Her glaring eyes meet mine.
Instantly. The storm-gray finds the amber-gold with the particular, searching intensity of a consciousness that has been retrieved from somewhere deep and is now trying to determine where it’s been placed. She looks at me the way she looks at me every time the void pulls her under and something brings her back—as if she’s trying to figure out where in her mind I belong.
It doesn’t take long.
Despite feeling like an eternity in the tense silence.
In the silence where Cassian is sitting very still with a blade against his throat and Lucien and Dominic are frozen at the doorway and the only sound in the room is Victoria’s ragged breathing and the faint, distant drip of blood from surfaces that have absorbed more than their capacity.
“Meowwwwww.”
Long. Drawn out. The particular, operatic vocalization of a kitten who has impeccable dramatic timing and zero respect for tense interpersonal standoffs. The sound comes from above.
Victoria blinks. Once. Twice. The mechanical recalibration of someone returning to full awareness—the void releasing its defensive hold, the rational mind reasserting itself, the woman behind the weapon recognizing that the man at the end of her blade is not the enemy and the man holding her wrist is not the threat.
Something small and warm lands on my head.
Ruby. Who has apparently scaled the doorframe and launched herself onto the highest available surface—which is me—with the particular feline logic that saysif it exists and is taller than me, I belong on top of it.
Victoria looks up. Her gaze lifts from mine to the kitten perched on my skull, and the way her eyes soften?—
There it is.
That thing her eyes do.
The thing that only happens with Ruby and sometimes with me and never with anyone else.
The light behind the void.
“Ruby,” she mutters. The word is tender in a way that nothing else she says is tender, carrying a warmth that the poison and the violence and the room full of corpses can’t extinguish because it comes from somewhere they can’t reach.
“Meow!” Ruby declares with pride.
I pout.
The expression is involuntary and entirely justified.
“I kill fifteen men for you—actually, no, sixteen, cause that fucker is over there—” I jerk my head toward the body I shot from the doorway. “And you acknowledge the kitten that did nothing. I’m offended.”
She smirks.
Very weakly. The expression barely reaches formation before the muscles give up and return to neutral, but it was there—the closest thing to a smile that Victoria produces in the aftermath of combat and poisoning and nearly dying and waking up with a blade against a stranger’s throat while a kitten sits on her feral Alpha’s head.
She looks at Cassian.
The knife has been lowered. Her fingers still hold it—the grip loose now, the weapon resting against her thigh rather than against his carotid—but her storm-gray eyes assess him with the particular focus of a consciousness that is back online and cataloging.
“Oh.” A pause. The word is flat, unimpressed, carrying the particular energy of a woman who has just emerged from a near-death experience and is now being asked to process new social information. “It’s the twin.”
Cassian tilts his head. The motion is slight—a fractional adjustment of angle that communicates curiosity without challenge.
“It?”
“Hmm.” She blinks. Her words are still carrying the slurred edges of the poison’s residual interference. “Don’t know name.”
“Cassian,” he says. “My brother at the doorway is Lucien.”
She nods once. Slow, deliberate, the nod of someone allocating mental resources to information storage while the majority of those resources are still occupied with staying conscious.
