Zmeya attacked the bottle with the same intensity he brought to everything—desperate, determined, his whole tiny bodyvibrating with the effort of living. Behind us, Malysh had woken up and started crying, that particular plaintive sound that meant he'd realized he was alone.
"Your brother's fine," I told him, scooping him up too. He went limp immediately, trusting, tucking his head under my chin. "Just hungry. Always hungry, both of you."
I fed them in shifts, Zmeya first because he'd bite Malysh if he had to wait, then the gray one who purred through his entire meal like gratitude had a sound. They fell asleep on my chest afterward, tiny hearts beating against my skin, and for a moment the monster in my chest went quiet.
But only for a moment.
I put the kittens back in their box, both of them milk-drunk and floppy. They'd be fine for a few hours. Unlike me, they could actually sleep after eating.
The security room was my next stop—habit more than necessity. Banks of monitors showing every angle of the compound, the feeds cycling through in predetermined patterns. Front gate, quiet. Perimeter, clear. Kitchen, empty. Hallways, nothing. Nikolai's wing, dark. Maks's office, one light on but that was normal.
My thumb found the guest wing controls without conscious thought.
Maya's light was on.
I leaned closer to the monitor, adjusting the angle. She was pacing. Eight steps to the window, turn, eight steps to the door, turn. Arms wrapped around herself like she was holding her pieces together. She wore the clothes Sophie had left for her—sweatpants and a t-shirt that swallowed her small frame, making her look even more fragile.
The image was grainy, black and white, but I could still see the tremor in her hands. The way her mouth moved like she was talking to herself, working through something. Probablyreplaying the attack, the bodies, the moment Brand's man had put a gun to her head.
She stopped suddenly, freezing mid-step like she'd heard something. But there was nothing—I checked the other feeds. Just her and her ghosts.
Then she moved to the corner of the room, the one furthest from both door and window. She pressed herself against the walls like she was trying to disappear into them. The camera angle wasn't perfect, but I could see her sliding down, curling smaller and smaller until she was just a ball of borrowed fabric and visible shaking.
The monster in my chest stirred. Not with violence this time, but with something else. Something protective and possessive and absolutely inappropriate for what she was—a witness, an asset, a doctor who needed protection until we could deal with Brand.
She wasn't mine to want. Wasn't mine to protect beyond professional obligation. Wasn't mine at all.
But my hand was already reaching for the door, and my feet were already moving, and the monster in my chest was already making decisions my brain would regret later.
The walk took ninety seconds, but I made it last longer. Counted each step like it might be the one where I came to my senses and turned around.
She didn't ask for me. That thought repeated with every step, a rhythm like marching orders. Didn't ask, didn't want, didn't need another predator circling her when she was already bleeding. I should send Sophie. Should call one of the female staff, someone soft and unthreatening who wouldn't smell like gunpowder and blood no matter how many showers they took. Someone whose hands weren't specifically designed for violence.
But I kept walking.
The guard at her door—Igor, one of the younger ones—straightened when he saw me approaching. He had that look they all got around me, careful and alert, like I might suddenly decide to test if his neck would snap as easily as it looked like it would.
"Take a break," I told him.
He didn't argue. Smart boy. Just nodded and disappeared down the hallway, probably grateful to be anywhere I wasn't.
My hand on the door handle was steady. I turned it slow, careful, the way you'd approach a wounded animal that might bolt or bite. The door opened silent on well-oiled hinges—everything in this compound maintained to perfection because Nikolai couldn't stand anything that wasn't under complete control.
The room was dim, just the bedside lamp throwing shadows that made everything look like a threat. And there she was, exactly where the monitor had shown her, but somehow smaller in person. Crushed into the corner where two walls met, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them like she was physically holding herself together.
Her breathing hit me first—rapid, shallow, the kind that meant her body was eating itself with panic. Then the shaking, visible even from across the room, her whole body vibrating with the effort of containing whatever was tearing her apart from the inside. But it was her hand that made my chest crack open.
Her thumb hovered near her mouth, trembling, fighting something. The gesture was so young, so desperately human, that it bypassed every defense I'd built and went straight to something I didn't know existed in me. She needed comfort so badly that her body was trying to self-soothe in the most basic way it knew, but she was fighting it. Ashamed of it. Denying herself even that small mercy.
The monster in my chest didn't roar. It whimpered.
This brilliant woman who'd saved my life, who'd stood up to Brand's killers for her patients, who'd carried knowledge of atrocities for months while being hunted—she was falling apart in a corner, too proud or too broken to ask for help.
Every instinct screamed to go to her. Gather her up, hold her until the shaking stopped, make promises I had no right to make about safety and protection and never being alone again. But I knew what cornered creatures did when approached directly. They fought or they froze or they shattered completely.
So I did something else.
I lowered myself to the floor six feet away, my back against the wall perpendicular to hers. Not blocking her exit, not looming over her, not doing anything that might register as threat to her panicked brain. Just folding my massive frame down until I was lower than her, less threatening, almost small if someone my size could ever be small.
