Chapter 28 Nyx
NYX
Grief did not hit me hard.
It came in pieces my body could not hold all at once. One moment I was in the back of the SUV with Malachi's arm around me and Kairo's hand at the back of my neck. The next I was back in that chamber, watching the knife go in again.
I did not remember how we got back to Meridian. I remembered the sound.
Not the gunfire. Not the shouting. Not the comms crackling while Elijah rerouted our exit and Jabari breathed like he was trying not to tear the city open with his bare hands. I remembered the sound her body made when it hit the stone.
That was what stayed lodged behind my ribs while the SUV tore through the streets. That was what followed me through every red light and every sharp turn and every order barked into the dark.
I did not cry at first, because some part of me still refused to believe what I had seen.
My mind kept trying to fix it behind my eyes. Maybe she had passed out. Maybe there had been medics. Maybe the Council wanted me broken, not bereaved. Maybe Tatum was still breathing on that floor while men in polished shoes argued over paperwork.
I stared at my hands.
They were shaking. Not violently. Not enough for anyone else to call it dramatic. Just enough that when I tried to curl them into fists my fingers would not obey me.
I had always been the steady one.
When our parents died, I did not cry in front of Tatum. I did not scream. I did not fall apart where she could see it. I stood in a funeral dress too tight across the shoulders and held her hand while she cried against me and asked what happened next.
I was fourteen.
She was nine.
I told her I would handle it. I told her she would not be alone again. I told her I was not going anywhere.
The SUV stopped and cold air rushed in when the doors opened.
I still did not cry. Malachi lifted me out and my feet touched the ground, but I did not feel it. Compound lights glared down over concrete and steel while men moved around us like the world had not just ended in a room full of witnesses.
That felt obscene.
Inside Meridian, the doors shut behind us and the sound changed. Everything got quieter. That was when denial cracked.
The bond snapped tight around my chest and my omega surged upward so hard I folded over. The sound that tore out of me did not feel human. It came from someplace older than language, older than thought, older than pride.
"She's gone," I heard myself say.
My voice sounded far away, like it belonged to a girl standing somewhere across the room instead of inside my own mouth. "She's gone."
Kairo caught me before I hit the floor. Malachi's hand pressed into my spine and Elijah was suddenly in front of me, his eyes moving over my face like grief was something he could outthink if he looked hard enough.
But this was not a problem.
It was a hole.
My knees gave out anyway, and they carried me to the nest because that was where omegas broke safely. That was where I had been contained before and loved before and protected before. That was where they thought I might come apart slowly.
I did not come apart slowly.
The second they set me down the grief tore through me whole. I folded forward with my hands in my hair and my elbows braced on my thighs while a scream climbed up my throat and ripped loose without permission.
It was loud. It was ugly. It hurt.
"She said my name," I gasped.
Malachi went still behind me and Kairo's grip tightened. Jabari cursed somewhere near the door while Elijah told somebody on the other end of a call to lock down every Council route south of the river and not let a damn thing move without his say so.
"She said my name," I said again, and then I was crying so hard I could not breathe.
Not quiet tears. Not the pretty kind. My chest heaved and my nose ran and my throat burned while I rocked back and forth like my body had forgotten how to stay upright through pain.
I had not cried like that since the night the social worker left and Tatum crawled into my bed and asked whether we were going to be split up. Back then I swallowed it and held her until she slept.
Now there was no one smaller to protect from my collapse.
My omega was not composed. She was not strategic. She was not any of the polished things the world liked to pretend about surviving women.
She was frantic.
Her scent flooded the room, peaches turned sharp and metallic under the heat of panic. It hit all four of them at once and for one hot second I felt their alphas answer it.
Containment.
That was what they were built for, even while the city outside kept moving under their orders.
Malachi moved first. He slid in behind me and pulled me back against his chest, not gentle and not rough, just solid enough that my body had something stronger than grief to lean on. Kairo knelt in front of me and took my face in his hands.
"Look at me," he said.
I couldn't.
