“Righttttt.” The word stretches with the sluggish elongation of impaired speech. “And the douche?”
The smirk that passes across every face in the room—mine, Cassian’s, the grin I can hear in Lucien’s exhale from the doorway—is simultaneous and unanimous.
Dominic huffs.
“She better not be referring to me.”
“I am,” Victoria says.
“Dominic,” Cassian provides, his voice carrying the faintest trace of amusement he’s displayed since I met him.
Victoria nods slowly. Her eyes drift—the focus softening, the storm-gray going glassy as the antidote and the poison negotiate for control of her system. When she speaks, her voice carries the particular gravity of someone who has processed the evening’s events and arrived at a conclusion.
“Well.” A breath. “They were here for the invitations, I guess.”
That has them all frowning. The shift is collective—Cassian’s brow contracting, Lucien’s silence gaining weight at the doorway, Dominic’s aged-whiskey eyes narrowing with the particular focus of a man who has just received tactical intelligence that reorganizes his understanding of the threat landscape.
Victoria tries to rise.
Her body attempts the transition from horizontal to vertical with the determination of a woman who refuses to be carried and the physical capacity of a woman who has been poisoned and cut and battered and is currently operating on a cocktail of antidote and adrenaline and whatever reserves the void keeps in storage for exactly these situations.
I curse and catch her.
“You’re not walking, Precious.” My arms tighten around her—not restraining but supporting, the physical assertion of a man who has decided that this particular argument is non-negotiable. “Remember? Poison embolizes you.”
She huffs. The sound is so familiar—so Victoria, so perfectly her, the audible manifestation of a woman whose compliance is never given willingly and always given eventually—that itproduces a wave of relief so intense it threatens to crack the composure I’ve been maintaining since the tracker alert.
“Right, right…”
She’s trying to say something else—her mouth forming words, her brow creasing with the effort of organizing thoughts that the poison keeps scattering—when her eyes roll back. The storm-gray disappears behind lids that close with the involuntary finality of a system that has reached its operational limit and is shutting down whether the person operating it consents or not.
She’s out.
Like a light. The metaphor is accurate—the consciousness that was flickering and fighting and refusing to surrender extinguishes in a single instant, leaving behind a body that is warm and breathing and slack in my arms.
Cassian and Lucien curse. The sounds are soft, simultaneous, carrying the twin-frequency alarm of two men who have just watched an Omega regain consciousness after poisoning fast enough to put a knife to someone’s throat and are now watching her lose it again.
“Is she seriously okay?” One of them. Both of them. The question comes from the shared concern of men who have apparently decided, somewhere in the last twenty minutes, that Victoria’s survival matters to them for reasons beyond the masquerade.
Cassian speaks before I can answer. His gray-blue eyes are on the antidote vial, reading the label with the focused attention of someone who is cross-referencing the compound against a knowledge base I haven’t had time to interrogate.
“This was an antidote for—” He names the specific poison with a clinical precision that makes me look at him sharply. “Correct?”
“Yes.” The word comes out harder than I intend—the residual feral adding an edge to a confirmation that should be neutral. I want to ask him how he knows. Want to demand an explanation for the medical competence that has been operating at a level I didn’t expect from a man whose dossier reads “identical twin, old money, disguise specialist.”
But he’s already moving on.
“Let’s go to our place.” His voice is practical, decisive—the register of a man who has assessed the situation and identified the next action without requiring group consensus. “I should have something in the lab. It’ll quicken her recovery.”
A pause.
“Even though it seems her tolerance is extremely high.”
The observation is delivered with a clinical evenness that carries, underneath, something that sounds like respect.
I don’t respond to the observation. Don’t confirm or deny the tolerance assessment that is, unfortunately, accurate—Victoria’s body has been exposed to enough toxic compounds over the years that her system processes them with a speed that would be medically remarkable if the reason for the speed weren’t medically horrifying.
Instead, I look at Lucien.
