Beneath Her Teeth

Corbin Grayson was supposed to die in that house, though he didn't know that yet—not consciously, at least. Instinct had already registered what his mind hadn't caught up to: the silence pressing through the dark was wrong. He pushed himself up from the narrow couch in the suite above Sal's study before he fully knew why. Somewhere below, the house seemed to be holding its breath. The wolf inside him stirred—not in panic, but in warning. Sal's words surfaced from where Corbin had buried them two years ago: If anything happens, you get her out. You understand me? He'd accepted that order the way he accepted everything from Sal: with a loyalty that had never stopped to ask what it might one day cost him. He'd called it loyalty for years because the alternative asked too much of him. His phone lit the dark and dragged Corbin's mind back to the present. "Sal," he answered on the first ring. Static rushed across the line, followed by the sharp c***k of gunfire from Sal's end. Raised voices bled through after it, urgent and overlapping, and then a door slammed hard enough to jar the line. Corbin went still. Men didn't bring this kind of war to Sal Moretti's door in Greymoor unless somebody had opened it for them. Sal came on hard and clipped, already buried in the middle of hell. "Listen to me. They’re looking for you too. Get Elena out.” Every muscle in Corbin's body tightened. He crossed the room in three strides and reached the window, pushing the curtain aside just enough to see the grounds below. The yard lay in hard bars of security light and shadow, but darkness had never meant much to him. His gaze tracked the perimeter, the trees, the long black stretches between one pool of light and the next. Nothing moved. Nothing showed itself yet. That didn't mean safety. It meant the night was still choosing its moment. "What happened?" Corbin asked, eyes still on the grounds. "They hit Pasquale's place ten minutes ago. Docks went dark after that. I've got men pinned at Halstead and more closing on the east side." Gunfire cracked over the line, closer this time. Sal's tone never shifted. "This is coordinated." Cold rolled through Corbin in one clean wave. He looked toward the closed door of the suite, already calculating distances, angles, and exits. Three floors down to the kitchen level, then the back corridor to the mudroom, basement access beyond that, and the garage below. After that, three miles to Halstead through rough terrain and roads that were probably already being watched. Alone, he could have made it fast. With Elena beside him, protecting her every step, it would be slower and uglier—but still possible. Getting there wasn't the problem. Obeying Sal was. "Hold on," Corbin said. "I'm coming." "No. You're not." Corbin's hand tightened on the phone. "Sal—" "Corbin. Listen to me." Sal's voice dropped, stripped of every layer of command until all that was left was the man who had given him a life when the world would have let him die. "You get her out. You keep her safe. That's how you save me. You understand?" Corbin understood. He hated it, but he understood. Sal had said it before—years ago, in a different house, after one of the first times Corbin had taken a bullet for him and come up snarling. Sal had stood at the kitchen sink with blood on his hands and delivered the words without looking at him, as if they were no more debatable than gravity. If anything happens, you get her out. Not save the books. Not save the money. Not save him. Her. A sound at the door pulled Corbin's attention up. He turned just as it opened and Elena stepped into the room. She was still in the clothes from earlier—black trousers, a dark silk blouse with the sleeves rolled to her forearms—as though some instinct in her had refused the lie of sleep before the rest of the house caught up to it. Her black hair was pinned back, though a few loosened strands had slipped free and softened the sharp lines of her face. Corbin noticed that the same way he always noticed more than he should where Elena was concerned: not as a simple appreciation of beauty, but as something more treacherous, buried beneath years of discipline and denial. Sal's voice was still in his ear, lower now and deadlier for the control in it. "Corbin, move. Get her out." Elena said nothing. She didn't need to. Her gaze shifted from the phone in his hand to his face, and whatever she found there tightened her expression almost at once. She had grown up around liars, killers, and men who treated the two as parts of the same trade. Reading a room had become second nature to her long ago. Reading Corbin had always come easier. He watched hope leave her by degrees, watched understanding settle in its place, and hated Sal a little for making him be the one standing there when it happened. His pulse did what it always did when the worst finally arrived: it slowed. Something in him locked into place with brutal precision, as if panic belonged to other men and he had been stripped down years ago to something colder and more useful than that. Fear didn't leave him. It simply changed shape, hardening and narrowing until it became what it always became—angles, exits, timing, blood, and distance. "How bad?" Corbin asked. The silence on the other end lasted only a second or two, but that was enough. Sal had never been a man who hesitated without reason, and in that brief pause Corbin heard more than he wanted to: gunfire