I saw fluorescent lights and a blade and blood soaking through brown skin that looked enough like mine to make my stomach turn. I saw her eyes finding me across the chamber. I saw the way they held her up so I could watch.
"She was scared," I choked out. "She didn't know where she was."
Jabari said something low into his comm, his voice so calm it made the words worse. "Sweep every clinic. Every holding house. Every transfer point. Don't leave me nothin' breathing that smell like Council if they got her blood on it."
Then he crouched close enough for his thigh to press against mine while Elijah kept issuing orders from the other side of the room.
"You fought for her," Kairo said.
"It didn't matter." The words came out shredded. "It didn't matter."
Anger hit right on the heels of that.
It came fast and hot and mean enough to make my vision blur. I shoved away from them so abruptly Malachi's grip slipped and I barely made it to the bathroom before I threw up.
There was nothing in my stomach. My body tried anyway.
I gripped the sink and stared at myself in the mirror. My braids were half loose. My eyes were already swollen. There was a faint smear of dried blood at my collarbone.
Not mine.
I scrubbed at it until my skin burned.
"I'll kill him," I whispered to my own reflection. "I'll kill every last one of them."
The words did not feel dramatic. They felt clean.
Behind me, through the half-open door, I could still hear the pack moving.
Elijah was in the bedroom with his phone to his ear, voice clipped and surgical as he rerouted men and money and information through the city.
Jabari answered somebody else with that soft Southern politeness he used when he meant violence.
"No, sir. I don't care who his uncle is. Find him and hold him. If he reach for a phone, break that hand first."
Kairo stayed by the bathroom door and did not crowd me. Malachi did not speak at all.
That made it worse.
"She hated cold floors," I whispered.
The memory came anyway. Tatum at ten, standing on kitchen tile in socks too thin to matter, glaring at me until I picked her up because the cold was creeping into her bones. Tatum stealing my hoodie because it smelled safe. Tatum asking me whether I'd still braid her hair when she got grown.
I pressed my palm to my mouth to stop the sob climbing again.
I had raised her.
I packed her lunches. I signed school forms. I learned how to braid tighter so it would last the whole week. I sat up with her through fevers and bad dreams and every stupid school project she swore she forgot until midnight. I told her she would never be alone.
And I watched her die.
A knock came against the frame.
"Nyx."
Malachi.
He stepped in slowly, like he knew grief could startle like gunfire if you moved wrong.
"I failed her," I said.
He did not lie to me immediately. That was why he led.
"You were restrained by armed men in a fortified chamber," he said evenly.
"I promised her."
His hand came up to cup the back of my neck. Warm. Steady.
"You were fourteen," he said quietly.
Bargaining slid in ugly right then, slick enough to make me hate myself.
If I had agreed. If I had said yes. If I had offered them my body just long enough to get her out of that room, maybe she would still be alive.
"If I had submitted," I whispered. "If I had played along for five minutes, if I had let them think they won, maybe they would have let her live."
Malachi's face changed in a way I had learned to recognize by then. Something hard and furious passed behind his eyes and then disappeared under control.
"No," he said.
I laughed once, broken and wet. "You don't know that."
"I do." His thumb pressed into the nape of my neck. "Men like that do not let witnesses walk away because they are satisfied. They keep taking until there is nothing left to take."
I wanted to argue. I wanted to say if I had been quicker, meaner, smarter, colder, more willing to let them use me, maybe she would not be gone.
Instead I slid down the wall until the tile caught me. The cold soaked through my legs.
"I told her I would handle it," I whispered. "At Mama's funeral. I told her I would handle it."
My omega howled inside me. Not metaphorically. It was instinct and biology and devastation ripping through one body at once. My hands clawed at my shirt while I tried to breathe around it.
Malachi crouched in front of me and pulled me forward until my forehead pressed into his chest.
"You are not God," he said softly. "You are not responsible for every evil man in the world."
"I was responsible for her."
The silence stretched, and then the pack closed in.
