جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 20

Ronan hit Hale like a hurricane, shaped like a beast.The impact sent shockwaves through the collapsed room, shattering what little structure remained. Shards of metal clanged against walls, dust billowed upward, and the floor lurched beneath them all as the facility groaned in protest.Hale stumbled back, barely avoiding a swipe that would have taken his head clean off. Even in the chaos, the doctor did not look afraid — only irritated.“Knew you’d be close,” Hale muttered, touching the edge of a cracked console for balance.Ronan did not answer.He roared.A deafening, guttural explosion of sound that shook dust from the overhead beams and rattled the air like thunder trapped inside stone. The bear‑alpha towered over Kiera in a shield of fur, muscle, and fury, his claws gouging deep scars into the floor.The moment Hale flicked his wrist, Ronan lunged.Metal shrieked. The stun device in Hale’s hand sparked and died as Ronan crushed it beneath his claws.Hale slipped backward throug

The concrete slab plummeted toward her like a descending sky.Kiera didn’t have time to brace. Time didn’t exist.There was only falling stone, the rush of air, and Ronan’s voice—distant, strained, breaking—“KIERA—"Impact never came.Something slammed into her instead—warm, massive, alive. Ronan’s arms wrapped around her as he dove, his body curling over hers like a shield. The world exploded in a roar of stone and dust as the slab hit where she had stood only seconds before.Kiera’s vision went white.The floor heaved beneath them, buckling. The air filled with choking grit. Cracks split across the walls like lightning frozen in concrete. Pipes screamed as they tore free. Hot sparks rained down in frantic showers.The entire facility was dying.Ronan held her tighter, one hand cupping the back of her head, pulling her into his chest as debris battered down around them.“Stay with me,” he rasped—not mind‑to‑mind, but out loud, the words torn from him in a desperate growl. “Stay wit

The first set of footsteps hit the metal corridor like a hammer.Fast. Heavy. Numerous.Kiera’s breath strangled in her throat.She stumbled backward, palms scraping along the cold concrete walls as she pushed herself away from the line of flickering lights, away from the glass windows where shadows writhed like half-formed nightmares.She didn’t have time to process what she was seeing.She didn’t have time to think.She only had time to run.The emergency lights hummed to life overhead, one by one, bathing the long corridor in a flickering red glow. The glass cells lining the walls pulsed like enormous, blood-lit eyes.And behind the glass—Something moved.Something hungry.Her heartbeat stuttered. Her knees threatened to buckle.“Ronan”— she tried to send his name through the barely‑there bond, but all she felt was static.He was too far. Or the bond was too weak. Or something down here was interfering—She didn’t know.She didn’t have time to know.A metallic voice crackled

Ronan ran by scent and sound and the throb of the bond.Dust seared his lungs. Heat pressed off broken conduits. The tunnels shrieked as the old facility tore itself apart above and below him. None of it mattered. He tracked the one thing he would never lose: her—the thin, electric thread that tugged behind his ribs, leading him into the kind of dark a sane creature avoids.Kiera’s panic had a taste. Cold iron. Storm‑salt. It spiked, vanished, spiked again. Too far. Too faint. Interference crackled through the link like static.“Hold on”, he thought at her, forcing calm through a throat that wanted to roar. “I’m close.”He wasn’t sure she could hear him.A side corridor had collapsed, leaving a jagged gap over a churning black shaft. He didn’t slow. He sprinted, leapt, caught the opposite ledge with clawed hands, and hauled his weight up in a shower of stones. His shoulder throbbed where the earlier dart had grazed bone. The scent of his own blood blended with scorched metal.“Ronan!”

For a moment after the name left Hale’s lips, the forest stopped breathing.Kiera.Liora. The two names collided inside Ronan’s chest like twin storms, both hers, neither hers, both true, both wrong.But Hale… Hale said the older one like a claim.Like ownership.Ronan’s claws dug into the earth hard enough that dirt cracked beneath his fingertips.Kiera—no, Kiera—hovered inches above the ground, her body suspended in a ripple of white‑hot psychic pressure. Her hair lifted in threads of static. Her eyes—usually sharp, wary, alive—glowed with cold, hollow light.She looked like a star burning itself out.But he refused to see her as anything but the terrified, furious, brave woman who had fought every second of her life to survive.“Kiera,” Ronan whispered again, even though she warned him not to come closer. His voice was rough, scraped raw by fear and fury. “Look at me. Not him.”Her eyes flicked toward him—barely, but enough to send a tremor of hope through him.Hale stepped forwar