Lance ran around the corner. He’d followed the woman’s scent through street after street, leaving the rest of his team far behind.

His mate had run aimlessly, as far as he could tell. As though all she wanted was to get as far from the danger as possible.

Which meant she must be an innocent in all this.

The thought eased something inside him. Something about the situation at the subway station still pinged him as wrong, but he put that aside for now.

Her scent was stronger here. Lance glanced along the street, letting his human eyes shift slightly so he was seeing with his snow leopard’s more powerful senses.

There.

A short, stocky figure in a long coat, standing in a dark corner with her head bowed. There was exhaustion in every line of her body: the rounded shoulders, the hanging head. The shock of adrenaline from the explosion would be wearing off now, leaving her trembling and bone-weary.

She still had her hands wrapped around her front. Now that he knew what he was looking for, he saw the slight bulge under her coat.

Hope flared inside him. His hunch had been right. The hatchling had escaped—thanks to this stranger.

He could have laughed. How had he missed it earlier? The woman—his mate, God, this woman was his mate—had kept her hands in front of her stomach the whole time he was pulling her out of the burning station. She’d been protecting the hatchling under her jacket.

Lance lifted one hand to his shield. He’d kept it activated while he tracked her, but if she had the hatchling with her, a dragon hatchling, then she’d already seen enough weird shit for one day. A strange man appearing out of thin air right in front of her might just tip her over the edge.

His comm crackled.

“Briers here. I’m having trouble tracking the target, sir. And you, with the shield on. Can you let me know your location—”

Lance sighed. “I’ve got the target, Briers. Focus on tracking the shifter mercs from the station.”

“You’ve found her? But—”

Resisting the urge to roll his eyes, Lance muted his comm. Briers was good at what he did—but he got in a hell of a mood when his cameras and computers let him down. Well, let him stew. Lance had work to do. He tapped his shield off.

As Lance strode purposefully down the street, his snow leopard raised its head. Lance’s senses exploded as his animal tried to take in too much detail at once: the gas-dirt smell of the air, the million stale scents trodden into the sidewalk by passersby, the cold bite of the night air and the moving shadows on the street-front windows as cars passed by.

A million points of data, and not one of them explained his snow leopard’s sudden sense of wrongness. Frowning, Lance tapped his shield again.

He saw the attacker a split second later. A split second too late.

A black-clad man loomed above Lance’s mate, flicking an extendable baton. Lance broke into a run as he raised the weapon, aiming for the woman’s head.

“Look out!”

Shit. He hadn’t unshielded again. She wouldn’t even hear him.

He sprinted. He was only twenty or thirty feet from the woman and her attacker, but it was like he wasn’t moving at all. Time stretched out. The baton whistled towards the woman’s head in slow motion, and he was still too far away.

At the last moment, she cried out, and ducked.

Lance didn’t have time to stop or unshield, or thank his lucky stars that she’d moved in time. He barreled into the attacker, slamming him into the wall.

The man roared, dropping the baton and reaching for a gun. Lance grabbed his wrist and twisted, and the gun clattered to the ground.

Who are these people? he wondered as the man gave up on the idea of weapons altogether and tried to headbutt him. Lance stepped aside neatly and laid him out with one blow.

Lance knelt to make sure the attacker was out cold, and then looked up to see the barrel of a gun pointed directly at his face.

The woman had picked up the man’s gun and was aiming it straight at him. Her grip was shaky, the barrel waving back and forth—but that wasn’t exactly a good thing. Scared people did things they didn’t mean to.

Always assuming she didn’t actually mean to shoot him.

Lance considered his options. If he still had Briers on comms, he could have asked him to look up the woman’s name, and any information he could use to get her on his side. But he’d muted him, and that would take time, anyway.

Time to do this the old-fashioned way.

Lance straightened up slowly, holding his hands palms-out at his sides. Look, I’m unarmed, his stance said.

“Hey,” he said, keeping his voice low and even. “I hope you can hear me alright now, not like back at the station. My name’s Lance MacInnis. I’m—”

And then he made the biggest mistake of the night so far. He looked into her eyes.

“I…” he tried again, but his throat was suddenly dry.

He’d heard of this happening. When shifters met their mates for the first time, the mate bond formed. It would remain weak until the shifter claimed their mate and the mate accepted them, but the creation of the bond was still—and Lance was quoting his friend Grant here—”like having a fucking house fall on your head, and then explode”.

Lance thought the rush of adrenaline as he rescued her from the station had been his equivalent of that.

Oh, how wrong he’d been.

I tried to tell you, his snow leopard purred. I knew we should have followed her from the start!

