Beneath Her Teeth

Chapter 2: What the Dark Kept

Elena stopped halfway down the stairs, staring into the wreckage below without understanding it. Blood streaked the marble. Bodies lay twisted across the foyer—one crumpled against the wall, another sprawled near the base of the stairs, the others dropped in angles that made the whole room feel wrong. In the middle of it stood something huge and half-formed, claws slick and dripping, its breath sawing ragged through the silence.

Then it turned toward her, and through the brutal shape of it she saw the torn remains of Corbin’s shirt, the dark blood soaking his side, and eyes she’d always recognize.

“Elena.”

Her name came out shredded by pain and something not entirely human. The creature lurched, staggered, and dropped hard to one knee as the shape of him began to wrench back into itself.

The sound that tore out of him broke her paralysis more effectively than reassurance could have. It was pain, unmistakable and ugly. Blood ran down his side in a steady sheet. Something struck the marble beside him with a wet metallic tick, and Elena flinched before realizing it was a bullet, forced from the wound as his flesh struggled to close around it. Then another pushed free and bounced across the floor.

Corbin had always been dangerous. She had never imagined the violence in him looked like this.

When he lifted his head again, the worst of the shift had passed, but not enough. His hands were still wrong. His jaw still held too much of the wolf. He saw the look on her face then, and something in his expression closed off. She hated that she had looked at him that way. She hated more that she couldn’t seem to stop.

Outside, an engine turned over hard. Gravel shifted. Voices carried across the grounds.

Corbin forced himself upright and looked at her. His breathing came harsh and uneven. “Move, Elena. Now.”

Her eyes flicked to the dead men, forcing herself to really see them this time. None of them belonged to her father’s people. No familiar cuts, no familiar faces. Hired muscle, outside guns, the kind brought in for work men wanted done without their own names on it.

“What are you?” she asked.

Another crash sounded deeper in the house.

Corbin turned at once, listening. When he looked back at her, whatever answer might have existed was gone beneath urgency. He bent, stripped a pistol and radio from the nearest corpse, and thumbed the radio on just as it crackled to life.

“Front entry’s down,” a voice snapped through the static.

Another voice answered, closer this time. “Go around back. Take the girl alive. Watch for Grayson. He wasn’t at the main house.”

Corbin went still for half a beat. They knew his name. They weren’t just here for Elena.

Silence hit hard after that.

He lowered the radio, jaw tightening, and looked up at her.

“Stay close,” he said. “Do exactly what I say.”

Another crash rolled through the back of the house, louder this time, followed by the splintering groan of wood giving way under force. Elena jerked at the sound, but Corbin had already gone still, head slightly turned as he listened past the crash itself, reading it for distance, direction, and how much time they had left.

“The back way’s gone,” he said.

Elena stared at him. “Then where are we supposed to go?”

He looked toward the broken front door and the dark grounds beyond it, then toward the detached garage past the drive. His breathing was still rough. Blood still tracked down his side. None of it seemed to matter as much as the calculation moving behind his eyes.

“Garage,” he said. “We cut across the front, get in the car, and get out before they block us in.”

She tightened her grip on the banister. “You want me to run out there with them all over the property?”

“I want you alive.”

The words landed harder than she expected because he gave them to her without softness. Flat. Immediate. Absolute.

Another voice carried from deeper in the house. Closer now. Not words she could make out, just men moving through rooms that had belonged to her family an hour ago as if they owned them already.

Elena looked back at Corbin and felt that same cold confusion twist through her again. His face had settled further toward human, but not enough to erase what she had seen. There was still too much wrongness in the line of his mouth, too much violence lingering in the hands at his sides. She must have let some part of that show, because his expression hardened.

“I know what you saw,” he said.

She swallowed and said nothing.

For a beat, something almost bitter moved through his eyes. Then it was gone, locked away behind the same hard control she had always associated with him.

“You know me,” he said quietly. “Whatever else this is, you know me.”

The words struck somewhere deeper than fear. Not because they fixed anything. They didn’t. The image of him in the foyer with blood on his claws and bodies at his feet was already burned too deep for that. Still, beneath the horror and the questions she couldn’t begin to answer, there was the simple fact of him: Corbin, who had stood at her father’s shoulder for years, who had always been the one person in the room she never had to doubt when things turned dangerous.

Another crash shook the hall.

Corbin’s gaze snapped toward it. “When I move, you move,” he said. “Don’t stop unless I put my hands on you. Don’t look back.”

