“Aren’t you afraid I bite, darling?”
The endearment is deployed like a probe—light, testing, calibrated to measure her response and extract data from whatever reaction it provokes. Most Omegas would respond to Lucien’s attention with some variety of visible impact: a blush, a flinch, a nervous laugh, the instinctive recalibration of posture that proximity to an interested Alpha typically generates.
She does none of these things.
Her expression remains stoic—the same practiced flatness that withstood my dominance assessment, the same void that deflected ten minutes of sustained Prime Alpha pressure without producing a single crack. But her eyes catch his gaze. The storm-gray finds his gray-blue, and for a fraction of a second—so brief that I would have missed it if I weren’t watching with the obsessive attention of a man whose analytical function has been running at maximum capacity since she walked through the door—something shifts in them.
Not fear.
Not submission.
Assessment.
She’s measuring him.
The way I measured her.
“No.”
One word. Flat. Carrying the same absolute certainty that characterized hernon-negotiabledeclaration about the feral Alpha now settling into the seat at the far end of the arc beside Cassian.
“I can handle myself.”
She looks away from Lucien. Focuses on Violet. The transition is smooth, dismissive without being aggressive—the conversational equivalent of closing a book you’ve decided you’ll finish later.
“Besides.” A pause. The faintest shift at the corner of her mouth—not a smile, not even the ghost of one, but the structural precursor to an expression she suppresses before it forms. “I can always bite back.”
Lucien’s smirk deepens.
Cassian’s eyebrow rises.
And I?—
Impressed.
The word arrives against my will and installs itself in my assessment without permission. Impressed. By an Omega who just sat next to the more dangerous of my twins by choice, deflected his verbal probe with three words and a redirect, and delivered a counter-threat so understated it was almost invisible.
A rebel.
Some sort of rebel Omega who breaks brass knuckles instead of hearts and stares down Prime Alphas instead of submitting to them and sits next to wolves instead of running from them.
What the hell has Violet brought us?
Our attention shifts to Violet.
She’s been watching the entire exchange with the expression of a scientist observing a hypothesis being confirmed in real time—professional satisfaction layered over something warmer, something that might be genuine pride in the Omega she selected for this particular set of circumstances. She rises from her chair, the red silk gown cascading around her frame as she moves to the front of the desk—the power side, the audience side—and slides five envelopes onto the polished ebony surface.
Red.
The same deep crimson as the one that presumably delivered this woman to our coordinates. Five of them, fanned across the desk with the deliberate arrangement of cards being dealt by a dealer who knows every hand in the deck and is choosing the distribution with strategic rather than random intent.
She puts her hands together—that signature gesture, fingertips meeting fingertips, the steeple that precedes every significant statement she makes the way thunder precedes lightning.
“The masquerade invites,” she begins.
She smiles.
And her eyes darken.
