria snarls, frantic. Push. Don’t drown.
“Rena!” A distant shout—Auren, somewhere around the corner. Hope punches, useless as air when someone’s stealing it.
I bite down on the forearm at my throat. Salt and cloth and skin. He swears, surprises enough to loosen. I wrench my chin and drag a breath like it’s contraband.
“Let her go,” the other orders, tone changing—impatient now. “Boss said quick.”
“Shut up and watch,” the one behind me snaps. “It’s more fun this way.”
Lyria slams herself against my ribs. Light now—forward—
“Fine,” I gasp, and stop trying to dam the surge. It blasts out of me in a white lash—raw, wild, too much. The glow erupts, shattering air. The wolf in front staggers, hands flying to his eyes. “What the—?!” He drops the baton; it clatters, harmless.
Behind me: “Not enough.” His arm locks, tighter, tighter. World narrows to a ring of iron. Sound tunnels. Breath becomes a coin I can’t afford.
“Rena!” Auren again—closer—feet pounding gravel.
“Don’t,” the man snarls into my hair, choking me and the sentence at once. “One twitch, little light, and I snap—”
A roar tears the air in half.
Not human. Not distant. A beast-sound that shreds courage to ribbons. The fence rattles with it. My body recognizes before my mind does—every nerve goes still, waiting, as if the forest from my dream stood up inside the day.
Kai.
He hits the attacker behind me like a black wave with bones. Impact rips me free; the man flies sideways into the dumpster with a crunch that makes bile lick my tongue. I collapse forward, hands skidding on concrete. Knees bang. Ears ring. Air pours back into me too fast; I cough, gag, cough again.
The second wolf blinks through tears, swears, grabs for the dropped baton with blind fingers. Auren barrels into him shoulder-first. They slam into the brick; the baton skitters across the ground. “Get away from her!” Auren snarls, and for once there’s nothing performative in it—just fury and fear.
“Kill order!” the blinded one barks, swiping wild. “Luminous dies—”
“No,” Kai says, voice made of winter, and lifts the first attacker by the front of his jacket like he weighs nothing. Mask hangs crooked; eyes wild. A single punch folds him with a wet sound. He hits the ground, tries to crawl, fails. Kai doesn’t look at him again. His gaze finds me—checks breath, pupils, color—in one sweep that feels like being counted alive.
Auren wrestles the other down; a knee to the ribs buys him a gasp, a second to yank the mask half off, another to show a face I don’t recognize. “Who sent you?” he demands, forearm to throat. “Who—”
“Run,” the man coughs, and bucks hard. Auren wrenches for control. He gets it. Barely.
Sirens don’t wail, but I hear them anyway—imagined, predicted, a future someone else would have called, too late. My hands tremble so badly I can’t push myself up. Lyria paces—aiming for fight, getting held by fear. Up, she urges. Up, up—
“Kai,” I rasp. “I can’t—”
He’s already there. Kneels. One arm slides under shoulders, the other under knees, and I’m lifted—weightless and not—and tucked against heat that smells like rain on stone and steadiness. My cheek finds his chest on instinct; my body recognizes the shape it made in a dream. Every shaking part of me tries to hide under his heartbeat.
“You’re safe,” he says, voice wound low around me. “I’ve got you. I swear.”
A sob rips free—ugly, too loud. I hate it. He doesn’t. His palm cups the back of my head, shielding, fingers threading damp hair, thumb gentle at my nape. Breath hitches; breath steadies; breath remembers its job. I clutch his shirt—fistfuls—because falling feels possible again and I need proof that it isn’t.
“Rena.” Auren’s face appears over Kai’s shoulder—sweat, blood on his lip, eyes wrecked. He’s still got the second attacker in a hold; the man twists, spits, then goes limp with calculation. “You okay? Hey—look at me—”
“I’m—” Not okay. Not broken. Somewhere in between, shaking hard enough to rattle my teeth. “I’m here.”
“We need to move,” Kai says, gaze flicking to the corners, the roofline, the alley mouth. “Now.”