farther off and closer in, voices moving fast beneath command, the unstable edge of a night already slipping beyond anyone's ability to contain it. By the time Sal answered, Corbin had already understood the truth of it in his bones. "Bad enough," Sal said. Elena had gone very still by the door. She looked exactly like someone shaped by Sal Moretti's world—never sheltered from its harder edges, never allowed the luxury of innocence for long. Sal had stopped keeping her from the business years ago, and she had taken to it faster than anyone expected. The fact that he had placed her under Corbin's protection tonight told him everything else he needed to know. Sal had seen this coming. He'd been afraid enough to plan for it. "Tell me where to bring her," Corbin said. On the other end of the line, gunfire cracked again—closer now, hot through the speaker, almost intimate. Sal didn't react. If anything, his voice only grew more controlled, as if he were forcing order onto the night by sheer refusal to give it anything else. Sal blew out a breath, frustration rough in it. Corbin was about to ask again when Sal answered. "It can't be anywhere local. I don't know who had a hand in this, but they had help on the inside without a doubt." A swell of shouting, then the crash of something breaking apart. Sal's voice came back, steady despite it all. "We need to get her somewhere safe." Corbin's jaw tightened. "Sal—" "A hit like this doesn't happen without money, reach, and somebody feeding them pieces of us." More shouting, then the splintering of wood. "Until we know who sold us out, everybody close is a risk." Elena hadn't moved. Her eyes stayed on Corbin's face, then flicked toward the window before returning to him. She couldn't hear Sal's words, but she didn't need to. The tension in his mouth and shoulders told her enough. She was too smart not to understand. Briarwood. Corbin knew it more by reputation than memory—a town that had stopped pretending to be anything else years ago, which made it useful to men like Varga. The kind of place where a loading dock could double as a receiving line for things that never touched a ledger. Far enough from Greymoor to keep Elena safe, and Varga's operation was more than capable of making sure she stayed that way. Sal was still thinking clearly after all. "Get her to Thomas," Sal said. "Make sure she's buried deep. Then you get out. Go somewhere they won't find her." Corbin's eyes narrowed. "To where?" "Ravenport." The name landed hard. Vincent Gallo's city. Neutral ground, technically, but that only held as long as both sides agreed to the lie. Corbin had been there once, years ago, and still remembered the way Vincent's men watched strangers—quiet, patient, as if they were measuring what you owed before you ever opened your mouth. A gunshot exploded over the line. Not the distant rhythm of gunfire this time. Closer. Sharper. Close enough that Corbin felt it in his teeth. "Sal?" Shouting burst across the speaker—someone else's voice, not Sal's—followed by the splintering crash of wood and another gunshot. Corbin's spine locked. He pulled the phone from his ear, already moving toward the door, toward Elena, toward a fight he couldn't reach—but there was nothing. Nothing but the sound of his own voice saying Sal's name like a prayer he didn't believe in. Below them, the front of the house exploded inward. Elena jumped. Corbin was already moving. He shoved the phone into her hand. "Lock this door. If I don't come back, you run." Then he was gone. He hit the stairs at a sprint and heard them below before he saw them—boots on marble, men shouting, the metallic snap of weapons being raised. Three in the foyer. Maybe four. No time to count. The first man looked up just as Corbin reached the landing and the wolf came up hard. Pain ripped through him as bone shifted and muscle swelled. His hands twisted into claws, and a growl tore from his throat, deep enough to stop the room cold. The man in the foyer froze with his gun half-raised, and Corbin hit him before he could fire. The next few seconds came apart in blood and noise. A shot tore through Corbin's side. Another grazed his shoulder. He barely felt either. He moved through them too fast, too close, all teeth and claws and raw force. One body hit the wall hard enough to c***k wood. Another went down choking. The last one tried to run and never made it to the door. Corbin stood in the wreckage of the foyer, chest rising and falling, blood running from his claws in slow, deliberate drops. The broken front door hung open behind him, letting the cold night spill into the house. Bodies lay twisted across marble and carpet, and the silence that followed felt deeper than the violence had—unnatural, watchful, as if the house itself had not yet decided what to make of what he'd become. Above him, a floorboard creaked. He turned. Elena stood halfway down the staircase, one hand locked around the banister, her face gone white. In her other hand, she still held the phone. He was still shaped like a man, but only just. His frame had thickened into something built for tearing—shoulders too wide, arms too long, hands ending in black hooked claws. Blood ran over them in slow, heavy drops. His face was worse: jaw pushed forward, teeth bared, his features dragged out of human shape toward something older and more brutal. Only his eyes were still his. Elena stared at him and didn’t move. Then her lips parted.