He moved her.

“Wrap your legs around me,” he said against her ear.

She did instantly, arms locking around his neck, legs clamping tight around his waist as if she were drowning and he was the only air left on the planet. Her grip was iron. Her body was shaking so hard the shaking was transferring into his chest, her tremors becoming his tremors, the matebond carrying her terror through every point of contact between their bodies.

He ran.

Alpha speed.

Holding her against his chest like she might break if he loosened his grip for even a second.

Her ragged breaths finally began to steady, shallow, uneven, but present.

Figures stepped out of the walls ahead. Tall. Thin. Wrong in a way that was different from everything else this corridor had produced, and the corridor had produced a comprehensive catalogue of wrong.

Each one’s skull was twisted completely around, chin resting against their spines, faces staring backward into the stone they had emerged from.

Their necks were over-rotated, tendons stretched tight and trembling, vertebrae bulging beneath skin pulled too far. The anatomy was a violation. A deliberate, calculated perversion of how bodies were supposed to work, designed to produce a revulsion that bypassed rational thought and hit the ancient, animal part of the brain that recognized predators.

They walked forward without looking where they were going. Their eyes never blinked.

As they moved, their limbs snapped backward at impossible angles, striking behind themselves with surgical precision.

Serena saw them.

“No. No, no,” she sobbed. The sound broke something in Dexmon’s chest. The breaking was physical. He felt it crack, somewhere behind his sternum, in the place where his composure lived, the composure that had been holding him together through vampires and volcanoes and skeleton wolves and portals and every other goddamn thing this continent had thrown at him. Her sob broke it.

Her body shook as she buried her face against Dexmon’s collarbone, breath ragged, desperate.

One of the creatures smiled, its mouth stretched sideways, jaw unhinging far beyond anything human. The smile was an invitation. The invitation was to a place where screaming was the currency and the currency was accepted in unlimited quantities.

Gold magic detonated from Dexmon’s body, blasting it back. A gold shield slammed around them, just as more spawned from the walls.

Aegon: You made that shield.

Dex: I have absolutely no idea how.

Aegon: I do. Mate was in danger. You made shield. Cause and effect. Very simple. Even for you.

Dex: Thank you for the encouragement during the worst moment of my life, Aegon.

Aegon: You are welcome. Your shield is better than your aim. Focus on shields.

“I’ve got you, baby. They’re touching you over my dead body.”

He kept moving, both arms locked around her. The shield rang like iron under pressure.

“I have absolutely no idea how I am making this shield, fair warning. If it breaks, I might need your help.”

She didn’t answer. Her face was buried against his neck and the buried was total, her entire world compressed to the square inches of his skin that she could press her face against, the pressing being the only thing between her and the corridor’s newest horror show.

They crowded closer, front, back, sides, closing space faster than he could clear it.

Then they spoke in unison.

“Silver chains.”

“Can’t breathe. Still can’t breathe.”

Dexmon’s blood went cold. The creatures were speaking her trauma. Her specific, personal, documented trauma. The corridor had accessed her memories and was playing them back through the mouths of things that should never have had mouths at all.

Dexmon blasted more of them back. Even with the shield, he couldn’t run with how fast they were appearing.

Half started making choking noises, while the other half spoke in unison.

“Drowning again. Too heavy to rise. Trapped.”

Half of them wheezed while the rest echoed screams.

“We ate the last white wolf. Pulled her apart slowly.”

“She screamed just like you.”

That broke her.

Her breathing shattered into panicked sobs. The sobs were full-body. Convulsive. The kind of crying that came from a place so deep it didn’t have a name, the place where trauma lived and trauma’s living was a permanent residency and the residency had just been activated by creatures reciting her worst fears in voices designed to maximize damage.

Dexmon snarled. The snarl was Aegon. The snarl was Dexmon. The snarl was both of them fused into a single frequency of rage so pure it bypassed human and went straight to something older and more dangerous.

More gold magic exploded out of him in a brutal wave, far more than he’d ever drawn before, more than he’d known he was capable of. It slammed into the corridor and everything in its path disintegrated on contact.

Bodies vanished.

The wave hit the walls. The floor. The ceiling. Gold light scoured the corridor in every direction, the magic expanding outward from the man at its center with a force that was producing structural damage to ancient stone that had survived ten thousand years of everything and was now being challenged by an Alpha whose mate was crying against his neck.

The screams lingered for a heartbeat after the magic faded, then cut off all at once.

The hallway gave him half a second of space.

Dexmon took it, bolting forward. A new gold dome snapped into existence around them, magic flaring bright.

Dark tendrils spawned from the walls in that instant. But the second they hit Dexmon’s magic, they screamed, furious. The screaming was different this time. The screaming was frustrated. The corridor’s tendrils were meeting resistance they couldn’t drain, gold magic that burned on contact instead of being absorbed, and the burning was producing a retreat that was involuntary and pissed off.

“Breathe, Serena. I’ve got you,” he said, kissing her ear.

He tightened his grip, both arms around her.

Fin’s voice slammed through the mindlink like a whip.

Fin: Dexmon, status update.

Dexmon vaulted over a collapsed section of stone without breaking stride.

Dexmon: Just secured her. Looking for cover.

He continued down the corridor with her tightly gripped in his arms. He kissed her head again. The kissing was involuntary. Each kiss was a punctuation mark on the sentence “I’ve got you.”

As more things came, he held her tighter, jaw clenched.

No one was taking her. The thought was clean, simple, absolute. The thought was the only thought in his head, the only instruction his body was running, the only line of code in the operating system of Dexmon Drakenfell, and the code was executing flawlessly and the flawless was producing gold magic and the gold magic was producing safety and the safety was the only gift he could give her right now and he was going to give it until his body gave out.