Chapter 5 Kairo Cross #2
I took a step closer before I caught myself. Her scent deepened, peaches and cream edged with suppressant tang and something defiant underneath it that my body recognized instantly.
I forced my expression to remain neutral. I’d spent years perfecting that mask.
If my father saw what I felt, he would turn it into a test. If Jabari sensed it, he would challenge it.
If Elijah noticed, he would store it away and use it later.
“You shouldn’t be down here,” Jabari said.
The words were not really about me. They were about order.
“I go where I want,” I said, letting a simple grin show like I was here for a casual visit. The smile was the point, because it kept them from noticing how hard my instincts were pulling toward her.
I kept my hands loose. I kept my shoulders relaxed.
I did not square up to Jabari the way I wanted to, because challenging him would make this about ego. I did not have the luxury of ego right now.
Jabari was not my enemy. He was also not safe.
Not with her.
Elijah’s gaze swept over me, sharp and assessing. He noted everything without comment.
“You’re early.”
“I was nearby,” I said. He let the lie stand.
“What happened?”
Jabari did not elaborate. He did not have to.
The way his shoulders were still tight, the way his hands flexed told me enough. I’d grown up watching him handle problems.
If she was unconscious and restrained, it meant she’d moved. It meant she’d refused to freeze.
My gaze slid to the medic adjusting the monitors. Sedation.
I put the pieces together quietly.
I nodded once, keeping my face neutral even as recognition struck low and sharp in my body.
“What’s the plan?”
“Containment,” Elijah said. “Restricted access. We keep her sedated long enough to see exactly how far the damage goes. Then we decide whether she is an asset or a liability.”
He did not say the rest out loud. Elijah never did.
Kidnapping was only a word when it was illegal. Here, it was a process.
Hold. Strip context.
Extract information.
Remove the problem when usefulness ended.
My stomach turned hard.
Containment rooms did not just erase people. They trained them to disappear quietly.
I’d seen it happen under medical language and clean paperwork, omegas reduced to compliance until nothing sharp remained.
I pictured Nyx waking in a room with no windows and no time, watched until resistance became a diagnosis, and something ugly tightened behind my ribs.
I moved closer to the table and stopped short of touching her. If I did, the room would register it.
Fate would announce itself through my skin, and Elijah would notice.
“If you are deciding whether to erase her,” I said evenly, “then you need to see what she awakes. Not broken. Not drugged. Talking.”
Jabari laughed once. Elijah did not.
“She will be isolated,” Elijah said. “No contact.”
It was safer that way. It was also torture.
For her, because she would wake surrounded by strangers who’d already decided she belonged to them.
For me, because my body was going to keep recognizing her while my mouth pretended she was only a problem.
They unstrapped her from the exam table and transferred the restraints to transport cuffs.
Jabari lifted her upright while the medic steadied the monitors, and together they guided her out of the medical bay toward the containment corridor.
I followed at a measured distance, pretending I was not tracking every breath she took.
The containment room closed in immediately the moment they pushed her inside. Low ceiling. Reinforced walls. A single camera mounted in the corner.
Constant light.
No softness anywhere.
Her scent filled the space, and I locked my hands in my pockets to keep from reaching for her.
In a smaller room, the scent had nowhere to go. It pressed against my senses settling into my lungs.
I caught myself leaning forward and forced my feet to stay planted.
If I moved toward her, the men behind me would notice. If they noticed, they would make her pay for it.
I caught the medic’s sleeve as Elijah turned away and spoke low enough that only she heard me.
“No more suppressants,” I said. “Clear her system. Quietly.”
I held her gaze until she understood this was not a request.
“I’ll take responsibility.”
Anger spiked through me, hot and immediate, but something sharper chased it just as fast.
Removing suppressant compliance was not a test. It was a fuse.
I could already feel the air change around her, the chemical edge of the suppressants thinning as her natural scent began to rise beneath it.
I could hear my mother’s voice in the back of my head, soft and firm, telling me that systems always punished women for what men could not control.
She would have hated Meridian. She would have hated the way my father ran it.
She would have hated that her son grew up inside it.
