Chapter 8 · Breathed Back to Life

Chapter 8: Breathed Back to Life

The gate ripped sideways and the river slammed into me like a fist.

Four feet of black water, and I'd stopped being able to tell up from down about ten seconds before the metal gave. I heard the groan first — steel tearing its own throat out — then light cracked through the seam above me, thin and white and widening fast.

Kane. That's a Tier-Four lockdown door. Nobody rips that open with his hands.

He did.

I saw him through the flooded glass, shoulders blown wide, veins standing up his neck like cable, both palms flat against steel that was never built to bend for a man. The council had a word for what he was doing. Illegal. Primal override. The kind of raw Alpha force that gets heirs stripped of rank in front of the whole pack.

He didn't look like he cared.

The gate buckled with a crack I felt in my back teeth, and the current punched through the gap and dragged me with it — out of the dead end, out of the chamber that was about to be my coffin, into open water.