Chapter 17 Kairo
KAIRO
Iwoke up with the distinct feeling that the universe had messed with me personally.
Not with violence or urgency, because that would have made sense in Meridian.
Not with a gunshot echoing down the hall, or Jabari kicking a door open because someone had made a mistake.
Not even with Elijah moving through the penthouse with that quiet, surgical precision he carried.
I woke up to silence, the kind that felt too clean, too deliberate.
Pack Meridian did not do clean, not in the way normal people meant it. Meridian did controlled, it did contained, and it did filtered air and soundproofed corridors that kept panic from leaking into the hallway.
Meridian did constant motion beneath the surface, power humming through the walls even when nothing appeared to be happening. This morning, the penthouse felt paused.
I lay there staring at the ceiling, one arm tucked behind my head, trying to convince my body that this was fine.
That nothing was wrong. I listened for the low hum of the security systems adjusting, and I listened for footsteps, for voices, for any sign that I was not the only one awake in a house that never really slept.
My alpha rolled under my skin, restless and impatient. Nyx, and the way my body had tracked her. It had been three days since my father’s idea of a date, and since then, everything in the penthouse had shifted toward her.
The thought landed fully formed and heavy, dragging me upright before I could talk myself out of it. I did not pretend it was a normal reaction. I scrubbed a hand over my face, dragged my fingers through my braids, and swung my legs out of bed.
Sweatpants, a shirt, no shoes. If I ran into my father, he would not care. If I ran into Jabari, he would call me soft. If I ran into Nyx, I would forget how to breathe.
The hallway outside my room was dim and cool, the temperature set just low enough to keep people sharp. My father believed warmth made men sloppy, and he was probably right.
I took one step out of my room and stopped. Her scent was there, faint but undeniable, threaded through Meridian’s filtration.
It was peaches and cream, sweet but bruised at the edges. Beneath it was something warmer now, something restless that made my alpha lift its head.
My alpha perked up immediately. My pulse did the same, stuttering once, and I hated it felt so obvious even though nobody could see it. I followed the scent without thinking, because it was not a decision so much as a surrender.
My feet carried me down the hall the same way they had been carrying me toward her since the day she showed up with her notebook and her steady gaze and that quiet, calculating mouth that never wasted words.
The door to my father’s room was cracked. I stopped there, staring at the narrow opening, because staring was safer than stepping inside.
I knew, logically, that she would be with him. Malachi Cross did not hand problems off. He swallowed them whole. If Nyx was a risk, he would keep her where he could see her.
If her heat was rising, he would contain it the same way he contained everything else, personally and without asking. I knew that. My alpha knew it too.
Neither of us liked it.
I pushed the door open just enough to see.
Nyx was curled against him, and even at a distance her body was unmistakable. She was full-figured and deliberate, all soft curves layered over unyielding strength, the woman who took up space without apology even in sleep.
She was not just near him. She was tucked into his side, one leg thrown over his thigh and her arm draped across his torso, fingers loose.
My father’s arm was wrapped around her, heavy and certain, his hand resting at her lower back with the possessive quiet that did not ask permission because it already owned the room. He was asleep, and that was what hit hardest.
Malachi Cross did not sleep like that, not deep and not openly. With Nyx pressed to him, he looked almost human, dark hair mussed and the hard planes of his face eased, his tattooed hands and scarred forearms relaxed against the sheets.
Nyx was wearing his shirt. The black fabric swallowed her frame while still tracing the generous lines of her hips and thighs, hanging off one shoulder and brushing mid-thigh, and the sight of it dragged a slow, aching breath out of me.
Yearning hit first, sharp and clean. I wanted her to be that comfortable with me, wanted to be the place her body chose when it finally tired of being on guard.
And then confusion followed, heavier than it had any right to be. How had my father did what no one else had, how had he gotten her walls to lower without breaking her to do it?
Nyx did not fold for men. She studied them. She measured them. She survived them. Seeing her like this, relaxed in the arms of the most dangerous alpha in Chicago, made my brain stumble.
It was not jealousy, not in the way outsiders used it. It was the uncomfortable awareness that my father had found the right key, and I was standing here with my hands full of jokes.
