The rusted hinges of the service door screamed before they even moved.
To Raphael's hyper-sensitized hearing, the grinding metal sounded like a slaughterhouse winch. A slice of sickly yellow kitchen light spilled into the pitch-black alley, cutting through the overwhelming stench of rotting garbage and stale piss.
Raphael didn't breathe.
He was crouched low behind a row of overflowing industrial dumpsters, the wet cobblestones soaking right through the knees of his dark denim. He hadn't dropped from the sky like a theatrical superhero. He had tracked Knighton's movements through the restaurant's skylight, watched the bastard slip the paralytic into his mate's wine, and then descended to the ground to build a graveyard.
The heavy steel door slammed shut. The jazz music was violently cut off.
James Knighton shoved Ebony out into the humid muck.
She stumbled. Her expensive heels dragged uselessly over the slick brick. The synthetic sedative was already ravaging her central nervous system. Her knees buckled, and Knighton cursed under his breath, hauling her roughly back up by the thin strap of her emerald dress. The silk dug viciously into her golden skin, dangerously close to the faint, raised rose birthmark between her shoulder blades.
The Jaguar inside Raphael slammed against the cage of his ribs, roaring for blood.
Hold, he ordered his beast. Not yet. Let the trap close.
"Stand the fuck up, Ebony," Knighton hissed, dropping the charming gentleman act entirely. He wrapped a thick arm around her waist, practically carrying her dead weight.
"James..." Ebony slurred, her head lolling against his chest.
Even now, her brilliant, deeply naive brain was trying to rationalize the nightmare. Her tongue felt like lead, but her thoughts stubbornly tried to piece together a logical puzzle. He just wants the lab codes, she thought fuzzily, fighting the encroaching dark. He's a corporate spy. She was a world-class virologist, but when it came to reading the absolute, unadulterated evil in a man's eyes, she was hopelessly blind.
"You don't... you don't need to do this," she mumbled. "I'll give you the drives..."
Knighton laughed. It was a cruel, scraping sound. "Shut up. You don't have a clue what you're worth, do you?"
From the deepest shadows, Raphael watched.
For over a century, he had been an empty vessel. A weapon forged in blood. He had long ago accepted that the earth considered him too stained, too jagged to ever be granted a mate. He thought he was a statistical anomaly. A dead end.
Then he caught her scent in the street. Crushed lavender. Raw honey. The ozone of a breaking thunderstorm.
The bond hadn't blossomed; it had detonated inside his chest, shattering a hundred years of ice. And the very first thing the universe forced him to watch was this tailored piece of shit putting his hands on her.
Headlights cut through the dark. An idling black transit van pulled to the mouth of the alley. The rear doors swung open.
Five men piled out into the muck. They moved with military precision, tactical vests strapped tight, compact submachine guns raised and sweeping the perimeter. High-dollar corporate mercenaries.
"Get her in the back," the handler barked, stepping around the driver's side door. He had an ultraviolet stamp glowing faintly on his wrist. "We're burning time. The buyer at the docks wants her breathing and conscious."
Knighton dragged Ebony toward the open cargo doors. She let out a soft, broken whimper, her body fully betraying her.
In the shadows, Raphael's humanity burned away into ash.
[Boss,] Thiago's voice buzzed sharply through the mental pack-link. The Beta was stationed by the fire escape, watching the exact same nightmare unfold. [The mission is a live capture. We need Knighton breathing to trace the money back to the Permanent Collection.]
Dante's mental voice sliced in, cold and tight. [Fuck the intel, Thiago. Look at the Alpha. He's gone.]
[Hold your fire,] Mateo whispered across the bond, the youngest sniper sounding genuinely terrified. [If they spray that alley, she gets hit.]
Knighton lifted Ebony off her feet, preparing to toss her into the metal cage of the van like a sack of meat.
Raphael moved.
He didn't shift into the Jaguar yet. A massive feline form was too big a target for five submachine guns in a narrow choke point. He needed to clear the board first.
He stepped out from behind the dumpster, drawing the heavy, serrated combat blade from his thigh sheath.
[Thiago,] Raphael's telepathic voice was a guttural, sub-harmonic rasp that didn't sound human at all. [Leave the handler breathing. Slaughter the rest.]
