“I have to.” Whoever just broke in—whether they were sent by the Senate or Initiative Industries, the Ouroboros Corporation’s parent conglomerate—they weren’t going to let us just hide out back here, and they certainly weren’t going to let us slip away. They would find us, and they would kill us.

I’d known it was a bad idea to stay with Garth. I’d known I would be endangering him, and I’d done it anyway. It was my fault that they were here, whoever they were. This was on me, one hundred percent. I owed it to him to make it right.

One of the intruders entered the bedroom, an armed mercenary—human—from the looks of him. I could see his reflection in the mirror. He was armed to the teeth and dressed in all black, from his flak jacket down to his cargo pants and combat boots. I swept the gun around and aimed, threatening to put a bullet in his head before he could train his gun on me. It probably helped that I was naked. That might be what allowed me to get the jump on him.

The merc froze, a quick blink his only movement.

“Why are you here?” I asked, feeling like a moron for wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt. If his orders weren’t to kill me, I’d let him live. I wanted to leave him alive—he was only human, after all, and this life was it for him and his mortal soul—but not at the expense of my life, let alone Garth’s. He was human, too, and one that I cared about. If humans were going to be dying in this condo today, he wouldn’t be one of them. Not on my watch.

The merc didn’t answer. He just stood there, staring at me.

Not a moment later, one of his buddies tossed a small metal can into the room. It started spewing a foggy gas.

I reacted without thinking. I shifted my aim lower and pulled the trigger, shooting the guy I had in my sights in the thigh, then swinging around to get his buddy in the shoulder. I backstepped and slammed the bathroom door shut. “I think it’s tear gas,” I told Garth, crouching off to the side in case the other mercs got gun happy. I grabbed a bath towel off the towel rack and stuffed it into the crack under the door. “There’s eight, maybe ten mercs out there.” They wouldn’t have long after that gunshot. Someone would call the cops, which meant the intruders would get desperate, quick. Not great for us.

Garth nodded, impressing me with his sharp focus. He wasn’t dazed in the slightest, and the glint in his eyes told me he wouldn’t go down without a fight.

“Here,” I said, reaching into the shower and handing him back his gun. As I turned away from him, I slammed the side of my fist down on the iron-esque pole of the now-empty towel rack, knocking it free. Thankfully, Garth had splurged for high-end fixtures; the thing didn’t just look like iron, it was iron.