I pause.
Look at him. His gray-blue eyes are steady. His hands—visible, open, positioned where I can see them—are still. Not shaking. Not twitching with the adrenaline that should be running through any person who has just sprinted across a compound and entered a building full of corpses. Just still. With the particular stability of someone whose nervous system maintains its function under pressure the way mine doesn’t when the pressure involves her.
I want to debate.
Every instinct I have—feral, rational, and the hybrid of both that constitutes my operational personality—wants to insist on doing this myself. Because she’s mine. Because her body is my responsibility. Because the idea of a stranger’s hands touching her when she’s this vulnerable activates a territorial response that my rational mind can identify as counterproductive and my feral mind can’t hear over the sound of its own growling.
But time is the enemy.
And we don’t have enough of it for me to put pride over my Precious.
I offer him the components. Vial, injector housing, needle assembly. My hands release them with a controlled reluctance that costs more than any of the fifteen shots I fired tonight.
“Green vial into the housing. Needle attaches clockwise. Two full rotations to lock.”
Cassian’s hands receive the components with the same steadiness they displayed while empty. He assembles the injector in five seconds.
Five.
Literal seconds. The vial slots into the housing. The needle engages. Two rotations—precise, measured, the mechanical dexterity of someone who has assembled precision instruments before and whose hands treat small components with theparticular respect of a person who understands that calibration determines outcome.
Where the fuck did he learn that?
“Thigh or neck?” he asks.
The question produces a secondary shock. Not just the clinical specificity of the delivery sites—which suggests medical training or at minimum medical familiarity—but the fact that he knows to ask at all. Most people would look at the injector and look at the patient and default to whatever delivery site their limited knowledge suggests. Cassian is asking because he knows that different toxins require different absorption rates and different delivery sites produce different absorption rates and the choice between them is clinical rather than arbitrary.
I don’t know how he knows that.
But the question buys him more trust than he realizes.
“Thigh,” I say. “As long as you aren’t some dirty bastard.”
Cassian nods. No reaction to the accusation—not offense, not amusement, just the acknowledgment of a man who understands that the warning is a formality required by the feral’s territorial programming and doesn’t take it personally.
He works quickly. His hands roll down her tights with the clinical precision of someone performing a medical procedure rather than undressing a patient—efficient, impersonal, touching only the fabric and only as much as necessary to expose the injection site on her outer thigh. The skin beneath is pale—porcelain, carrying the particular translucence that Victoria’s cold-running biology produces—and marred by old scars that I know the history of and Cassian doesn’t look at.
He produces an antiseptic wipe.
Where the fuck did he get an antiseptic wipe?
The question is genuine—the man is kneeling on a blood-soaked bedroom floor in a building he entered three minutes ago and has somehow produced sterile medical supplies from alocation I can’t identify and is now swabbing the injection site with the methodical, habitual care of someone for whom this step is not optional but reflexive.
He injects.
Victoria whimpers.
The sound is small. Involuntary. The vocal expression of pain that her conscious mind would suppress if it were operating at capacity and that her compromised state permits to escape uncensored. It’s the most vulnerable sound I’ve ever heard her make—more vulnerable than any sound she produces during intimacy, more revealing than any word she’s spoken in the years I’ve known her—and it sends goosebumps cascading up my arms with a velocity that makes my skin feel like it’s been electrically charged.
I growl.
The sound exits my chest before the rational mind can intercept it—low, deep, vibrating at a frequency that the feral produces when its territory is being threatened by proximity it hasn’t authorized. The growl fills the bedroom with the particular atmospheric pressure of a Prime-level Alpha pheromone warning, and the effect is immediate: the footsteps at the doorway—the other twin, the Prime—freeze.
Cassian pauses.
Looks at me. His gray-blue eyes meet my amber-gold with the patient, unintimidated directness of a man who has assessed the growl’s source and classified it asprotective responserather thanactive threatand is waiting for the distinction to be confirmed before continuing.
“She’s yours,” he says. Quiet. Factual. “I’m simply helping.”
