The pronoun is plural.
We. As in the pack. As in a collective responsibility that he’s assumed on behalf of people who haven’t agreed to it yet for a woman who hasn’t asked for it.
The void should reject that.
The void does reject that.
The thing behind my sternum that flickered earlier does not.
“I eat just fine,” I mutter, and the protest is genuine in its content and undermined in its delivery by the fact that I’m being carried to the bathroom like a child and my body’s resistance to the arrangement is limited to verbal objection because the physical resistance I attempt—a wiggle, a shift of weight, the particular squirming motion that should communicateput me down—fails miserably. His grip doesn’t budge. The arms remain steady. The transport continues uninterrupted.
“You’re going to pee on yourself if you keep doing that,” he observes.
I huff.
And go still.
I hate that he’s right.
I hate that the biological urgency of my bladder has sided with the man carrying me over the woman being carried.
The betrayal is comprehensive.
He lowers me onto the toilet.
The motion is careful, controlled—a gradual descent that transitions my weight from his arms to the porcelain with the particular, practiced gentleness of someone who understands that the person he’s transporting has compromised leg function and that the transfer requires more precision than a standard set-down. The bathroom is small—a utilitarian space adjacent to the laboratory section, tiled in white, functional rather than decorative, carrying the antiseptic scent of a room that is cleaned with the regularity of someone who maintains medical-grade hygiene standards.
“Do your business,” he says, straightening, his voice returning to the clinical register with the ease of a man who has just performed an intimate act of care and is not going to make it weird. “Call me when you’re done.”
“You could just call Hawk.” I say it from the toilet, looking up at him with the particular expression of a woman who isassessing whether to push back on the arrangement and is choosing, for the moment, to test its flexibility rather than its boundaries. “What if I have to go number two?”
He pauses at the doorway.
Looks at me. The gray-blue eyes meet my storm-gray with the patient, unruffled directness of a man who has just been asked about bowel movements by a woman he met hours ago and has apparently cataloged this as an unremarkable conversational development.
“Do your business,” he repeats, the words identical in content but carrying a new emphasis that saysI heard you the first time and my answer encompasses all varieties of business. “Call me when you’re done.”
A beat.
“There’s Febreze behind you. And your kitty pop probably smells worse.”
I huff.
“Don’t insult Ruby!”
The defense exits my mouth with a velocity and volume that the void did not approve—the particular, uncontrolled response of a woman whose emotional perimeter has been breached not by threat but by the disparagement of a kitten who weighs less than a bag of flour and has done nothing to deserve olfactory criticism.
Then the second part of his sentence catches up to my processing.
“Wait.” My eyes widen by a fraction. “She’s here?”
“Yeah.” Cassian’s voice carries the faintest trace of amusement—a hairline fracture in the clinical composure that the kitten topic apparently produces. “She’s terrorizing Dominic. Our fearsome leader hates cats, and clearly the little creature knows.”
Dominic.
The Prime Alpha with the aged-whiskey eyes and the devastating presence and the particular brand of dominance that my void stared down for ten minutes without blinking.
Being terrorized by a kitten.