He shushed it absently. The woman’s scent danced on his palate, like sweetness and salt and the crackle of sun on a hot pavement. Like a day at the beach, and finally jumping into the surf. Like endless summer, and the burst of a cool drink against your lips.

She was… Lance couldn’t put words to it. Beautiful wasn’t enough. Gorgeous wasn’t enough, even though she was. Her hair was pulled back severely, and she was pale with shock, but none of that stopped her beauty from shining through.

Lance’s eyes lingered on her soft-looking skin and a body that promised soft curves under her enveloping coat. One loose curl of dirty-blonde hair hung across her forehead. Lance felt the seconds ticking by, knew he should say something, but he was trapped, helplessly soaking up every detail of her he could see.

The curve of her ears, each with two small gold studs. The tension in her neck and shoulders as she held the gun on him.

Oh, that’s right, a voice said inside Lance, very far away. The gun. For some reason, that didn’t seem important. Not when he could look at her lips, instead. At her rounded cheeks.

Her eyes, stormy blue-gray, fierce with determination.

And confusion.

“Okay, what the f—fudge?” his mate demanded. “Are you—what’s going on? Are you alright? He just—you just…”

Her eyes dropped to the man crumpled at his feet and then shot to his face again, wide as saucers.

“You’re—from the station!”

“I—” Lance began, but his mate was still talking. And glaring at him. And pointing a gun at him.

Two of those things, he could live with. The other one was somewhat worrying.

Her eyes narrowed, which was even more worrying. “You’re after the dragon, as well!”

“Yes, but I—”

“You can’t have her!” The words were almost a shout. She took a step backwards, as though surprised by her own vehemence, and a small golden head wriggled out from under her coat collar.

The hatchling blinked at Lance with bright, cat-like eyes. It couldn’t be more than a few hours old, but Lance’s skin prickled, like the small creature was doing more than just blinking at him. It was assessing him.

Its scent was like pepper mixed with fireworks, not the wild, fresh scent of a feline shifter, but Lance’s snow leopard ignored that. It saw the cat-like eyes and small, wriggling shape, and greeted the infant shifter like it would any baby cat—with a playful psychic sniff and nudge.

The dragonling reared back, outrage in every line of its tiny body. Its eyes narrowed into suspicious slits, and it hissed before diving back under her collar.

“What did you just do to her—” the woman began, and then swore, her eyes flicking behind Lance. “Oh shit.”

Lance’s nostrils flared. A slight change in the air brought a familiar scent to his nose. The black-clad, shielded enemy agents from the station, their natural scents overlaid by the thick stench of smoke.

His snow leopard leapt to the fore, sharpening Lance’s senses as he checked over his shoulder.

Three of them. Shifters. Predators of some sort, but that was as much as he could tell when they were in human form.

Lance turned back to his mate and stared into her eyes. His vision fuzzed at first—he was standing close enough to her that his snow leopard’s farsightedness kicked in—but as he pushed his snow leopard’s senses back, he saw her clearly.

“Did your eyes just change color?” she hissed, and then made a frustrated noise. “Not that that’s the most important thing right now. They were at the station too, weren’t they? Oh, shit.”

Her pupils darkened as she stared back at him, and he wondered what she was seeing. The silver sheen of his snow leopard’s eyes? His dual nature, the wild animal inside the man?

Did she feel what he felt?

“Do you trust me?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

She glared at him. “Is it a choice between you and those assholes at the end of the street?”

Her expression was fierce, but fear flashed behind her eyes, just for a moment. Lance’s protective instincts surged as he realized how she could recognize the shifter mercs.

He’d picked her up while they were zeroing in on her. Before he touched her, she would have thought she was alone on that section of the platform. As soon as he put his arms around her, and she came under his shield, she would have seen the six black-clad soldiers suddenly surrounding her.

“I’ll protect you from them,” he promised her.

Her jaw clenched. “Fine. And…” Her eyes clouded with a confusion that was more vulnerable than the fear he’d seen in them a moment before. “I do. I do trust you. I don’t know why, but I do.”

Lance reached out. “Then come with me. I’ll keep you both safe.”

Shouts rang out behind him, but Lance didn’t bother looking back. His professional, human side told him that the enemy shifters wouldn’t dare shoot and risk hitting the valuable dragonling, and his snow leopard was too exultant to spare them a thought.

His mate’s hand fit into his like he had been made to hold her. Her fingers were slender, but strong. She smelled like sunlight and the sea and was so close to him he had to force his snow leopard’s eyes back, again, so he could see her clearly.

Lightning sparked where their skin touched. Lance grinned.

“Run!”