Kragen was losing blood.

Fast.

He winced as he pulled back the wire fencing that circled the perimeter of his chosen hiding place, and paused, one more time, to gather his focus.

He had been shot with a phase rifle. He should be dead. The only thing that had kept him alive was the kiss from his mate.

Andromeda.

Even still, he had to concentrate not to lose consciousness. The blow to the stab wound in his side that had never healed would have been enough to fell a less-determined Leonid; he could already feel toxins seeping into his blood from his damaged organs. And the burns from the phase rifle went deep, as they were designed to do. The blast radius was centered on his shoulder, but the wound spiraled down his side and back, to the now-open stab wound.

If that could not stop him, nothing would. Nothing, until he knew she was safe.

Kragen locked eyes on the side door of the warehouse, barely visible in the dark, and put one foot in front of the other.

He had nearly destroyed Magnus.

His blood brother.

And he would do it again, for her.

Kragen had had no choice but to strike at Magnus’s mind, but that did not change the outcome. He had only pulled back when he realized Magnus was strangely undefended, as though his blood brother had been starving for kuma for a long time. Perhaps as long as his other brother.

And Magnus had not been wearing the uniform of the Royal Guard, but of the Judicial Masters. He had been demoted after what had happened. Because of what Kragen had done.

Because of who, exactly, Kragen kept in the basement of this very warehouse.

So close now.

Kragen could feel her warmth stirring in his heart.

And then he felt something else.

Something darker. Something larger. Something that had been lurking for a long time, asleep in the deepest depths of Kragen’s psychic awareness. For a moment, he didn’t understand, because it felt like nothing else he’d ever experienced. The hunger was immense. It was the single-minded drive of a predator.

There was only one thing in the universe that would feel like that right now.

One Leonid.

He leaned against the side of the warehouse as he opened the side door and stumbled into darkness. He didn’t understand. He shouldn’t be able to feel him, not like that.

And then he understood.

Kragen wasn’t sensing his lost brother in the basement.

He was sensing Andromeda.

She was with him.

With a roar, Kragen broke out into a run.

* * *

Andie was in the dark.

Seriously, it was pitch black in the sub-basement. The only measly double-filtered moonlight streamed in from the crack in the extremely heavy door that she had managed to pry open just wide enough so that she could squeeze through with only minor boob squishing.

She was fucking terrified.

Every October, she and Kat had done a scary-movie binge. Even when they lived, briefly, in different states, they had Skyped and scared themselves silly with as many horror movies as possible. So Andie had at least a graduate-level education in how to avoid likely horrible deaths, and a heavily guarded, chained, and padlocked basement was definitely on the “avoid at all costs, you freaking dummy” list.

But Kragen had protected her with his body when someone pointed a giant space gun at them. He’d risked exposure to save her in a parking lot. And she knew, without a doubt, that if he were in her place, he wouldn’t just hang out and wait for her to deal with it.

And if she wanted a partner, someone who would trust her as much as she trusted him…

Granted, she wanted a partner who would hold her down by her hair and show her that he owned her ass, but still. She wanted a partner.

You have to be as brave as he is.

If there were weapons that could help him down here, she would find them. She’d just have to avoid whatever the hell else was down here, too.

As quietly as possible, Andie felt her way down the first step into the dark. Then the second. Her breathing echoed loudly in her ears, and her palms stuck to the guardrail, moistened with sweat. Her heart thudded in her chest as her body forgot all about Kragen’s kiss, and remembered all about survival.

Andie made it five steps down before she started to shake.

She counted her breaths until she felt her heart start to slow down, and her brain start to think beyond no no no no no.

And then she remembered her cell phone, and nearly laughed out loud.

Her phone didn’t provide much light, but it was enough to show her the corrugated metal stairs in front of her.

Andie was all the way down the stairs, standing on an unfinished dirt floor, before she realized her phone was also bright enough to wake something up.

She put the phone to sleep and stood statue still, frozen and silent.

And she waited.

You are just on an adrenaline high from having space guns pointed at you, she told herself. You haven’t seen or heard anything weird. You are just messing with your own head.

And besides, Kragen wouldn’t send her somewhere dangerous. She knew that, more than she knew anything else.

Then she thought: He didn’t send you to the basement.

Andie blinked in the darkness. When she opened her eyes, she almost thought she could see something. A little bit of light.

