"The anchor is quite clever," Orpheus noted, his voice resonating directly inside Claire's skull. 

He stopped ten feet away, his hands folded neatly behind his back.

"Virel, look at her. Look at the way she stabilizes you."

Killian lunged. He didn't use a tactical approach; he was a landslide of obsidian fur and raw, unadulterated fury. 

Orpheus didn't flinch. He raised a single finger—a finger that elongated into a blackened, needle-like thorn. 

A single violet moth landed on the tip of the thorn, and the Alpha slammed into an invisible wall of static, the air around him erupting in a shower of purple sparks. 

Killian hit the ground with a wet, heavy thud, his spine arching in a silent scream of agony. The non-human gold in his eyes flickered, the light dying out as the biological jammer hit his marrow. 

"Killian!" Claire screamed, reaching for him.

Adrian held her back, his grip on her arm like a frozen vice. 

"Logic, Claire," Adrian hissed, his breath icy against her temple. "The Alpha is offline. If you go to him, you complete the integration."

Orpheus smiled—a wide, skinless tear in the middle of his pale face. 

"The vampire is correct. The circuit requires two points." He took a step toward Claire, the violet moths swarming his shoulders like a living cloak. "One to provide the power. One to hold the anchor."

Claire looked at Killian, who was struggling to stand, his claws digging deep furrows into the mud. She looked at Adrian, whose eyes were fixed on Orpheus with a profound, evolutionary disgust.

Then she looked at her own hands. She didn't have a silver blade or Alpha blood. She was just a girl who understood how monsters were made.

"You call them puzzle pieces," Claire said, her voice dropping into a lethal, quiet register. She reached into her bag and pulled out the thermal comms unit. "But a puzzle only works if the pieces stay in the box."

She flipped the emergency toggle on the unit. 

"Leon! Now!" 

The campus didn't just stay dark; it screamed. High-frequency sirens, calibrated to the specific resonance of Lycanthrope hearing, erupted from the SUV's hidden speakers across the quad. 

The sound was a physical impact, a sonic boom that shattered the remaining windows in the psychology building. 

The violet moths didn't just scatter; they exploded, their fragile wings torn apart by the frequency. Orpheus let out a shriek—a sound of glass grinding on bone—as his command signal was drowned out by the noise. 

He stumbled back, his gold-rimmed glasses cracking

.

Killian's eyes ignited. The amber didn't just return; it surged, a volcanic flare that turned the quad into a theater of gold light. 

He didn't roar or growl. He moved with a velocity that bypassed human optics and vampire senses alike. 

One second he was on the ground; the next, his claws were buried deep in Orpheus's chest, lifting the man in the white coat off his feet. 

"You... don't... get... her," Killian growled, the voice a subsonic vibration that rattled Claire's ribs. He slammed Orpheus into the stone wall of the dormitory annex, the impact sending a shower of masonry onto the gravel.

Orpheus didn't bleed red; he bled violet—a thick, pulsating sludge that hissed as it hit the Alpha's fur. 

"The integration... is... inevitable," Orpheus rasped, his face rippling as the surgeon-mask began to dissolve. "The marrow... is already... calling to me." 

He dissolved into a cloud of ash and sulphur, the white lab coat falling empty to the ground. 

Silence returned to the quad, heavy and suffocating. Killian stood over the empty coat, his chest heaving, his massive frame shrouded in the fading violet smoke. 

He turned his head slowly, his molten eyes locking onto Claire. He shifted mid-stride, his bones cracking and resetting with a series of wet snaps. 

The wolf receded, and the man returned. Killian stumbled toward her, his tactical vest shredded, his bare chest mapped with black soot and bright red blood. 

He grabbed Claire's upper arms, his touch heavy, desperate, and burning.

"Claire," he rasped, his breath hot against her face. "Did he... did he mark you?"

Claire didn't answer. She reached up and touched his jaw, her fingers steady despite the chaos. 

"He's gone, Killian. For now."

Killian leaned his forehead against hers, his eyes closing as he inhaled the scent of vanilla and rain.

"He's not gone," Adrian's voice drawled from the shadows. The vampire was standing by the service ramp, drying his pale hands with a fresh linen towel. "He was a prototype, Virel. A projection of the 'Final Stitch'."

Adrian looked at Claire, his blue-gray eyes turning a dark, bruised obsidian. 

"And he left a receipt."

Claire looked down at her right wrist. Underneath the thin skin, right where the pulse hit the bone, a series of faint, violet lines had begun to spread. 

They looked like thorns. They looked like stitches.