“It’s as if you’re doing an underground designer business instead of some torture lab.”
He says it with the casual observation of someone who considers both equally plausible and isn’t sure which would be more concerning.
Lucien sighs.
The sound carries the particular weariness of a man whose creative enterprise has been reduced to a binary between fashion and torture by someone who apparently can’t conceive of a middle ground.
“It’s not like that at all.”
Hawk manages to keep the cigarette in his mouth during his next observation—a minor feat of oral dexterity that I’m beginning to understand is less a skill and more a permanent state. The man smokes the way other people breathe: constantly, habitually, the cigarette functioning as an extension of his respiratory system rather than an accessory to it. He inhales just slightly, the smoke entering through one corner of his mouth while the other corner remains available for speech, and releases the exhale from the side with a practiced deflection that keeps the cloud away from the silk-draped walls.
Nerves.
He smokes out of habit, but the frequency increases with nerves.
And right now, the frequency is high.
His hands slip deeper into his coat pockets—a movement I track because I’ve been tracking his movements since we entered this space, running the particular threat assessment that my Prime neurology performs automatically in the presence of a feral-prone Alpha whose emotional stability is architecturally dependent on the unconscious woman in the adjacent bed.
“Well, evil masterminds.” The endearment is delivered without warmth, though without hostility either—a neutral designation that Hawk has apparently assigned to the twins until further information warrants an upgrade. “Which one of you is the designer and the other the creator?”
Cassian answers.
He rolls away from the bed on the wheeled laboratory chair—the motion fluid, the castors gliding across the polished concrete floor with a sound that draws our attention to his position at the intersection of the atelier and the lab, the geographical point where the two halves of the twins’ operation converge. He reaches for the heavy curtain that separates the spaces and pulls it further open, revealing the full scope of the laboratory beyond—the glass-fronted cabinets, the chemical storage units, the centrifuge and the spectrometer and the equipment whose functions I can’t identify but whose presence confirms that Cassian’s medical competence is not improvised.
“I’m the creator,” he says, settling into the rolling chair with the particular posture of someone who is most comfortable when surrounded by his tools. “Lucien is the designer. But we alternate, if curiosity settles your nerves.”
Hawk does an odd thing with his lips—a compression and release that might be the precursor to a rebuttal or might be the habitual motion of a man who has been talking around a cigarette for so long that his mouth performs preparatory gestures for speech even when the cigarette is present. He realizes the obstruction, pulls one hand from his pocket to graspthe filter, and removes it from his mouth with the deliberate reluctance of someone separating from a coping mechanism.
“I’m not nervous.”
Cassian’s response is immediate, measured, and delivered with the clinical directness that I’ve come to recognize as his primary communication mode.
“You smoke when you’re in an odd environment.”
The observation lands in the silk-draped room like a pin dropping in a library.
“You also have a twitching hand, which is why they’ve been in your pockets.”
Hawk’s amber-gold eyes sharpen by a fraction.
“You like to pace unless you distract yourself in conversation.” Cassian continues with the steady cadence of someone reading a diagnostic report, his gray-blue eyes on Hawk with the particular focus of a man who catalogs behavioral patterns the way his brother catalogs fabric swatches. “And you probably haven’t gone fully feral on us because you can still smell your Omega. Right?”
Hawk doesn’t reply.
The silence that occupies the space where his response should be is itself informative—confirmation through absence, the particular quiet of a man who has been accurately profiled by a stranger in under an hour and is deciding whether this represents a threat or an asset.
Lucien looks over at his twin from his position by the cutting table, where he’s been examining fabric samples with the divided attention of someone who processes multiple conversations simultaneously.
“You’re usually kinder with your bomb drops,” he notes.
Cassian nods.
“I’m a bit triggered, to be honest.”
The admission catches my attention.Triggeredis not a word Cassian has used in my presence before—not because the less cynical twin lacks emotional vocabulary but because he typically processes his emotional responses internally before they reach the surface, and by the time they arrive, they’ve been translated into analytical language rather than experiential. For him to use the raw term suggests that whatever is bothering him has bypassed his usual filtration system.
It catches Hawk’s attention too. The feral Alpha’s amber-gold eyes narrow, and the assessment he’s conducting shifts fromterritorial evaluationtogenuine curiosityin a transition I can track through pheromone changes too subtle for most people to detect but well within my Prime’s diagnostic range.