I stared at Elijah, but I kept my face smooth. Elijah did not care about anger.
Elijah cared about leverage, and he would turn my reaction into a weakness if I gave it to him.
So I swallowed it.
Nyx woke hard.
Not slow. Not confused.
Her breath hitched once and then steadied, her body going still in a way that told me she understood restraint before she understood location.
Her wrists flexed against the cuffs, testing, not thrashing. Her ankles shifted next, subtle, measuring range and resistance.
Her eyes snapped open.
They did not go wide. They sharpened.
She did not waste time on panic. She lifted her head as far as the restraints allowed and scanned the room in a clean sweep, cataloguing before fear could catch up.
The camera in the corner. The door placement.
The distance between bodies.
Jabari’s weight forward, ready for impact. Elijah’s stillness, positioned just outside immediate reach.
Then her gaze landed on me. It held too long, not soft, not pleading, but it still made my skin tighten. She wasn’t flirting. She wasn’t even trying to provoke. She was simply refusing to look away, and something about that kind of composure made the room feel smaller.
She held it for a fraction longer this time. Not recognition.
Calculation.
“Which one of you is in charge?” she asked.
Her voice came out steady, not loud, but it carried. Even groggy and bound, she spoke.
Elijah replied without hesitation. “Not you.”
Her mouth curved faintly. Not a smile.
An acknowledgment.
“All right,” she said. “Then you’re the one who thinks this is about information.”
Elijah stilled.
She shifted her gaze to Jabari.
“And you’re the one who decided force was faster than conversation.”
Jabari’s jaw tightened. His hands flexed.
Then she looked back at me.
“And you,” she said quietly, “are the one watching them instead of me.”
The room changed.
Jabari stepped forward.
I stepped forward from the wall beside the door and moved first.
“You’re safe,” I said, keeping my tone even as I placed myself half a step between her and Jabari’s reach. “You’re inside Meridian. Pack Meridian.”
The move was practical. It was also intimate in the way control always was, because my body noticed how close I had to stand to block her properly. I did not touch her. I did not lean in.
Her wrists twisted again, deliberately this time, angling the cuffs to test leverage.
She was not trying to break free. She was learning how much room she had to work with.
“Sedation,” she said, breath controlled. “Low dose. Short half life. You wanted me awake.”
The medic froze.
Elijah’s eyes flicked to her. Interest sharpened into something colder.
“You’re not stupid enough to kill me yet,” she continued. “Which means you need what I know. But you don’t know how much that is.”
Jabari growled low in his chest and reached for her arm.
“No,” I said.
It came out sharper than I intended.
I felt it then, the moment where the wrong move would cost her something she could not get back.
A snapped wrist. A crushed windpipe.
A correction meant to teach compliance instead of gather information.
Nyx saw it too.
She went still. Not frozen.
Focused.
“I can make this easier,” she said. “Or I can make it expensive. That depends on what you can give to me.”
Silence stretched.
I respected her for it. I also feared it.
Because a woman who mapped quickly would find the weak points in my pack, and my pack would respond the only way it knew how.
With force.
In that moment, understanding settled in.
If I did nothing, my pack would destroy her. Not with bullets or blades.
With control, with their damage pressed into her until she became something Pack Meridian could manage instead of a person.
I would not let that happen.
Not loudly. Not recklessly.
Strategically.
“Elijah,” I said, keeping my voice easy. “We’re done here.”
He looked at me, brows lifting a fraction. “We are not.”
“We are,” I repeated. “She’s awake. She’s lucid. Whatever you think you’re getting from her tonight, you won’t. Not without breaking her.”
Jabari shifted, clearly displeased, but he did not step forward again.
He watched Elijah instead, waiting for instruction.
Elijah considered me for a long moment. I could see the calculation happening, the cost and benefit running behind his eyes.
Finally, he nodded once.
“Move her,” he said to the medic. “Secure her. We take her upstairs.”
The medic unlocked the wall restraints and swapped them for transport cuffs again.
Upstairs, where we actually processed problems instead of simply containing them.
