A pause.
“Yes?”
It takes me several seconds to process the statement and the question that follows it. The feral is loud—occupyingthe cognitive foreground with its territorial alarm, filling my awareness with the primitive demand toremove the stranger from her proximity immediately—and the rational mind is having to shout over it to deliver the assessment that matters:he’s not the enemy.
He’s not the enemy.
He’s the guy who assembled your injector in five seconds and asked thigh or neck and produced antiseptic from fucking nowhere and is currently kneeling on a blood-soaked floor administering an antidote to your girl with the clinical proficiency of a field medic.
He’s not the enemy.
I nod.
Slowly. The motion is controlled—the physical manifestation of the rational mind regaining enough ground to produce a social response while the feral continues its growling retreat into the background where it belongs. For now.
Cassian injects the remainder.
The vial empties. The needle withdraws. He disposes of the sharp with a practiced motion that confirms the medical competence he’s been demonstrating for the last ninety seconds. Then he sits back on his heels and waits.
We wait.
Together. A feral Alpha and a twin who met less than four hours ago, kneeling on opposite sides of a woman they share no bond with and one shared priority: keeping her alive.
Her breathing starts to slow.
The ragged, irregular rhythm that the poison produced begins to smooth—the respiratory rate declining toward normal, the lungfuls deepening, the rhythm finding a cadence that suggests the neuromuscular agent’s grip on her system is loosening. Color returns to her face—the porcelain warming from corpse-white to its natural pale, the blood resuming itscirculation with a visible progression that I track with the particular attention of a man who has memorized every shade her skin produces and can read her physiological state through pigmentation the way other people read facial expressions.
“Fuck,” I whisper.
The word carries everything—relief, fear, love, the feral’s retreat, the rational mind’s reassertion, the comprehensive emotional cascade that occurs when the worst possibility is replaced by a survivable one. I scoop her into my arms. Pull her against my chest. Press my lips to her forehead in a kiss that is not romantic but structural—the physical act of confirming, through contact, that she is warm and breathing and real.
She stirs.
Fighting unconsciousness. The muscle beneath my arms tenses, relaxes, tenses again—the involuntary cycling of a body whose system is being pulled between the poison’s sedation and her neurological refusal to surrender consciousness. Normally, I’d let her rest. Normally, I’d hold her and let the antidote do its work and watch her sleep with the patient vigilance of a man whose favorite activity is watching this woman exist safely.
But not here.
Not in front of these men.
Other Omegas would be out for days after a dose like that. Not awake from the potential poison in a few minutes.
She doesn’t need to look weak.
She needs them to see what she is.
Her eyes barely open. The storm-gray appears through slitted lids, glazed, unfocused, processing the room with the sluggish effort of a visual system still under chemical interference. She squints?—
And a blade is against Cassian’s neck.
The speed is inhuman. One moment she’s semiconscious in my arms; the next, a knife from her thigh sheath is pressed tothe throat of the man kneeling beside her, the edge finding his carotid with a targeting precision that her compromised motor function should not be capable of producing but apparently is, because Victoria’s combat reflexes operate on a layer of neurology that poison hasn’t reached.
My instincts kick in.
My hand catches her wrist. Stops the blade’s progression fromagainsttothroughwith a grip that is firm enough to arrest the motion and gentle enough to communicateit’s mebefore the command arrives verbally.
“Precious.”
Stern. The word is delivered in the register I rarely use—the firm, authoritative tone that I deploy less than a handful of times per year because I know what it does to her, know the triggering potential of a male voice issuing commands to a woman whose history has given her every reason to classify male authority as threat. But it’s the only frequency that cuts through the post-combat haze and the poison’s fog and the void’s defensive perimeter to reach the part of her that recognizes me.
