Page 37 of Say You're Mine

A deep, droning roar fills my skull, drowning cognition in a retching tide of blood-drenched fury. The chains and electrodes and slivered skin fade to insignificance against the inferno erupting in my core.

They dare. They dare to threaten what's mine, the only pure and perfect thing I've ever called my own? They dare imply that my child - my fierce, wild love made impossibly tender flesh - might be ripped untimely from this world before ever drawing breath?

No. A thousand times no and fuck no, a neon-bright denial scrawled across the underside of my atrophied soul.

I will peel the skin from their bones in still-screaming strips. I will turn the earth to salted glass and choke the seas with corpses before I let them lay one desecrating finger on Cara or the fragile promise we've kindled between us.

My bonds shear like cobwebs as I lunge for Faulkner's pencil-scrawny throat, a guttural snarl erupting from a place so deep and primal it vibrates in my very nuclei. His eyes bulge comically behind his spectacles as my fingers clamp down, each tendon and vein throbbing against my palm in panicked staccato.

"You vile, soulless, malignant little toad," I croon, tasting his fear like ambrosia on my tongue, "I will see you and all your misbegotten ilk scoured from the face of this blighted fucking earth before - "

Twin pinpricks of scorching agony lance the meat of my shoulders. A red-hot railroad spike rammed through my eye sockets and out the base of my skull. I convulse, gagging on a garbled howl, before my nerveless fingers slacken and slide free.

Through the strobing crimson haze I glimpse two black-clad wraiths materializing at my sides, Tasers still crackling in their ham-sized fists. Of course. Faulkner's ever-present safety net, primed to drag unruly experiments back across the shattered border of sanity.

I hit the frigid tile like a sack of overwrought meat, cheek mashed against filthy ceramic, every synapse firing white-hot agony down my screaming dendrites. Somewhere above, the sharp slice of expensive leather on linoleum, a throat clearing with self-satisfied delicacy.

"An admirable effort, truly. The sheer Neanderthal brutality of it sent quite the atavistic shiver up my spine."

A toe prods me, fastidious as a housewife disposing of a particularly noisome bit of roadkill. "But as you can see, your charming obstinacy has once again proven...insufficient."

The foot rolls me with surgical precision, splaying me onto my back like a snared rabbit. Faulkner's face swims into focus, blotchy and empurpled, eyes lambent with lunatic glee.

"Now then. Shall we continue?"

The snap-hiss of live current buzzes in my peripheral, the scents of ozone and singed hair acrid in my nostrils. I squeeze my eyes shut, lips peeling back from clenched teeth, tendons cording in my neck as I brace for the inevitable onslaught.

But in the lightning-split instant before the fire swallows me, I tumble down, down into the warm velvet dark behind my eyelids.

There in the sheltering shadows, Cara waits. Limned in gossamer gold, lush and luminous as a Botticelli angel, serene as a Madonna. My hands - whole and unscarred, elegant and dexterous as they were Before - rise to cup her beloved face, trace the salt-damp swell of her cheek with a touch lighter than thistledown.

"Do you trust me?" I rasp, shock-raw throat turning it to a raven's croak.

Quicksilver eyes, glinting in the gloom, fathomless as the sea and just as enthralling. "With every beat of our hearts."

I shudder, a full-body spasm that verges on the ecstatic. The truest vow we can make, an affirmation of the bond that sears and sustains us despite the unceasing tempest without.

"Then know this." I tilt until our brows meet, until our lashes tangle and our breath mingles, cinnamon and honeyed cloves. "No earthly force, no power in this benighted universe, will keep me from you. From our family."

A hand, still rope-raw and needle-pricked, presses light as a sigh against the swollen silk of her belly.

"I'm coming home, my wild. I'm coming home, if I have to slaughter the armies of hell and sow the earth with salt to do it."

She smiles then, slow and enigmatic as a sphinx, a warrior queen girding herself for glorious battle even as her fingers twine through mine.

"Then I'll wait, my love. At the edge of the world, at the end of all things, I will wait for you."

I bury my face in the jasmine-and-orange-blossom cascade of her hair, breathe deep the scent of hearth and home. "Let them come," I growl, savage and exultant and ablaze with the purity of purpose. "Let them unleash their worst. We will meet them, you and I, and we will make them bleed."

The words hang between us, a blood-oath, a covenant signed and sealed in the marrow of our matching souls. And as the first white-hot flares of electric torment ravage through me, I cradle their echoes close, a lodestar to steer by through the hellish shoals ahead.

I will come for you, Cara. For our son, our daughter, the world-devouring love we've blazed into being between us.

Faulkner can shatter my skeleton, Elaine can send her jackbooted thugs to grind me to gory dust.

It will make no difference. My path is locked, my purpose fixed and unshakable as the pillars of creation.

I will have my vengeance. I will reclaim my reason for being.

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