Relief and tension collided in my chest. We were going to be humane about this. Something about Nyx made me want to protect her, but I wouldn’t defy the Pack right now.
It wasn’t the right time.
Not when she didn’t want to be here. Not when we were forcing her around our pheromones.
They released the restraints one at a time, replaced them with transport cuffs that allowed movement without leverage.
Nyx watched every hand, every change, storing it all away.
When Jabari reached for her again, I stepped in without looking at him.
“I’ve got her,” I said.
He hesitated, then stepped back.
I guided her up, one hand firm at her back, another ready if she stumbled. She flinched away.
She did not want my touch. Even unsteady. My hand twitched. I wanted to reach out and support her, but didn’t want to cause more distress. My useless limb hung in the air between us as I fought to stay in control. My alpha would prefer we carried her.
I knew she wouldn’t have that.
We walked the length of the containment corridor to the security elevator.
The elevator ride up was quiet.
The space pressed in, metal walls reflecting our shapes back at us.
I could feel her scent sharpen with every floor we rose, suppression burning off faster now that her body breathed.
When the elevator doors opened onto Meridian’s executive floor, the air changed.
Power lived here in the corridor outside Malachi Cross’s private offices.
It sat in the plush carpet, n the perfectly regulated air, in the way the hallway swallowed sound.
It lived in the the lacquered paneling on the walls and the quiet that felt enforced.
The moment we stepped out, my alpha surged.
My skin tightened. My jaw clenched.
Heat rolled through my gut and settled low, heavy, urgent, the heat that did not ask permission.
It wanted to rut.
It wanted to claim.
It wanted to press her on the floor and make her take my scent until her body stopped trying to remember anyone else’s air.
I hated how fast it came. I hated how much of me wanted it.
Because my alpha did not care about timing. It did not care about strategy.
It did not care that my father’s name was at the end of this corridor and that Jabari and Elijah could turn on her the second they suspected she belonged to me.
My alpha only cared that she was close, that her suppression was thinning, and that her scent was rising.
Peaches and cream again, but warmer now, fuller, threaded with something sharper that made my mouth water in a way that felt violent.
My palms dampened. My tongue pressed hard against the back of my teeth like my body was preparing for a bite.
Mark her.
Mine.
The words hit me hard.
I forced my shoulders loose. I forced my hands to stay where everyone could see them.
I forced my posture into the version of myself they expected, the one they laughed at, the one they called pretty and reckless and harmless.
That mask was not softness. It was camouflage.
It was the only way I could stand close enough to keep her safe without my father reading the truth off my face.
So I let the version of me, the charming one that laughed too easily and looked harmless on purpose.
Performance had kept me alive since my mother died, and I was not about to stop now.
I let my mouth soften. I let my eyes warm.
I let my expression say steady, say calm, say you can breathe around me.
Inside, my alpha clawed at the leash.
It hated the smile. It hated the patience.
It hated that I was acting like I was not starving.
“This is as far as I go,” Elijah said, stopping short of the double doors at the end of the corridor. “From here on, this is Malachi’s call.”
Nyx’s head snapped up.
Malachi.
The name hit her harder than Meridian had. I watched it ripple through her.
I watched her eyes widen on the monitor, watched her breath hitch, watched calculation stumble for the first time since she woke.
Good. She should know whose house she was in, and she should be afraid of it.
Fear made people careful, and careful meant alive.
My alpha wanted to pull her against me right then, to hide her in my chest, to wrap my scent around her until that fear turned into trust.
I did not.
I leaned toward the observation mic built into the wall outside the interview suite, low enough that only she would hear me through the room speaker.
“Stay sharp,” I murmured. “He’s worse than the rest of us, and he’ll smile while he does it.”
Her gaze flicked toward the corner of the interview room where the camera was mounted, startled, then steadied.
She was listening. Trust did not bloom, but attention did.
I straightened in the observation hall as the doors to the interview suite opened down the corridor, the smile still in place, the mask still smooth.
Under it, my alpha paced like a caged animal as they guided her inside. The lock clicked shut behind her..
Nyx Brooks was about to meet my father.
And I just made sure she lived long enough to do it.