The alley exploded.
Raphael crossed the distance to the first mercenary before the man's brain could even register the movement. He didn't bother with a tactical disarm. He grabbed the barrel of the submachine gun, shoved it toward the sky, and drove his blade upward through the soft tissue just under the man's chin. The steel punched straight through the roof of the mouth and scrambled the brain. Blood erupted in a hot, wet geyser. Raphael ripped the knife free, letting the corpse drop into a puddle.
To his left, Thiago dropped from a low fire escape overhang, landing directly on the shoulders of the second merc. The crunch of the man's cervical spine snapping echoed like a gunshot.
"Contact!" the third merc screamed, squeezing the trigger. A blind spray of bullets chewed into the brick and ricocheted off the dumpsters.
Isaías hit him like a freight train. The massive enforcer tackled the shooter around the waist, driving him backward into the corrugated steel side of the van with bone-shattering force. Isaías buried his thumbs directly into the man's eye sockets. The mercenary shrieked until Isaías slammed his skull against the steel panel and the screaming stopped.
Dante handled the fourth. The sharpshooter slipped out of the shadows with a terrifying, manic grin, parried a desperate knife thrust, stepped inside the guard, and drew his blade across the merc's throat. A deep, messy cut. The man dropped his weapon, drowning on his feet.
It was over in six seconds. The air turned thick with the copper stench of fresh blood and voided bowels.
Lucas, moving with clinical detachment, pinned the handler with the ultraviolet tattoo against the hood of the van. He drove a throwing knife straight through the man's hand, pinning it to the metal.
The handler screamed.
"Shut the fuck up," Lucas said flatly, pulling a heavy zip-tie from his belt and yanking the man's uninjured arm behind his back.
Only James Knighton was left.
He had dropped Ebony when the ambush started. She was slumped against the rear tire of the van, barely conscious, her chest rising and falling in shallow, ragged hitches.
Knighton backed up, his polished dress shoes slipping in the bloody muck. He pulled a compact 9mm pistol from a shoulder holster, aiming it directly at Raphael's chest. The broker's face was pale, his eyes wide, but the sheer, sociopathic arrogance in his DNA refused to let him beg.
"You think you can just crash my drop?" Knighton spat, his hands shaking. "Do you have any idea who I work for? The people paying for her will hunt you down and skin you alive."
Raphael didn't care about his gun. He didn't care about his threats.
He looked at Knighton, and the last tether to his human restraint completely snapped.
The shift was a brutal, agonizing tearing of anatomy. Raphael's bones cracked and elongated. His spine bowed, tearing his shirt to shreds as dense, corded muscle packed onto his frame. Midnight-black fur erupted from his pores. His jaw dislocated and pushed forward into a massive, crushing snout filled with serrated teeth. The agony was blinding, but it was nothing compared to the rage burning in his chest.
In a matter of seconds, a six-hundred-pound melanistic jaguar stood in the alley.
The beast's eyes were pools of molten, burning gold. Its breath plumed in the humid air. The guttural growl that rolled out of its chest made the metal panels of the van rattle.
Knighton stared at the monster. The corporate bravado finally shattered.
"What the fuck..." Knighton whispered.
He pulled the trigger.
Bang. Bang. Two 9mm rounds hit the Jaguar in the heavy muscle of its shoulder. The bullets barely penetrated the dense, supernatural tissue. It felt like being stung by angry hornets.
It only pissed the beast off more.
Raphael lunged.
He cleared the twelve feet between them in a terrifying blur of black muscle. He hit Knighton squarely in the chest, the kinetic force lifting the man off his feet and slamming him into the back doors of the van. Knighton's ribs cracked under the impact. The pistol clattered uselessly to the cobblestones.
The Jaguar pinned him there, four-inch blades of obsidian bone sinking through the expensive suit jacket and piercing the skin over the man's lungs.
Knighton coughed up a splatter of blood, but the sick bastard actually smiled. His teeth were stained red.
"Go ahead," Knighton wheezed. "Kill me. You're just a dumb fucking animal. You won't get the buyer's name."
