My kitten.
Something happens behind my sternum again. The flicker. The unauthorized light in the dark room. This time it’s accompanied by something else—a sensation in my abdomen that might be humor or might be delight or might be the particular, unfamiliar experience of imagining a scene that is inherently absurd and finding the absurditypleasantin a way that the void cannot categorize and therefore cannot suppress.
Cassian’s expression shifts. A millimeter. The corner of his mouth.
“Let the war wage on.”
He closes the door.
The latch engages with a soft click that leaves me alone in a white-tiled bathroom in an underground lair decorated in designer silks, sitting on a toilet with compromised legs and residual poison in my bloodstream and a feral Alpha somewhere upstairs and a kitten conducting psychological warfare against a Prime Alpha who hates cats.
I kinda like him.
The thought arrives without authorization from the void, without clearance from the security protocols that govern my emotional life, without the extensive vetting process that every person who enters my awareness is supposed to undergo before being assigned a classification aboveneutral threat.
Odd.
Why is that?
It can’t be that easy to befriend an Alpha.
The data says otherwise. The data says that Alphas are weapons shaped like people—that their designation makesthem dangerous by default, that their pheromone influence makes them manipulative by biology, that the history of Omegas and Alphas is a history written in dominance and submission and the particular, systemic cruelty that occurs when one designation is engineered to command and the other is engineered to comply.
And yet.
He noticed I was cold before I shivered.
He asked thigh or neck.
He assembled the injector in five seconds.
He told me his mother is the real power behind the empire, and the way his voice changed when he said it?—
And his eyes are slightly darker than his brother’s, and the only person who ever noticed is their mother, and now me.
None of that means he’s safe.
But it means he’s interesting.
And interesting is the first thing I’ve found any Alpha besides Hawk.
Which is either the beginning of something or the continuation of the pattern that put me in Savage Knot in the first place—trusting the wrong person, seeing something real in eyes that turned out to be performing, building a bridge to someone who was already planning to burn it.
Vivian was interesting too.
Vivian was the most interesting person I knew.
And Vivian is dead because she earned it.
I don’t regret that.
I regret the circumstances that made it necessary—the designation, the jealousy, the biological lottery that assigned me Omega and assigned her Not and converted the difference into a weapon she aimed at my life.
But the killing?
No.
I don’t regret the honest thing.
