But there's less conviction in it this time.
I straighten, taking a step back to survey the situation.
She can't stay in the chair all night. As comfortable as it looks, she's still recovering from poison, still healing, still in desperate need of actual rest. And leaving her here while I figure out what to do next seems... wrong somehow.
Since when do you care about wrong?
The question doesn't have an answer.
Or maybe the answer is: since my father proved that all the rules I built my life around were lies.
I move her hair first.
Brushing the pink strands away from her face with more gentleness than I knew I possessed. The texture is soft—finer than it looks, like silk threads dyed the color of cotton candy.
Cotton candy.
Her scent is fading now, muted by sleep and the clean smell of soap from her shower. But I caught it earlier, when she was playing pool and stealing my whiskey and smirking at me like she knew exactly how much her presence was affecting me.
Frosted sugar.
Cherry blossom.
The sweetest goddamn thing I've ever smelled, and it makes me want to bury my face in her neck and never come up for air.
I huff at my own weakness.
Then I bend down and scoop her up.
She weighs nothing.
Nothing.
Like picking up a child, or a doll, or some fragile creature that shouldn't exist in a world as brutal as ours. Her head lolls against my shoulder, pink hair spilling across my chest. Her hands are limp at her sides, fingers twitching occasionally in whatever dreams have claimed her.
Even unconscious, she counts.
I can see it in the subtle movements—four twitches, pause, four twitches, pause. The obsessive rhythm that she probably doesn't even realize she's maintaining.
OCD, Sage mentioned.
ADHD. PTSD.
A brain that doesn't work the way it's supposed to.
And yet she's survived this long.
Thrived, even.
Carved out a place for herself in the most brutal sector of the academy system, earned a townhome through violence and cunning, built a body count that most Alphas would envy.
She's not weak.
She's not broken.
She's just... different.
Dangerous in ways that don't fit the standard categories.
