Page 265 of Blood and Ruin: The Complete Series

I’m down the hall and in the lift by the time they catch up to me.

Kai stalks into the lift, caging me in. “Stay close and don’t do anything stupid, or next time we play, I’ll bend you over and teach that ass a lesson you won’t forget.”

I bite my lip, giving him a wicked smirk. “Looking forward to it…Alpha.”

Kai’s eyes darken. “Good girl.”

“Fuck.” Axel groans, stepping in behind us. The others follow.

Jax raises his hand, waiting for everyone to look his way.

“Yes, Jax.” Kai sighs, his gaze briefly flicking upwards, waiting for his reply.

“Well, if we’re going with new nicknames, I think mine should behubby.”

Luka chokes on air, giving him a wide-eyed expression.

Rion finds it amusing.

Jax looks at me expectedly. “What do you think?”

“I think…” The lift pings opening on the ground floor. I turn, walking backwards out of the lift. “You should talk to my other mates about that.”

“We unanimously vote no,” Luka says without missing a beat.

Smiling to myself, I head for the large portal, smack in the middle of the lounge. There are a couple of men and women around it, talking. As soon as they see us, they go quiet and stand up straighter.

“Alphas. We’ll be here for when you need the portal reopened.”

“Thank you, Celina,” Kai says.

Luka takes my hand as we step through the portal and walk straight out into chaos. Complete and utter chaos.

“What the…” Luka says, looking around at the destruction.

The air is thick with fog. Black smoke billows from every surface. Buildings are up in flames, with most of them already crumbling or completely destroyed. The road is no longer visible, with chunks missing and long, jagged cracks breaking it into nothing but rubble.

Cars are overturned, their shape nearly unrecognizable as the flames eat away at them. The smell of burning rubber assaults my senses as we pass them.

“Damn,” Jax whispers as we spot the demon beast in action.

A cold shiver runs down my back at my first look of one of the demons. It is something not even my nightmares could come up with to terrorize me.

Four long, sharp, jagged horns sit on the side and on top of its head, with more running down the length of its back. Its entire body is covered in a hard black leathery hide with razor-edged spikes running along its shoulders and arms.

It’s huge, towering over us all and matching the size of the buildings around it, but it’s the face that creeps me out the most. It has two lines of dark, sharply pointed teeth on the top and bottom of its wide-open mouth and two sets of sinister yellow eyes.

“That’s the biggest one yet,” Luka tells us.

Good to know they aren’t all this huge and terrifying.

Hunching down, it uses its arms to destroy everything around it, clawing the ground and scraping it up like clay. People are screaming and shouting, some running toward it in their shifter form to fight, but most are running away.

There are smaller beasts that look like some sort of hybrid mix between a hyena and lion, but their tails are spiked, and they use them like a weapon to slash out at people around it. Fog spills from the large demon and blankets the smaller hybrid beasts as they move about.

Jax glances over at me, his face pale. “Baby… maybe you should—”

“No. I’m staying.” I give him a hard look, telling him this isn’t something they can sway me on. I’m not leaving them. This is my fight as much as it is theirs.

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