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I couldn’t just let himgo.

Above me, Jiro scoffed. “You’ll be lucky to make it off the floor, dog.”

Dakota’s lips were dry as a desert, cracked with deep red splits.

“You’ll be all right,” I whispered to him.

Seth would come. He’d—he’d bring Prudence. She’d know what to do.

“You just have to hold on.”

Jiro’s voice might’ve held an edge of annoyance at being ignored, but I couldn’t look away from Dakota long enough to confirm.

“That’s all right,” he said, “it’s where you belong. I don’t need a goddamn dog at my side. We at Igarashi aren’t quite so pathetic.” A growl rumbled in my throat, but still...

Dakota.

If I kept watching him, he’d stay with me. He had to.

“I need your product and your network, and I can get access to both with those fae you’ve put your trust in. Duplicitous weaklings, every one of them, but you should’ve known that. Still, I’d rather work with a fae than a stinking mutt.”

A panicked, manic laugh bubbled up inside me. Charles? He thought to take Charles and the fae?

Whether or not I made it off this floor, he’d already played himself. Mages like this always overplayed their hands, failed to see why anyone like us would ever deny them a damn thing.

Once Dakota was on his feet again, once Prudence arrived to save him, I’d deny Jiro the right to another free breath.

Quite possibly by tearing out his throat.

33

Dakota

Icouldn’t breathe properly, my very lungs burned by the massive fireball Jiro had thrown at me, and I couldn’t open my eyes. They were almost certainly as ruined by the fire as my lungs, and for a moment, when someone bent down over me, I panicked, thinking it was Jiro, come to finish me off.

Not that he needed to.

I was dying.

I didn’t need to have any particular medical knowledge to know that if I couldn’t breathe, I wasn’t going to live.

It wasn’t Jiro’s voice that drifted into my ears, though, but Jax’s, like a soothing balm over my literally fried nerves. “You’ll be all right.”

I wondered if he believed it, or if he was just trying to give me comfort. If we had a pack bond, like Prudence and I had discussed, I would have likely known.

But that sparked something in my mind. Jax had been hit by the exact same fireball as I had, and he was fine. Werewolves, I’d been told, healed incredibly efficiently.

And I was dying.

So even though every movement hurt, I reached for Jax, curled my fingers into his rough and ruined lapel. “Bite,” I managed to rasp out, even though I couldn’t manage a full breath.

“What?” Jax asked, sounding initially horrified, but damn it all, I didn’t have time for him to worry about things. I couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t going to last long enough to—“Oh.”

For a moment, I worried he wasn’t going to do it. That he was going to insist I’d be fine like a character in a movie holding his gut-shot beloved, telling him he’d be just fine if only he would hold out. I wasn’t sure I had the breath to even ask again, let alone explain, and I very much didn’t want to die because Jax didn’t understand what I wanted. Or didn’t understand that I was dying.

But he seemed to understand just fine, because a moment later another fire ripped through my veins, my left wrist torn open by his teeth. At least, I hoped it was his teeth.

It hurt more than anything before in my life, more than the fireball had, because unlike the fire, it wasn’t gone in a moment, leaving only blessed cool office air behind. It felt as though my flesh was being flayed from my bones.