The kind that lived in Leonid metal.

Or maybe she just thought she could see, as soon as she heard the slow, heavy clang-clang-clang of Leonid chains sliding past each other as something large and strong stirred.

Andie stopped breathing.

She could see. Barely. She could see him, because he glowed, ever so slightly.

He was a huge Leonid, bronzed skin, white-blond hair, impossibly heavy shoulders hulked over his big body, his head bent down. He was covered in the shifting highlights of Leonid metal. Covered in Leonid chains.

Slowly, so slowly, his chains hissing in protest, he rose to his full height.

He was on the other side of the now dim basement, near the wall. There was a sort of bed behind him, other things. Empty syringes. But mostly there were chains. She wondered that this Leonid could move at all.

This was what Kragen was hiding?

A prisoner?

Andie was about to say something, anything to help her understand how Kragen could have done this, when the white-haired Leonid opened his eyes.

They blazed gold.

Andie couldn’t look away. They were hypnotic. Something, some tiny ancient forgotten voice in the back of her primitive brain, told her to run. Run fast. Run now.

This is a predator. You are the prey.

She said, “What are you?”

His voice rumbled through the floor to shake her very bones.

“Huuuungry,” he said.

* * *

Kragen was aware of every drop of blood he lost, every bit of damage to his internal organs, every little tear of flesh or burn to the nerves. But it was happening somewhere far away from his focus.

Andromeda.

He sensed her before he saw her. Smelled her.

Fear.

She was afraid.

By the time he reached the back of the warehouse, Andromeda was pushing, with all her might, on the door to the basement. It was still open just enough for someone of her size to slip through. He could feel what lay down in the basement. Could feel the waves of malevolent hunger roiling off of what had once been his brother, Rune.

Roaring, Kragen used his last ounce of strength to rush forward, slamming into the heavy door behind Andromeda. With a heavy, final thud, it shut tight.

Kragen did not hesitate. He grabbed the Leonid metal padlock in his bare hand and secured the chains around the door. In his weakened state, the Leonid metal seared his flesh with a hiss. It did not matter. None of it mattered.

She had seen.

Kragen turned from her, too angry, too sad, too filled with the sting of failure to trust himself at the moment. He let his big, burned, scarred hands rest on a rusting industrial shelving unit, propped against the wall, and focused on his wounds.

They were worse than he thought.

“You’re hurt,” she said, behind him.

“I told you not to go near the basement,” he said. Even his voice sounded far, far away, from somewhere in the land of the living. Kragen’s mind was somewhere else. He was still bleeding.

“I was looking for help,” she said. “I was looking for weapons.”

“You should not have gone down there.”

There was a pause. Kragen counted his breaths, and tried to calculate how long until he lost consciousness. If he did, he did not know if he would wake up again. Not without the healing help of his mate.

No. You will not claim her.

When Andromeda spoke, her voice had changed.

“Who is that, down there?” she asked him. And then, quieter: “What have you done?”

Kragen growled, but his legs betrayed him and he crashed to the ground, catching himself on his uninjured arm. Too much blood. So much blood.

“Oh my God,” he heard her say. “Kragen. You’re really hurt.”

Something in her voice made him turn his head. She was wincing. The bond was still getting stronger, and now his mate was feeling his wounds.

Unacceptable.

“What are you doing?”

Kragen ignored her, pulling himself up and reaching for the box where he kept a supply of syringes preloaded with triclosan. He had one in hand when he felt it.

Her hand.

His bare back.

Kragen’s body lit up with the presence of her kuma, like a dying battery hooked up to a power source. With a growl, he grabbed hold of the metal shelving unit and crumpled the supports in his hands. The need to plunge himself into her, over and over again, until the end of fucking time, was overwhelming.

He concentrated. Grabbed another syringe. Turned around, to inject himself in the leg.

Andromeda’s hand stopped him.

“Absolutely not,” she said. “You are not getting away with this. I am going to heal you, and you’re going to answer my questions.”

Kragen snarled his answer.

She silenced him another touch, this time her hand on his brutalized shoulder.

Kragen growled, but he didn’t move away. He couldn’t. He looked at her small hand on his shoulder, her pale skin flushed even in the dim light. Her brown hair falling over her eyes, her goodness shining through it all.

For the first time in his life, he doubted his self-control.