Behind the beast, Thiago's voice rang out through the mental link, tense and pleading. [Alpha, hold! We need him breathing! Just take a leg!]
The Jaguar didn't give a shit about the intel.
He leaned in close, his hot, blood-soaked breath washing over Knighton's face. He wanted the man to look into his eyes and understand exactly what he had awakened. You don't put your hands on an Alpha's mate and get to keep your pulse.
Raphael opened his massive jaws. He didn't go for a quick, clean kill. He clamped his teeth down on Knighton's right shoulder—the exact same hand that had squeezed Ebony's hip, the exact same hand that had poured the poison.
The Jaguar bit down with a sickening, wet crunch, completely crushing the clavicle and scapula into powder.
Knighton threw his head back and finally screamed. It was a ragged, horrific sound that tore his vocal cords. The Jaguar ripped its head back, tearing a massive chunk of muscle and fabric completely away. Knighton slumped against the van, his eyes rolling back in shock.
But Raphael wasn't done.
He stepped forward, placed his jaws around Knighton's throat, and felt the frantic fluttering of the man's pulse against his tongue.
He clamped down.
The carotid artery burst. The windpipe collapsed with a wet snap. Knighton's body jerked violently as blood sprayed in a thick, dark arc across the side of the van. The Jaguar released him. Knighton slid down the metal panel into the puddles, twitched twice, and went entirely still.
The alley fell into a ringing, heavy silence, broken only by the ragged breathing of the pack and the dripping of blood.
Lucas stood over the pinned handler, wiping a knife clean on his pants. "Well. So much for asking him questions."
"We have his phone," Thiago said grimly, stepping over a gutted mercenary. "And the handler. It's enough. But we need to move. The cops are going to get called for the gunfire."
Raphael ignored them.
The bloodlust began to recede, leaving behind an overwhelming, frantic need. He turned away from the mangled corpse and looked down at Ebony.
She was slumped against the tire, her eyes half-open, glazed over from the heavy sedative. She was a brilliant scientist who spent her life looking at the world through the cold, logical lens of biology, and she was currently staring at a six-hundred-pound monster dripping with human gore.
Raphael stepped toward her, his heart hammering. He was terrified she would scream. He was terrified the bond would be tainted by the absolute horror of what he had just done.
He lowered his massive head, sniffing her hair. She smelled like terror and chemicals, but underneath it, her true scent was intoxicating.
Ebony's heavy, drugged eyelids fluttered. To her foggy, poisoned mind, he was just a massive, impossible shadow that had saved her from the bad men.
She slowly lifted her hand. Her trembling fingers brushed against the thick black fur of his cheek.
"Pretty boy," she whispered, a small, sleepy smile touching her lips. "Good boy."
The Jaguar completely froze.
The massive, lethal killing machine leaned into her gentle touch, letting out a low, rumbling purr that vibrated deep in his chest.
Her hand slipped away, falling into her lap as the drug finally pulled her completely under. Her eyes closed, and her breathing slowed to a steady rhythm.
Raphael stepped back. He let the shift reverse.
It was just as painful going back. The bones snapped into place, the fur receding into his skin. Within seconds, a man knelt in the bloody muck of the alley. He was completely naked, his chest heaving, his skin slick with sweat and gore.
He was shaking. Not from the pain of the shift, but from the sheer, overwhelming realization that she was his.
Thiago tossed Raphael a pair of dark sweatpants pulled from the gear bag in the SUV. "Put these on, Boss. Dante is bringing the truck around. We need to vanish."
Raphael pulled the pants on, ignoring the blood drying on his torso. He reached down and scooped Ebony into his arms. She was so light. She fit perfectly against his chest, her head lolling onto his shoulder.
"Take the handler to the safehouse," Raphael ordered, his voice still rough and gravelly from the beast. "Break his fingers until he gives you the encryption key for that phone. Find out who the buyer at the docks is."
"And her?" Thiago asked, looking at the unconscious woman.
Raphael tightened his grip on Ebony, pressing his face into her hair.
"She comes with me," he said. "Nobody touches her. Nobody looks at her. She is mine."
He turned and walked out of the slaughterhouse, carrying his mate into the dark.