My palm slid to the doorframe and held there, wood cold against my skin, grounding me. Relief threaded through the ache because she was safe, because if she was going to let anyone hold her inside Meridian it should be the man built to keep the entire city off our doorstep.
Still, my throat tightened with the wanting of it. I wanted her trust. I wanted her soft. I wanted to know what my father had said to make her believe she could rest.
I had not even kissed her, not properly, not in how would have required me to stop hovering at the edge of things and actually step forward. I joked. I smiled. I had done what I always did, which was try to be liked instead of being brave.
My alpha was unimpressed, pacing under my skin. The rest of me tried to play it cool, anyway. I cleared my throat softly.
“Good morning,” I said.
It came out quietly.
Nyx stirred first. Her fingers flexed against my father’s chest. Her lashes fluttered as she surfaced, and when she lifted her head and looked at me, her eyes were sharp even half-asleep.
Dark, intelligent, framed by thick lashes and brows that never quite lost their defiant arch. For a moment she looked confused. Then recognition slid into place.
“Morning,” she whispered.
Her gaze flicked to the open door and then back to me, color rising high on her cheeks fast and human.
“If you’re thinking anything, don’t,” she said, words coming out in a rush. “I was too tired to go back to my room, and he told me to stay. That’s all.”
“You don’t owe me an explanation,” I said, and I meant it even while my alpha paced my ribs. “As long as you’re happy, so am I. That’s the only part I care about.”
Her voice was sleepy and calm.
My father shifted beneath her, the movement instinctive. His hand tightened at her back for a second before loosening again.
He did not wake, not even a flicker. Nyx’s gaze stayed on me, and something warm flickered there. Amusement, maybe. Understanding. She could see the wounded little pride in my chest and had decided not to step on it.
“I am going to make breakfast,” I said, because it was the only sentence my brain could assemble.
It was not smooth or charming. It was panic wearing sweatpants.
Nyx’s lips twitched. “Okay.”
That was it. No scrambling away from my father. No apology for where she was. No embarrassment.
She was not that kind of omega, the kind who apologized for existing in the same room as an alpha. Nyx was the omega who made you earn her softness and then dared you to keep it.
I turned and walked away with the dignity of a man who was absolutely not sulking.
I was sulking, and I hated how it sat on me.
The kitchen was all marble and steel and appliances expensive enough to have their own clearance codes, and even that was a kind of violence.
Meridian loved luxury the way it loved control.
If you could buy comfort, you could buy silence, and if you could buy silence, you could hide what you planned to do next.
I turned on the espresso machine with more force than necessary and started pulling ingredients out of the fridge.
Eggs, bacon, bread, fruit. Pancake mix, because pancakes were comforting and because I was, apparently, a literal golden retriever in human form.
My hands moved fast. My thoughts moved faster.
She smelled like him, and even from the hallway I had scented it. The realization scraped down my spine.
Malachi’s scent was deep and steady, cedar smoke and oiled wood, the presence that made men fall into line without being told. It clung to spaces and fabric and skin.
Nyx wrapped in his shirt meant she would carry him with her when she walked out.
My alpha bristled, and the back of my neck went hot with it. I cracked an egg too hard. The shell splintered.
“Perfect,” I muttered.
I fished out the pieces and forced myself to breathe.
This was not a competition. My father did not compete.
He won. He always had. Not just in rooms like this, but in the quieter places too, where a man learned what he was allowed to want and what he had to bury.
I had called him Dad in kitchens and hallways when nobody else was listening, and called him sir when the world was.
Still, my throat tightened. The ugly part was that it made me want to perform, and the better part was relieved it was her who had the protection, not some stranger who would not survive my father’s patience.
After my mother died, affection became something you earned by being easy. By being funny. By being useful. It was easier to make people smile than to make them stay.
Nyx did not smile easily, and that was part of what kept pulling me toward her. It meant the part of me that still believed love was a prize started sprinting.
Her footsteps reached the kitchen before she did. Her scent hit first, warmer now, thicker, heat simmering beneath restraint.