“Guys,” Auren pants, pinning his weight across the man’s shoulders, “we either tie this one or he bolts.”
The first attacker groans and tries to push up. Kai’s stare pins him to the concrete without contact. “Try it,” he suggests, conversational. The man thinks better.
Sir— footsteps thud inside my skull; not real—panic echo. I press closer. “Don’t put me down.”
“I’m not.” His arms tighten a fraction. “You’re with me.”
“Both of you breathe,” Auren says, breathless, trying for levity, landing on worry. “And maybe get out of the open? Cameras—”
He doesn’t finish. The second attacker wrenches hard, slithers out from under Auren’s grip with a burst of chem-strength desperation, then bolts around the dumpster. Auren cusses, launches after him. A blur of motion, a clatter of chain-link, a shoe scuffing metal—then both are gone around the bend.
The first whimpers, rolls, lurches to his feet. Kai’s eyes go flat. “No.”
The man reconsiders movement. He staggers backward instead, hands up, then spins and runs limping across the lot towards the service road. I expect Kai to throw me down and hunt. He doesn’t. His choice is me. It lands heavy and holy and terrifying.
“Let them run,” he says, to himself as much as to me. “We have names to pull and cameras to scrub.”
“I ruined lunch,” I choke, useless, hysterical.
He huffs something that might be a laugh if ruin weren’t all over the ground. “You ruined their day by surviving. Good.”
“I thought I was going to black out.” My voice shakes. “He—he said—”
“I heard.” His mouth hardens. “I’ll hear it in my sleep until I make sure they can’t say it to anyone again.”
“Kai.” Saying his name helps. I say it again. “Kai.”
“I’m here.”
“I—” Words shred. Tears restart, humiliating and unstoppable. “S-sorry—I can’t stop—”
“Don’t,” he murmurs, forehead tipping to mine for half a second, not touching, close enough to share breath. “You get to shake. You get to cry. You get to be alive.”
Footfalls pound back—Auren, empty-handed, furious, scanning the corners for a second helping. He skids to a stop, eyes flicking to me in Kai’s arms and away like it hurts. “He’s gone,” he grinds. “I’ll find him.”
“You’ll tell me what you saw,” Kai corrects, efficient through the rage. “Height, gait, scent, any mark.”
“Later,” Auren snaps, then catches himself. Softer: “Later. Get her out of here.”
My fingers curl tighter in Kai’s shirt. “Don’t fight,” I whisper, voice small and ruined. “Please.”
“We’re not,” Kai says, even if it’s a lie, even if I’m the rope holding two wolves apart with a sentence. “We’re moving.”
Students shout somewhere distant; the bell rings, useless. A golf cart whines down the far path—janitor on patrol. Kai shifts me higher, finding the place where my weight fits his chest like it always meant to. My breath hitches; his doesn’t.
“I can walk,” I try, token protest.
“You won’t,” he replies, not unkind. “Head down.”
I tuck under his chin. The world narrows to fabric and heartbeat and the steady cadence of his steps. Every jolt is a reminder that I’m not on that concrete, that hands aren’t on my throat, that light didn’t tear the sky open and swallow me. Auren ranges ahead, then behind, then to the side, a silent perimeter with clenched fists and a mouth he can’t trust.
We cut along a service corridor, through a side gate that yields to a swipe I don’t see, into the strip of parking reserved for a rank the school pretends it doesn’t cater to. Black SUV idles, driver already half out, eyes scanning. Doors click. Air-conditioning breathes cool over my sticky skin.
Kai lowers me onto the seat as if gravity might bruise. His jacket remains around my shoulders, heavy as a vow. Fingers brush my cheek, checking heat, checking color, checking that I’m not splitting into light again.
“Home,” I croak, ridiculous.
“No.” He crouches to eye level—storm-gray steady, mouth set. “You’re done living unprotected.”
“I don’t—what does that—”
“We’re leaving,” he says, decisive and low, the king and the man speaking the same truth. Arms slide under me again. Lift. Hold. “I’m taking you to the Capital. You’re done living unprotected.”