Running now. He was running, and it was terrible, the jangling of her limp arms and legs causing her to retch from the agony as her raw skin rubbed against his shirt, his muscles, his bones. And there was even less oxygen to be had up off the floor. As she gasped and gagged, she had no idea how he was breathing through the exertion. Or how he knew where he was going. The smoke was blinding, not that she could have tracked anything, because pain was making her go in and out of consciousness, her eyes checker-boarding and then clearing… only to phase out again.

And then there was pause. And an explosion.

No, wait, he was kicking down a door.

But it wasn’t to the stairwell. It was to an apartment, and she was rushed into the space.

Trez—or what seemed to be him—slammed the door shut behind them and went farther into the apartment, all the way to the back, to a bathroom. The air was clearer now, and he yanked down the shower curtain with one hand, and laid it out on the tile.

“I’m going to put you down now,” he said.

He was careful as he did so, but she moaned in pain as her body was shifted, and as soon as she was on the hard flooring, a coughing fit curling her onto her side—and she was pretty sure she vomited. She didn’t know. She was just trying to breathe, but all she could seem to draw in was smoke, even though her eyes, unreliable as they were, were telling her that there was none in the cramped room.

Trez turned away. Opened the window. Got out a phone.

Then he was back down beside her, leaning over her as he spoke to someone.

All she could do was study his face.

He was totally familiar to her, she realized in her delirium. But not just because she had met him at the restaurant. Or because she had had sex with him. Or because she had been thinking of him all day and night since their breakup.

It was because she knew him… from before.

And this conviction made her study him all the more closely—although what she saw terrified her. Soot streaked the dark skin of his beautiful face, and part of his short hair was gone, singed off from the heat. The collar of his thin silk shirt was black, but not because the fabric had come in that color. The smoke had seeped into the fibers that had been white, and she had a thought that their lungs were the same, now clogged with particles.

What if he died here, too—

He was talking to her. Urgently.

When he took her hand, she moaned in pain, and he immediately stopped. In the strange, surreal silence between them, he looked as terrified as she felt, and she knew he feared he was too late when it came to having saved her. Just as she was scared she had endangered his life.

She wanted to tell him she loved him. Because she did. In a way she could not understand, the clogging, blinding smoke had brought in its thick, impenetrable folds a clarity that revealed everything: She had been his at an earlier time, and he had been hers, and they had been separated by death. After which she had been placed on the doorstep of her parents’ house and destined to find him here, in Caldwell, some decades down the line, in this specific moment right here.

This was the reunion that he had recognized first and then doubted.

And that she now saw for what it was.

A Christmas miracle.

Desperately, she wanted to tell him all this, but her strength was draining fast, as if, now that they were in relative safety, the adrenaline load that had kept her barely alive was leaving and taking the functioning of her vital organs with it. She was out of time.

Therese thought of her mahmen. Her brother. Her father.

And then she focused on Trez’s face.

With the last vestiges of her energy, she lifted her hand. As it entered her line of sight, she had a momentary horror at the bald anatomy that was showing. But then not even that mattered.

Touching Trez’s cheek, she knew she had come home to him.

“My love…” she whispered roughly. “How I have missed you.”

* * *

Trez couldn’t hear what Therese was saying as he leaned over her. But he wanted her to keep talking. Needed her to. She had been terribly injured, whole sheets of her skin… gone. Parts of her clothes melted onto her. Soot covering her to the point where the whites of her eyes glowed as if backlit in contrast to her smoke-stained skin. He had no idea how she had survived at all.

Reflexively, he went to take her hand again and had to stop himself. It had hurt her too much the first time.

“Stay with me,” he begged. “Help is coming—”

Her eyes locked on his, and the light behind them made the back of his neck tingle. Then she smiled. Even through her pain, she smiled at him and was beautiful.

“My love…,” she whispered. “How I have missed you.”

As she spoke the words, a cold shock went through him—and a vision of his shellan’s face overlaid Therese’s, or maybe it was more that his Chosen’s was revealed through Therese’s. Revealed to be… the same.

“Selena?” he choked out.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I don’t know how… but yes.”

