Page 64 of The Hyena’s Guardian

Theron went completely still.

Matt felt the bond tighten sharply between them before he fully understood why. Instinct pulled him closer automatically, and for half a second the claws lengthened again beneath Theron’s partially shifted hands.

Then Matt reached for his arm.

The reaction was immediate.

The tension locking through Theron’s body eased just enough for him to breathe again, and this time nobody missed it.

The survivors stared openly now. At Matt’s hand wrapped around Theron’s arm. At the calm settling through Theron beneath the contact. At the bond neither of them could deny anymore. Theron looked down briefly at Matt’s hand still resting against him.

Theron’s relentless restraint faltered at last, and beneath it Matt saw something he had never expected to find there.

Hope.

Chapter 10 - Theron

Theron had forgotten what gentle touch felt like.

The realization stayed with him after Matt stepped away near the underground stream, lingering beneath his skin with far more persistence than the corruption ever had. He could still feel the warmth of Matt’s hand around his arm as though the contact had marked him somehow, burning through centuries of instinct and isolation with terrifying ease.

No one had touched him like that in a very long time. Not with kindness, and not without fear.

For centuries, every hand raised toward him had carried violence, restraint, desperation, or pity. Eventually even those disappeared. The guardians died. The hungry ones forgot themselves. The mountain remained.

And Theron endured it alone because that had been the purpose.

Contain the prison. Hold the line. Die before becoming one of them. Simple. At least it had been once.

The simplicity had kept him sane long after sanity should have abandoned him.

Now nothing felt simple anymore.

Another tremor rolled through the chamber while operatives prepared equipment near the collapsed passageways, but the movement barely registered beneath the noise inside his own thoughts. Theron remained near the outer edge of the room, forcing himself to focus on practical things instead.

Escape routes. Structural instability. The First King growing stronger beneath the mountain. Anything except Matt Reynolds.

It did not work.

His senses kept tracking him automatically through the chamber despite every attempt to stop. The sound of his breathing separated itself from the others without effort. Theron could identify the rhythm of his footsteps beneath the shifting stone and distant voices. Even the scent of him lingered persistently through the cold underground air, warm and alive in ways the catacombs had not felt for centuries.

The bond intensified everything, stripping away what little distance he still tried to keep.

Before the First King’s corruption, bonds had been considered sacred among their kind. They were neither ownership nor destiny, but something far more dangerous than either.

The bond did not create love where none existed, nor obedience, nor affection. It simply stripped away distance until two souls could no longer pretend they were strangers to one another.

Most bonds formed slowly over years. Some remained weak their entire lives, little more than heightened instinct and emotional awareness.

What existed between him and Matt was nothing like that. Theron had felt him long before the collapse united them beneath the mountain.

The moment Matt entered the catacombs, Theron sensed something unfamiliar moving through the prison, an awareness that reached him more deeply than sound or scent. A steady presence pulling at him through corridors that should have swallowed everything alive.

The closer Matt came, the louder the bond became.

Theron had tried avoiding him. That part almost made him laugh now.

As though there had ever been any possibility of escape once the bond recognized them both.