“Babysitting?” we say.
Hawk blows out smoke, and his amber-gold eyes move across the three of us with the particular assessment of a man who is cataloguing what he sees and comparing it against information he’s already gathered.
“Yeah.” He takes another drag, lets the smoke settle in his lungs for a beat longer than necessary, then releases it in a slow stream aimed at the ceiling. “I decided to do a check on y’all’s bounties. On my Precious’s request.”
He whistles. The sound is long, low, carrying the particular note of someone who has encountered data that exceeds their expectations in a direction they find both alarming and entertaining.
“Damn. Y’all’s pack brother really hates y’all, huh.” He tilts his head, the cigarette between his lips, and the question that follows carries genuine curiosity beneath the casual delivery. “Did you mix him up at birth? Was he gay and couldn’t come out of the closet? Why the hell did he set you guys up like that?”
He takes the cigarette from his lips and points it at us—the ember glowing like a small, accusatory star.
“Cause I’m guaranteeing y’all aren’t going to last by sunrise tomorrow with how high the stakes are.”
The guarantee lands in the fluorescent silence with the weight of a verdict. I meet his amber-gold eyes with my aged-whiskey ones and find no deception there—no manipulation, no strategic deployment of fear. Just the unvarnished assessment of a man who has looked at the numbers and doesn’t like what they add up to.
“And how are you going to help us with that?” I ask.
My voice comes out steadier than I expect—the Prime register reasserting itself, the authority recalibrating after the disruption. The question is genuine. Not confrontational. The genuine inquiry of a man who has just been saved by someone whose motivation for saving him is unclear.
Hawk shrugs.
The gesture is full-bodied, unhurried—the rolling lift and drop of shoulders that communicates the particular brand of flexible commitment that I’m beginning to understand is his operational philosophy.
“Well.” He takes another drag. Considers the smoke. Considers us. “I can either continue bodyguarding y’all, or I can just focus on Victoria and let y’all die.”
The options are presented with the casual equivalence of a waiter describing specials.
“But I think that would upset her. A tad.” The understatement is delivered with a smirk that suggests he knows exactly how much it would upset her and the answer is significantly more thana tad. “Since this masquerade would get her out of this hellhole. And frankly?—”
His voice shifts. The casual register drops by a degree, replaced by something that sounds dangerously close to sincerity.
“After all her sacrifices. Matched with her sheer talent. She deserves to dance on a stage and be appreciated by the world.” He looks at the cigarette as though it contains the relevant data. “Not this luxury cage of rich fuckers.”
We share a look.
The three of us—Prime and twins, the remaining pack, the men whose collective survival has just been added to the operational responsibilities of a feral Alpha who would clearly prefer to be elsewhere doing things I’d rather not visualize—exchange a microsecond assessment that produces a consensus without requiring verbal negotiation.
He means it.
The vulgar, cigarette-smoking, romance-novel-reading feral means every word.
He’s not protecting us for our sake.
He’s protecting us because we’re the mechanism that gets her out.
And that—paradoxically—makes him the most trustworthy person we’ve encountered since Damien left.
Lucien speaks first. As always.
“Well then. What are we going to do now? Stick together?”
The question is lighter than its content—Lucien’s particular gift for making consequential inquiries sound like casual suggestions.
“We could,” Hawk begins, and I detect the beginning of a logistical proposition forming behind his amber eyes—a plan, or the framework of one, the operational thinking of a man who has apparently been doing reconnaissance while we were shooting at walls and smoking cigarettes and walking through the colddiscussing an Omega’s physical attributes. “But I have to go check on?—”
His phone goes off.
The sound cuts through the shooting range’s concrete acoustics like a blade—high-pitched, urgent, a tone that doesn’t resemble any standard notification I’ve heard. Not a ring. Not a chime. Abeep—sharp, repetitive, the sonic profile of an alert system designed to communicate emergency rather than convenience.