Without warning, her eyes fluttered closed and a sound that was more animal than anything remotely civilized ripped from his throat. He lunged forward, as if he could go into her failing body and drag her soul out of the burned shell.

“No!”

Planting his palms on either side of her, he was yelling, babbling, crying. He had done this once—he had already done this! He was not losing her again—

Someone touched his shoulder, and he bared his fangs and snapped at the hand, nearly biting it off at the wrist.

Doc Jane, instead of falling back, grabbed the front of his throat with a hard grip. “It’s me! Trez! I’m here!”

He blinked, aggression and agony warring for control as his faulty brain tried to pull some kind of rational anything out of the no-sense-anywhere that just happened. That was happening.

Oh, God… was it possible they were the same people after all? But how?

Or was he just getting back on the train he’d gotten off of, the one that had hurt a female he… loved?

“Back off,” Doc Jane commanded. “If you want her to have a shot at surviving, you need to back off right now.”

When he didn’t move—because he couldn’t—the Brotherhood’s physician put her hand out behind her, and snapped, “And you stay there. I do not need any help. I got this.”

Trez shifted his eyes up and over. Vishous, Jane’s mate, was standing off to the side, his diamond eyes flashing a bonded male’s urge to kill, his enormous body poised to attack, his fangs likewise bared. Which was what you got when you tried to bite someone’s shellan.

“I’ll fucking kill you and not even care,” the Brother ground out.

“Vishous! Lay off—”

Trez reared away from Therese, holding his palms up like someone was pointing a loaded gun at him. “I’m sorry—just help her! Please! I can’t lose her again—”

His voice broke, and then he was collapsing, his body refusing to hold his weight, what was left of him pitching to the side and slamming into the hard floor. Even as he went down, his eyes did not leave his female and he had to swipe his face with his hand to try to clear his vision.

“Just save her,” he kept saying, over and over again.

And he wasn’t only talking about Selena. It was about who Therese was, as well. It was both of them, a single life that had been lived in two parts, in two different eras, but with one true love.

This was the solution to the equation. Provided she lived.

Thank fuck Doc Jane was on it. She had come with a backpack strapped to her shoulders and an oxygen tank mounted on her chest, and she moved fast, putting a mask on his shellan and checking for a pulse at the neck. Then she was injecting things into an arm—no, an IV. She was setting an IV and then injecting things.

“Come here,” someone said to him. V. It was V.

Trez felt his position get moved, his torso lifted from the floor and laid in someone’s lap. And then something was passed over his face. He tried to bat it away, but his hands were unceremoniously slapped aside.

“It’s oxygen,” V said in a dry voice. “You’re wheezing.”

Was he?

“I need you to breathe slow and steady for me.”

Trez did what he was told because it was easier than arguing. All he really cared about was trying to keep track of what Doc Jane was doing—and the fact that she was still moving so fast was the good news and the bad news. It meant that his shellan was still alive, but it also meant that the injuries were serious. Like he didn’t already know that, though? Dear God, his female’s skin had been ravaged by the fire.

As he started coughing, he nearly vomited.

Doc Jane put a cell phone up to her ear. “Where are you. Right. ETA? Got it. Yeah, we’re going to have to move her.”

Trez’s body inflated with strength. Shoving himself up off of V’s lap, he pushed the oxygen mask onto his forehead. “I’m going to carry her. No one else.”

Doc Jane ended her call and opened her mouth, no doubt to hell-no him.

“That’s the way it’s going to be,” he said grimly.

“Not if you want her to live.” Doc Jane rezipped her backpack and got to her feet, the thin, clear tubing running between the oxygen tank and Therese’s mask terrifying because it seemed so fragile for its critical purpose. “You hold the oxygen mask in place and the IV bag. That’s just as important as her body. V, you’re going to have to pick her up. I haven’t given her any morphine, but I can’t run the risk of depressing her respiration any further.”

When he opened his mouth to argue, Doc Jane shook her head sharply. “Let’s make this fast, gentlemen, so I can stabilize her properly in the mobile unit.”

Trez was of a mind to disregard it all, but something in those forest green eyes got through his possessiveness. Doc Jane wasn’t giving him a choice, and not because she was playing games or didn’t understand how bonded males were. It was because she understood everything that mattered medically.