Acceptable losses.
The phrase echoes in my skull. That’s what they’d called it. What they’d written in clean type across official documents while I held Chance’s ashes and tried to remember how to breathe.
I make myself look at him again.
At the man who killed my mate.
Commander Jericho Allon.
His face shouldn’t look like this.
I expected something cold. Cruel. The kind of features that match atrocity—sharp angles and dead eyes, maybe. Evidence of what he is written in bone structure.
Instead: brutal beauty.
Strong jaw dusted with dark stubble frosted white with snow. High cheekbones that catch firelight, casting shadows beneath. His mouth is relaxed in unconsciousness, lips parted slightly around shallow breaths that fog the air between us.
Hard. Uncompromising. A face built for war.
But stripped of consciousness, something else bleeds through.
The tension he carries—that coiled readiness I glimpsed in the transport—has dissolved. His brow is smooth now, no longer furrowed with concentration. Blood tracks down his temple in a slow line, almost delicate against tanned skin.
Vulnerable.
The word tastes wrong in my mouth, but I can’t deny it. Unconscious, bleeding into snow, he looks… breakable. Human in a way that makes my chest constrict.
I hate it.
Hate that I notice the length of his lashes, the faint scar tracing his left eyebrow, the way his breathing stutters slightly before evening out.
Hate how my fingers itch to brush the snow from his face.
I could end this now. No challenge. No resistance. Just a blade across the throat and years of grief paid in blood.
My hand moves toward the belt of the fallen Syndicate operative. Finds the knife strapped there. One slash. That’s all it would take.
I pull the blade free. Test its weight.
Do it. End this.
My fingers tighten around the hilt. He doesn’t even know I’m here, wouldn’t feel it coming. Quick. Clean. Justice.
But the heat pulses beneath my skin again, and my wolf pushes forward. Not hunting.
Guarding.
The wrongness of it makes bile rise in my throat.
No.
I can’t. I don’t know why, but Ican’t.
I drop the knife. My hand shakes as I reach for the suppression cuffs on the operative’s belt instead. Standard Syndicate issue, designed to dampen a shifter’s magic and physical strength.
Now I snap them around his wrists.
The rune-etched metal flashes once, bright enough to leave afterimages. His body jerks with faint reflex, dragonfire dimming to nothing. The air around him cools immediately.
