Beneath Her Teeth

Chapter 6: What Followed Him Across

Kat’s words changed the room.

For the first time since she had stepped through the door, Corbin stopped looking merely exhausted and started looking dangerous again. The fatigue didn't leave him. It simply hardened behind his eyes until it became something colder and more useful.

“How many?”

“Two that we know of.” Kat stayed by the closed door, her voice low and even. “One of our men at Mercer saw them working the bridge road and the service lots. One used your name. The other asked after a wounded man from Greymoor who crossed Horizon late.”

Corbin reached for his coat. The motion pulled at his side hard enough to make him catch himself, and Kat crossed the room before he could take another step, her hand landing flat against his chest.

“If you tear that wound open again,” she said, “you won’t make it to the elevator.”

“I’ll manage.”

“You keep saying that.” Her hand slid lower, pressing lightly against the dark stain spreading beneath his shirt. “It still doesn’t mean healed.”

He glanced down. Fresh blood had already seeped through the black fabric.

“That’s inconvenient,” he muttered.

“Sit.”

The word was flat enough that it carried no room for argument.

Corbin held her gaze for a beat, then lowered himself onto the edge of the bed. Kat turned toward the bathroom and came back with gauze, tape, and antiseptic, the sort of neat, efficient supplies Vincent kept close at hand for men who attracted trouble.

“Shirt.”

He unbuttoned it the rest of the way and shrugged it off carefully. The bandage around his ribs had loosened. Bruising spread darkly across his shoulder and side. Kat took in the injuries, then the older scars beneath them.

“You collect bad habits.”

“Occupational hazard.”

Something faint touched her mouth and disappeared. She peeled back the bandage with brisk, careful hands. The wound had closed some, but not enough. Fresh blood welled along the edge.

“That looks ugly,” she murmured.

“I’ve looked worse.”

Kat wet the gauze and began cleaning the wound. The sting hit sharp enough to pull a line of tension through his shoulders, but Corbin held still. He had been patched up by doctors, by soldiers, by men in back rooms who treated pain as part of the work. This felt different, and not because of what she was doing. It was because she was close enough for him to feel exactly what she was beneath the cool precision of her hands.

Her wolf was there, quiet and leashed. His own answered at once.

“If they were just asking after a wounded man,” Kat said as she worked, “I’d call it spillover from Greymoor. The fact that one used your name means somebody gave them more than rumor.”

Corbin stared past her shoulder. “It wasn’t spillover at Sal’s either. They knew which properties mattered, where to hit first, what to cut loose. They didn't just kill him. They started dismantling everything.”

Kat said nothing, but her hands slowed slightly.

“They knew my name there too,” he went on. “One of them came over the radio telling the others to watch for Grayson. They came for Elena, and they came for me.”

At the sound of her name, Kat’s eyes lifted to his.

“You hid her.”

“Yes.”

“Well enough?”

“I thought so.”

Kat wrapped fresh gauze around his ribs and tied it off. “If men from Greymoor are already asking questions in Ravenport, then somebody decided Vincent’s borders were worth crossing.” Her gaze stayed on his. “That makes them my problem too.”

Corbin looked at her. “Your problem, or Vincent’s?”

A faint edge touched her mouth. “Tonight? Both.”

It was the closest thing to openness she had offered him, and it landed harder than it should have. Kat reached for the tape. Corbin caught her wrist before she could pull away.

The movement was fast, but not rough. His fingers settled around the inside of her wrist, where her pulse beat steady beneath his thumb.

“Why’d you come yourself?” he asked.

Kat looked down at his hand, then back at his face. “Because I knew you wouldn't stay in this room once you heard you were being hunted. And because I wanted to see what a wolf from Greymoor looked like when somebody finally pushed the right nerve.”

“And?”

Something faint and dangerous touched her expression. “I’m still looking.”

The air between them tightened.

She was close enough that Corbin could smell the cold night still clinging to her jacket, the trace of leather and soap beneath it, and the warmer scent under all of that which had nothing to do with either. His wolf pressed hard against his skin. Kat knew it. He knew she knew it. Neither of them moved.

Her free hand rose and settled lightly against his shoulder, just above the bruise.

“You hold it too tight,” she said.

“The wound?”

She gave the smallest shake of her head.

The meaning hit him squarely.

Corbin held her eyes. “Loose control gets people killed.”

Kat’s fingers pressed once, firm and certain. “So does strangling it until it tears through the wrong place.”

The room had gone very quiet. Corbin could hear the hum of the ventilation behind the walls and the steady beat beneath her wrist where he still held her. For one suspended moment, the threat outside the room seemed very far away.

Then someone knocked.

Kat stepped back first, smooth enough to almost hide that the moment had touched her too. She finished taping the bandage and crossed to the door. One of Vincent’s men stood in the hall.