Kairo slid down beside me first. Elijah came in from the bedroom with his phone still in his hand and set it aside only after muttering one last order about freezing Council accounts and putting eyes on every transport route west. Jabari positioned himself on my other side close enough that his thigh pressed against mine, one hand resting loose over his knee like he was forcing his body to remember patience.
Four points.
Four anchors.
My omega latched onto the contact like she had been drowning and somebody finally threw her a rope.
I leaned into them.
Not for dominance. Not for comfort either, not exactly. For containment.
"She didn't even get to say goodbye," I said.
"She said your name," Kairo replied.
That broke me all over again.
The sob that came out then felt like it split my ribs. "She trusted me," I whispered.
Jabari's voice came low and steady beside me, Southern and soft enough to cut. "Sweetheart, she loved you. Ain't the same thing as making you God."
I laughed once at that and hated the sound because it came out wrecked.
I cried until my throat went raw and my head ached and my body shook so hard Malachi tightened his hold like he thought I might seize. None of them told me to calm down.
Elijah put his hand against my back and kept it there while messages kept buzzing on the phone he had dropped on the floor.
Kairo brushed tears off my face with his thumbs every time I could not catch my breath.
Jabari sat solid and warm against my side like a wall somebody had built just for me. Malachi held me through all of it.
They stayed.
Time did not stop for grief. Meridian never worked that way.
While I broke apart in pieces on the floor, the pack kept the city moving. Elijah picked his phone back up after a while and stepped into the hall, voice low and precise as he started calling the people who needed to know before the Council could spin the story.
"We lost her," I heard him say once, quiet and final. "Prepare the house."
Jabari moved in and out of the room answering other calls, that same polite Southern cadence wrapping around threats that made men on the other end of the line listen carefully.
"Yes, ma'am," he said once, calm as church. "Funeral's gonna be private. But anybody who loved that girl can come pay respect."
Then softer, colder. "And if any Council dog show their face, you call me first."
Kairo disappeared long enough to bring water and a blanket and something that smelled like tea I never drank. Malachi did not leave me at all.
The world kept organizing itself around the fact that my sister was dead.
At some point I crawled back into the nest because my body needed somewhere to collapse that wasn't tile. I dragged one of my old hoodies out from under the blankets. Faded black. Sleeves stretched at the wrists.
Tatum used to steal this one.
Said it smelled safe.
I pressed it to my face and inhaled.
There wasn't anything left of her in it.
That was when the grief changed again.
It stopped being loud.
It became heavy.
Night fell without me noticing. Meridian grew quieter, the way it always did when something bad had happened and the city was waiting to see what we would do about it.
I lay on my side staring at nothing while the bond pulsed around me, steady and warm.
The pack breathed around me without trying to sync.
Elijah's fingers moved slowly along my spine after he came back in.
Kairo's thumb traced my knuckles. Jabari's hand rested at my hip. Malachi's chin pressed into my hair.
My omega was not calm.
But she was no longer frantic.
"She doesn't get to be a lesson," I said finally.
The room stilled.
"They don't get to write her down as subject," I continued. "They don't get to file her away."
"No," Malachi said.
"We're burying her right," I said quietly. "Not the way they wanted."
Jabari's arm tightened slightly around my waist. "Yes, ma'am," he said softly. "We already getting that ready."
The grief did not leave. It never would.
But underneath it something else formed. Not hysteria. Not blind rage.
A line.
They had made me watch. They had held her upright so I could see. They had wanted obedience.
I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling.
"She was my baby," I whispered.
Malachi pressed his mouth to my temple. "And you were hers," he said.
My eyes burned again, but the tears did not fall this time.
"They think they broke me," I said.
No one interrupted.
"They don't know what they did."
My omega settled fully then. Not healed. Not soothed.
Focused.
I turned my head slowly and met each of their eyes in the dim light.
"Tomorrow," I said quietly, "we bury my sister."
Silence held the room.
"And after that," I continued, voice steady now, "they start burying theirs."
For the first time since the blade went in, my hands stopped shaking.