Because my girl has been poisoned enough times for me to figure this shit out by scent alone.
A blessing in instances like this.
A curse in every other context, because the skill exists only because the need for it has been repeated with a frequency that constitutes its own category of trauma.
“Hang on,” I urge, lowering her into my lap on the bedroom floor, her body settling against my legs with the warm, terrifying weight of someone who is losing the fight against whatever is running through her system. Her breathing is ragged—the respiratory rate elevated, the rhythm irregular, the lungs working harder than they should to perform a function they normally execute without supervision.
I pull out the case.
Small, matte black, carried in my coat’s inner chest pocket at all times—alltimes—because the world Victoria lives in has taught me that the distance between her and a poisoning attempt is measured in hours rather than days and the only variable is which compound they’ll use this time. The case contains a set of antidotes—four vials, color-coded, each one the countermeasure for a different category of toxin that Savage Knot’s less creative assassins favor.
I identify the compound by her scent’s alteration. The cold iris has taken on a metallic edge. The night rain has soured. The combination points to a neuromuscular agent—something designed to progressively paralyze voluntary muscle function while leaving consciousness intact, because the people who use this particular poison want their targets awake for whatever comes next.
They wanted her alive.
Alive and immobilized.
Which means this wasn’t a kill order.
This was a capture.
And the invitations were the target.
My hands select the correct vial—the green one, third from the left—and begin assembling the injector. The process requires fine motor control that my current neurological state is actively undermining. My fingers shake. Not visibly—not the gross tremor that would be apparent to the three men I can hear on the stairs—but at the level that matters, the level that determines whether the needle goes where it needs to go and the dosage deploys at the rate it needs to deploy.
This always happens.
When the adrenaline is high.
When I’m trying not to panic at the idea of losing Victoria.
The feral surges and the rational retreats and the hands that need to be steady become the battlefield between the two, and the injector in my grip becomes the thing I can’t afford to fumble and am fumbling anyway because the man who shoots fifteen people without missing can’t keep his fingers still when the person who matters most is dying in his lap.
Footsteps reach the doorway. One of the twins—I don’t look up to determine which—curses softly.
“Is she okay?”
I don’t answer.
Because I’m not going to say yes when I don’t know, and I’m not going to say no when she’s still breathing, and the only person qualified to answer that question is currently losing the battle against a neuromuscular agent that is systematically shutting down her ability to answer anything.
Then one of the twins is on the other side.
Not at the doorway. On the floor. Beside Victoria, opposite me, having crossed the body-strewn bedroom with a silence I didn’t register and positioned himself at her side with the particular, unassuming proximity of someone who is offering help without demanding the right to provide it.
I look at him quickly. Gray-blue eyes. Cropped hair. Steady expression. The one without the edge.
“You’re the less cynical one.”
He barely smiles—the expression so faint it registers more as a muscular intention than a completed action.
“Cassian.” A pause. “Guess we didn’t really introduce ourselves, huh?”
“Nope,” I say, and my hands are still struggling with the injector, the components refusing to align because my fine motor control has been repossessed by the feral’s anxiety and the feral doesn’t care about assembling medical equipment, the feral cares aboutholding her tighterandgrowling at everything that movesandkilling whatever did this to her, none of which addresses the immediate problem of the poison advancing through her system with every second I waste trying to make my fucking fingers cooperate.
“May I?”
Cassian’s voice. Calm. The particular register of someone who is assessing a situation with the analytical detachment that my current state doesn’t have access to and is offering his competence without attaching conditions to it.
