He leaves.
Before we can challenge him. Before we can ask for clarification or contest his assessment or demand the specific, quantifiable data that my analytical mind requires before accepting subjective claims at face value. He’s through the door and into the corridor and gone, his footsteps fading against the concrete with the deliberate pace of a man who has planted something in a room and is leaving before the people in it realize what’s growing.
Silent company.
A blanket of peace.
From a woman whose existence is measured in kill counts and poison tolerance and the particular variety of survival that leaves the survivor less recognizable than the life they survived.
I don’t believe him.
And I want to.
The wanting is the problem.
The three of us stand in the silk-draped underground, surrounded by mannequins and medical equipment and the ambient scent of designer fabric and chemical compounds, and we look at the sleeping Omega on the bed—the woman whose history we now carry alongside our own, whose freedom is entangled with ours, whose presence in our lives is measured inhours but whose impact has already reconfigured the priorities of three men who thought their priorities were fixed.
She breathes.
Slowly. Evenly. The rhythm of a body healing in the particular, efficient way that bodies heal when they’ve had extensive practice.
Five days.
Prepare for a masquerade.
Learn the presence that a feral Alpha calls radiance.
To determine if the wanting I just identified is the beginning of something or the end of everything.
He leaves before we can challenge him.
CHAPTER 17
The Less Cynical One
~VICTORIA~
Purring.
The sound arrives before consciousness does—a low, rhythmic vibration that enters my auditory system through whatever corridor the brain leaves open during chemically assisted unconsciousness and deposits itself in the space between sleeping and waking, where sensory data accumulates until it reaches a threshold that the body interprets as a reason to return to the surface.
Ruby.
The identification is automatic. I know the frequency of her purr the way I know the acoustic signature of my own staircase—through repetition, through the particular variety of intimacy that develops between a creature who visits and a creature who pretends the visits don’t matter. Ruby’s purr is not a gentle sound. It’s a small engine—a mechanical, insistent vibration that her tiny body produces with a force disproportionate to her size, as though the sound itself is structural, the architecture that holds her contentment together.
The purring is close. Against my neck, maybe. The vibration transmitting through skin contact rather than air, the particularwarmth of a small, furry body pressed into the hollow of my throat where my pulse lives.
She’s guarding my throat.
My little sentinel.
Then a touch.
To my cheek. Light—the backs of fingers, I think, the contact so gentle it might be imagined if my skin weren’t already translating the data with the particular sensitivity of nerve endings that have been recalibrated by whatever Cassian’s antidote is doing to my neurochemistry. The touch is warm. My face is cold—my face is always cold, the thermoregulatory deficit that runs through my body like a river of ice that the world’s hot showers and heavy coats can reduce but never eliminate—and the contrast between the cold of my cheek and the warmth of the fingers produces a thermal differential that my brain interprets aspay attention.
I blink.
Once. Twice. The lids heavy, resistant, performing the mechanical function of opening with the sluggish reluctance of hardware that has been shut down and is rebooting. The first blink produces blur—the visual field flooded with undefined light and shape, the brain’s image-processing system still initializing. The second blink sharpens the blur into form: amber lighting. Silk-draped walls. The particular, unfamiliar geometry of a room I don’t recognize arranged around a bed I don’t remember being placed in.