Then he drew a breath that looked like it hurt and started for the front door.

Cold air knifed through the foyer the moment Corbin yanked it open. He didn’t give Elena time to think. His hand closed around her arm and sent her forward hard enough that she nearly stumbled on the first step before catching herself and running.

The estate had become a different place in the dark. The drive and lawn she had crossed a thousand times now looked wide and exposed, every yard of it a killing ground. Gravel sprayed beneath her shoes as she ran for the detached garage beyond the side drive, keys clutched so tightly in her hand they bit into her palm. Behind her, she could hear Corbin moving with a speed that no longer sounded entirely human, too fast and too light for a man bleeding as badly as he was.

The first shot cracked across the yard before she reached the fountain.

Something hit her from the side with brutal force. She slammed into the stone lip hard enough to drive the breath from her lungs just as the bullet shattered against the paving where she had been a second earlier. For one stunned beat she could only stare. Then she looked up and saw Corbin already rising from the crouch beside her, gun in one hand, blood running down the other.

Two men were cutting in from the tree line near the drive. Another crouched behind the low wall by the front walk, muzzle flashing in the dark. Corbin fired twice in quick succession. One of the men near the trees dropped. The other kept coming, low and fast, trying to close the distance before Corbin could get another clean shot.

“Elena,” Corbin snapped.

The command broke whatever had frozen in her. She shoved herself up and ran again.

The next sounds came almost on top of each other—another burst of gunfire, the scrape of shoes on gravel, and a harsh impact behind her that was too heavy to be either man simply falling. She didn’t look back. She forced herself to keep moving until the side door of the garage loomed in front of her.

Her fingers slipped once on the key ring. Panic clawed at her throat. She crushed it down, found the right key by touch, and jammed it into the lock.

Behind her, someone made a sound that didn’t belong to a man at all.

The lock gave. Elena caught the handle, yanked the door open, and stumbled into darkness that smelled of oil, rubber, and cold metal. She spun at once, heart hammering, just in time to see Corbin crossing the last stretch of gravel.

One man lay twisted near the drive, motionless. The second was still trying to push himself up on shaking arms when Corbin hit him again. Even at a distance, Elena saw the violence in the movement, the way his body aligned with it too easily, too naturally, as if this was the shape of him stripped of pretense. His hand drove into the man’s jacket, and for one terrible second she thought she was about to watch him tear the attacker apart.

Instead, Corbin jerked back as though he had touched something that burned. The man hit the ground hard. Corbin staggered once, blood running dark down his side, then fired toward the front walk where another muzzle flash split the dark.

“Elena, inside!”

“I’m in,” she shouted, though her voice came out thin with fear.

He backed the last few steps to the garage, one hand braced to his side, and slammed the door shut behind him just as something struck the metal from outside with a violent clang.

For a moment, the only sound inside was both of them breathing.

Elena turned toward him and saw how bad it was. Blood had soaked his side and darkened one leg of his jeans. More ran down his arm and dripped from his hand onto the concrete. The change had receded further, enough that he looked mostly like himself again, but the effort of holding that shape was written all over him. His breathing came hard and uneven, and his face had gone pale beneath the blood.

“You’re still bleeding.”

“I know.”

He crossed to the sedan, grabbed the driver’s door, then stopped with one hand braced against the roof as voices rose outside the garage. The side door handle jerked once. Then again.

Elena stared at him. “Can you control it?”

His eyes found hers. There was no room left for lies between them tonight. “Enough to get you out.”

Something hit the side door hard enough to rattle the frame.

Corbin got behind the wheel and hit the opener. The garage door began to crawl upward.

“Too slow,” Elena said.

“Yeah.”

The side door boomed again. Elena moved before she could think better of it. Her hand went into her coat and came back with the pistol Sal had insisted she learn to use. She raised it with both hands and fired straight through the metal.

A man shouted outside.

Corbin looked at her once, something dark and startled flashing through his expression, then threw the car into reverse and hit the gas.

The sedan tore backward through the half-open garage door in a scream of metal and sparks. Gunfire chased them down the drive. Trees swallowed the estate behind them almost at once.

Neither of them spoke for the first stretch of road.

At last Elena looked at him and said, “That thing in the house—”

“Was me,” Corbin said.

The road unspooled ahead of them, black and empty, while the silence between them settled around something that would not go back to what it had been.