Marcus' Pov
The silver burns.
Not like fire burns, quick and clean and needing an immediacy of response. This is slower. More brutal. It burns through my skin like acid, climbing up my bones until even the air I breathe tastes like metal. The manacles digging into my wrists have dug deep grooves into my skin, and whenever I move, they remind me exactly what I am now.
Nothing.
The fluorescent lights above my cell strobe to a beat that would make a regular person crazy. To me, it's just another torture method among many at Block Seven, otherwise known as the paranormal wing. Where the things that go bump in the night reside, and the creatures that used to roam under the moon at midnight.
I lean my back against the chill wall and close my eyes, feeling for her. Feeling for her always.
Maya.
The link to me thrums like an electric wire, even through the poisonous fog of silver. She's close now, closer than she's been in weeks. My wolf, what remains of him, stirs fidgetily behind the bars of my lungs. He senses her coming before I do, always does. Even tethered, even dying in increments, he senses his mate.
Footsteps echo down the corridor. Not the thud of guards' heavy boots, lighter, quicker. Trying to be stealthy. My heightened sense of hearing picks up the pounding beat of a racing heart, the soft brushing of fabric against skin.
I smell her first. Vanilla and jasmine, and that wild earth smell that awakens all of me that is feral. The wolf claws at my stomach, struggling to reach her, and I clench the frame of my cot in a white-knuckled grip.
She appears before the bulletproof glass window like an apparition, her dark hair engulfs the harsh light. Those green eyes, which at one time stared at me full of love, full of trust, are now filled only with pain.
"Marcus." My name sounds twisted from where I am, but I notice the soft hitch in her tone when she says it.
I get to my feet slowly, protesting muscles. The silver makes all things more difficult, makes easy tasks impossible things. But I must be nearer to her, must pretend that this wall of glass isn't between us.
"You shouldn't be here." Those are pebbles in my throat. "If they catch you—"
"They won't," she says, reaching forward and touching her fingers to the glass. "I have to see you. I want to know you're..."
"Alive?" I echo her action and rest my hand on the glass where hers is. The link between us ignites at once, heat and energy that makes both of us draw on quick breaths. I feel her sentiments surge through me through our touch, love, fear, guilt, desperation. The silver manacles burn hotter on me, reminding me of my imprisonment.
Her lids shut, and I know that she can feel it as well. The way our spirits extend to each other over an unbridgeable divide. The way they've always extended to each other, from the first time we met in that crowded pub three years prior. She'd been giggling at something her friend had said, unaware that her aroma had just turned my entire world upside down.
Look at us now.
"The silver's worsening," she whispers, and I catch sight of the tears she's trying to suppress. "I can sense it through the bond. It's killing you."
"It's meant to be." My voice remains calm, yet my hand shakes on the glass. "That's why there's an asylum. Slow death. Lingering torture."
"Don't say that." Her voice cracks. "We're going to get you out of here. Somehow, we're—"
"Listen to me, Maya," I lean against the glass, hoping she'll pick up on what I'm barely certain she'll be able to hear. The wolf paces back and forth, agitated. He feels what I'm only just beginning to understand. "Something's changing. Can you sense it?"
She frowns, her head cocked at the angle that used to make me smile. "What do you mean?"
The wind. It is shifting. I close my eyes, reaching forward with my silver-numbed but not-dead senses. "There is something coming. Something immense. And others sense it also, beyond us."
"You're frightening me."
"Good. You should be." I open my eyes, gazing directly into hers. "There's some-one who's been following you, Maya. Stalking you. I can smell it on you—another wolf. A male. Powerful."
Her face goes white. "Impossible. I would have remembered—"
"Not if he is skilled at hiding. Not if he is old enough, strong enough to cover his scent." The wolf inside me snarls and, for a moment, I almost want the silver to fail. Almost want to be able to shift, to break free of this cage and tear to pieces anyone who would try to track my mate.
But then there are chains. Always chains.
Her phone buzzes against her pocket, its piercing vibration loud in the stillness. She glances at it, then at me once more, her face furrowed in conflict.
"Answer it," I instruct her, though every nerve is screaming not to. "But stay where I can see you."
She extends her hand toward the phone, her movements slow, intentional. The screen shows a blocked call, and her finger lingers on the screen a beat too long.
"Hello?" She said softly, but I can smell the flash of fright in her perfume.
I don't hear the voice on the other end of the line, but I see the face change. See the color drain from her cheeks, see her other hand come up to cover her mouth. The phone comes close to slipping from her fingers.
"Maya." My voice cuts through whatever paralyzing shock keeps her frozen. "What is it?"
She looks at me through the glass, and I see all that I have been dreading reflected back at me. The past coming back. Truth finally rising up from wherever we thought we buried it.
He's alive," she says under her breath, and the news is like a punch. "And he wants me."
The wolf quiets. Even silver seems to cease its steady glow. Because both of us see who 'he' is. Both of us understand what that means.
And both of us are well aware that what stands between me and an action which would damn both of us is just this piece of glass between us.
Maya's phone crashes to the floor, ringing off the concrete walls with a gunshot sound. She's out of breath, with short, shallow gasps.
"Maya." I put both palms on the glass now, disregarding how the silver burns through my veins. "Look at me. Whatever he said to you, whatever he told you..."
"He knew." She whispers this. "He knew where to look for me. He knew about us." The overhead lighting is flickering, and in the distance a wailing alarm is beginning..