Page 18 of Roar Me Like You Mean It
The dream finds me again.
This time it’s not just fire. Smoke curls thick around me, dense and choking, and inside it shapes move, hulking and violent. I hear claws dragging across steel, scraping in slow rhythm like a warning. The growl comes next, deeper than before, not just sound but vibration, rattling through marrow, pressing me to my knees.
And then those eyes. Gold, unblinking, alive in a way that feels ancient. They fix on me as if the dream isn’t mine at all, as if I’ve been pulled into someone else’s memory.
I wake tangled in damp sheets, my chest heaving. The clock glows faintly just after six. Light creeps through the blinds, pale and cold. I stumble to the desk, open the laptop, and log in again.
The whistleblower portal greets me with a clean screen. No trace of my report. No confirmation. Not even a placeholder.
I check archives, reviewed files, pending cases. Nothing.
It’s as though I never typed a word.
For a moment I just sit there, staring at the glow until my eyes blur. My pulse hammers, too fast, too hard. This isn’t a glitch. It’s not an error. This is someone pulling my report before it ever had the chance to breathe.
My lips shape the word before I realize it’s there. “Thorne.”
The sound of his name in my empty apartment feels heavier than the silence itself.
He knows.
And if he knows, then I am already in more danger than I was in that lab.
11
MALEK
The safehouse waits at the very edge of the Alps, buried in stone and shadow where even satellites cannot find it. I only come here when I need to remember, which is not often, because remembering is a dangerous game.
Tonight, though, I drive the narrow mountain roads with the windows down, the icy air biting my skin like punishment, and I tell myself it’s not a memory I’m chasing. It’s control.
The building is older than most of the cities that surround it, a black structure cut into the rock face, hidden behind a thicket of pines. From the road it looks like nothing—an abandoned hunting lodge left to rot—but the reinforced steel doors at the back tell a different story. The lock recognizes me at once, palm pressed against the panel, and the bolts groan open.
Inside, the air is colder still, the silence thicker.
The room opens into a cavern lined with stone walls that have stood longer than nations. Shelves run the length of it, stacked with relics, weapons, scrolls sealed in wax, maps traced in ink that has faded to brown. The Crimson Pact might be broken, but its remnants live here, fragments of the oath we once swore, fragments of the lives we destroyed to keep it alive.
I shrug out of my coat and move through the space, trailing my fingers along the spine of a ledger written in Latin, the script familiar though it’s been centuries since I last studied it. The maps spread across the far table still mark territories long abandoned, lines drawn to show which of us guarded which borders, where the Syndicate could not tread, where we promised the world would stay safe from the truth of what we were.
I stop at the center, where a glass case holds what’s left of the seal itself. Crimson once, now dark as dried blood, cracked down the middle. I remember the night it shattered.
Rafe had been laughing even as he bled, his wild grin splitting his face as he swung his blade into Roman’s shoulder. Cassian hadn’t moved, his stillness like a monument, only his eyes following the betrayal as if he had known all along. Darius had roared his fury, the ground itself answering when he called on it, but Roman had already broken us by then. The seal split with the sound of a bone snapping, and I knew even before I saw it that nothing would ever bind us again.
I close my eyes and inhale the scent of the place. Dust, stone, old parchment, and under it the faint metallic tang of blood soaked into walls that remember everything.
My mind drifts where I don’t want it to. To her.
Jennifer Callahan, walking into the ballroom like she owned it, standing in my path like no one else ever has. Her voice sharp, her gaze sharper, her will the kind of steel that makes men like me notice.
She should be nothing to me. Just another opponent, another hunter who thinks the law can bind creatures like us. But the lion inside me knows better. It recognized something before I did, and now I can’t unhear the echo of her words, can’t forget the scent that clung to the air after she walked away.
I know what it would mean to give in to that pull.
The Pact was created to prevent it. To keep us apart from them, to ensure we never blurred the line between their world and ours. Darius was the one who said it first, but I agreed. So did Cassian. Even Rafe, with all his chaos, understood. To love them is to doom them. To tie ourselves to them is to burn the fragile wall that keeps the world from seeing what we are.
And yet I can’t stop thinking about what it would feel like to taste her skin.
I push away from the case, jaw clenched, and pour myself a drink from the decanter resting on the shelf. The whiskey burns going down, but it doesn’t quiet the images.