“Call from downstairs,” he said. “The Mercer men moved off the bridge lots and headed under the east span toward the old customs sheds.”

Kat nodded once. “We’re coming.”

She shut the door and turned back. Corbin was already pulling on the black shirt.

“You’re going anyway,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Good.” Her voice stayed dry. “I’d hate to waste clean gauze.”

By the time they reached the garage, whatever had passed between them upstairs hadn't gone away. It had simply changed shape and tucked itself in beside the urgency.

Kat drove. Corbin didn't object. Ravenport was hers in ways Greymoor had never been his, and she moved through it with the confidence of someone who knew exactly where danger liked to hide. The city slid by in pieces of riverfront dark, warehouses, rusted fencing, and hard geometry cast by the bridges overhead.

After a stretch of silence, Kat said, “How much did Moretti say on the phone?”

“Enough for me to know it was coordinated.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

Corbin looked out at the black sweep of water beyond the roadside barriers. “He told me to get Elena out. Said they were already hitting other properties. Told me to get her buried deep, then get out myself.”

“Did he name where?”

Memory hit with sudden clarity. Gunfire over the line. Sal’s voice staying level through it. The exact cadence of the words.

Get her to Thomas.

Corbin went still.

Kat saw it at once. “Corbin.”

“He named a contact,” he said.

“And if the line wasn't clean…”

He dragged a hand over his mouth. “I know.”

Mercer sat beneath the eastern arm of Horizon Bridge like a place built for use and then forgotten. The old customs sheds were cinderblock and corrugated metal. Freight lots stretched toward the river in broken grids of chain-link and bad light. The bridge groaned overhead now and then with the weight of passing traffic.

One of Vincent’s men waited beside a dark SUV.

“What’ve you got?” Kat asked.

“Bridge attendant says they came through about twenty minutes before the call,” the man replied. “First one did the talking. Gray coat, busted knuckles, burn scar down the left side of his jaw. Other one stayed back and watched. They asked whether anybody from Greymoor had crossed bleeding, carrying a bag, maybe with a woman. Then they moved under the span. Loud one got a call before they headed toward the far sheds. We found fresh tracks and a little blood.”

Corbin felt his pulse slow.

Kat nodded once and started forward. He moved with her, keeping low as they slipped between the sheds into deeper shadow. The place smelled of damp concrete, river water, oil, and rust. Beneath it all came a fresher scent that turned Corbin left before he even thought about it: blood.

At the rear of the second shed, a man lay crumpled beside the loading ramp in a dock jacket with a security badge. His throat had been opened cleanly and quickly.

“Witness,” Kat said.

Corbin was already looking past the body into the deeper dark. He heard the scrape of a boot, then the breath a heartbeat before the muzzle flash.

Kat hit him in the shoulder hard enough to throw the shot wide and came up firing in the same motion. Gunfire ripped through the lot.

Corbin was already moving. He rounded the stack low and fast, closing before the shooter could reset. They slammed into the chain-link fence hard enough to rattle it. Corbin ripped the gun free and drove the man face-first into the steel. Burn scar. Gray coat. The talker from the bridge.

Kat appeared an instant later with the second man twisted to his knees, her gun pressed against the base of his skull.

“Talk,” she said.

Scar-Jaw laughed once through blood. “Or what?”

Corbin let the wolf come closer.

He didn't shift. He didn't need to. The change was smaller and somehow worse: the roughening of his voice, the way his eyes stopped looking human enough for comfort. Scar-Jaw saw it and lost whatever was left of his nerve.

“We were confirming the bridge,” he said quickly. “That’s all.”

“For who?” Kat asked.

“The same people who burned Greymoor. The ones finishing what they started.”

“Names.”

“I don’t have the top names. We got paid for pieces. Routes. Eyes. Hand-offs.”

Corbin shoved him harder into the fence. “Then give me the piece that matters.”

The man swallowed. “Ravenport isn’t the move tonight.”

Something cold opened in Corbin’s chest.

“What does that mean?”

Scar-Jaw looked at him with something worse than fear. “We heard the call. Moretti said the name out loud.”

Behind him, Kat’s voice sharpened. “What name?”

The man’s mouth twitched. “Thomas.”

For a second the whole world narrowed to that one word.

Corbin let go of the man’s coat as if it had burned him. Kat dragged the second prisoner up by the collar.

“Who went?” she demanded.

Scar-Jaw smiled through busted lips. “Doesn’t matter now.”

Corbin’s face changed. Not outwardly in any obvious way, but Kat felt it as surely as she had felt him in the room upstairs. Whatever he had been holding inside himself all night went taut enough to become dangerous in an entirely new way.

“Corbin,” she said.

He looked at her, and for the first time she saw something beneath the rage that came close to fear.

“Briarwood.”

Then he turned and ran for the car.