Chapter 15 Sixteen Bodies And A Kitten #4
The sound is small. Involuntary. The vocal expression of pain that her conscious mind would suppress if it were operating at capacity and that her compromised state permits to escape uncensored.
It’s the most vulnerable sound I’ve ever heard her make—more vulnerable than any sound she produces during intimacy, more revealing than any word she’s spoken in the years I’ve known her—and it sends goosebumps cascading up my arms with a velocity that makes my skin feel like it’s been electrically charged.
I growl.
The sound exits my chest before the rational mind can intercept it—low, deep, vibrating at a frequency that the feral produces when its territory is being threatened by proximity it hasn’t authorized.
The growl fills the bedroom with the particular atmospheric pressure of a Prime-level Alpha pheromone warning, and the effect is immediate: the footsteps at the doorway—the other twin, the Prime—freeze.
Cassian pauses.
Looks at me. His gray-blue eyes meet my amber-gold with the patient, unintimidated directness of a man who has assessed the growl’s source and classified it as protective response rather than active threat and is waiting for the distinction to be confirmed before continuing.
“She’s yours,” he says. Quiet. Factual. “I’m simply helping.”
A pause.
“Yes?”
It takes me several seconds to process the statement and the question that follows it.
The feral is loud—occupying the cognitive foreground with its territorial alarm, filling my awareness with the primitive demand to remove the stranger from her proximity immediately—and the rational mind is having to shout over it to deliver the assessment that matters: he’s not the enemy.
He’s not the enemy.
He’s the guy who assembled your injector in five seconds and asked thigh or neck and produced antiseptic from fucking nowhere and is currently kneeling on a blood-soaked floor administering an antidote to your girl with the clinical proficiency of a field medic.
He’s not the enemy.
I nod.
Slowly. The motion is controlled—the physical manifestation of the rational mind regaining enough ground to produce a social response while the feral continues its growling retreat into the background where it belongs. For now.
Cassian injects the remainder.
The vial empties. The needle withdraws. He disposes of the sharp with a practiced motion that confirms the medical competence he’s been demonstrating for the last ninety seconds. Then he sits back on his heels and waits.
We wait.
Together. A feral Alpha and a twin who met less than four hours ago, kneeling on opposite sides of a woman they share no bond with and one shared priority: keeping her alive.
Her breathing starts to slow.
The ragged, irregular rhythm that the poison produced begins to smooth—the respiratory rate declining toward normal, the lungfuls deepening, the rhythm finding a cadence that suggests the neuromuscular agent’s grip on her system is loosening.
Color returns to her face—the porcelain warming from corpse-white to its natural pale, the blood resuming its circulation with a visible progression that I track with the particular attention of a man who has memorized every shade her skin produces and can read her physiological state through pigmentation the way other people read facial expressions.
“Fuck,” I whisper.
The word carries everything—relief, fear, love, the feral’s retreat, the rational mind’s reassertion, the comprehensive emotional cascade that occurs when the worst possibility is replaced by a survivable one.
I scoop her into my arms. Pull her against my chest. Press my lips to her forehead in a kiss that is not romantic but structural—the physical act of confirming, through contact, that she is warm and breathing and real.
She stirs.
Fighting unconsciousness. The muscle beneath my arms tenses, relaxes, tenses again—the involuntary cycling of a body whose system is being pulled between the poison’s sedation and her neurological refusal to surrender consciousness.
Normally, I’d let her rest. Normally, I’d hold her and let the antidote do its work and watch her sleep with the patient vigilance of a man whose favorite activity is watching this woman exist safely.
But not here.
Not in front of these men.
Other Omegas would be out for days after a dose like that. Not awake from the potential poison in a few minutes.
She doesn’t need to look weak.
She needs them to see what she is.
Her eyes barely open. The storm-gray appears through slitted lids, glazed, unfocused, processing the room with the sluggish effort of a visual system still under chemical interference. She squints—
And a blade is against Cassian’s neck.
The speed is inhuman. One moment she’s semiconscious in my arms; the next, a knife from her thigh sheath is pressed to the throat of the man kneeling beside her, the edge finding his carotid with a targeting precision that her compromised motor function should not be capable of producing but apparently is, because Victoria’s combat reflexes operate on a layer of neurology that poison hasn’t reached.
My instincts kick in.
My hand catches her wrist. Stops the blade’s progression from against to through with a grip that is firm enough to arrest the motion and gentle enough to communicate it’s me before the command arrives verbally.
“Precious.”
Stern. The word is delivered in the register I rarely use—the firm, authoritative tone that I deploy less than a handful of times per year because I know what it does to her, know the triggering potential of a male voice issuing commands to a woman whose history has given her every reason to classify male authority as threat.
But it’s the only frequency that cuts through the post-combat haze and the poison’s fog and the void’s defensive perimeter to reach the part of her that recognizes me.
Her glaring eyes meet mine.
Instantly. The storm-gray finds the amber-gold with the particular, searching intensity of a consciousness that has been retrieved from somewhere deep and is now trying to determine where it’s been placed.
She looks at me the way she looks at me every time the void pulls her under and something brings her back—as if she’s trying to figure out where in her mind I belong.
It doesn’t take long.
Despite feeling like an eternity in the tense silence.
In the silence where Cassian is sitting very still with a blade against his throat and Lucien and Dominic are frozen at the doorway and the only sound in the room is Victoria’s ragged breathing and the faint, distant drip of blood from surfaces that have absorbed more than their capacity.
“Meowwwwww.”
Long. Drawn out. The particular, operatic vocalization of a kitten who has impeccable dramatic timing and zero respect for tense interpersonal standoffs. The sound comes from above.
Victoria blinks. Once. Twice. The mechanical recalibration of someone returning to full awareness—the void releasing its defensive hold, the rational mind reasserting itself, the woman behind the weapon recognizing that the man at the end of her blade is not the enemy and the man holding her wrist is not the threat.
Something small and warm lands on my head.
Ruby. Who has apparently scaled the doorframe and launched herself onto the highest available surface—which is me—with the particular feline logic that says if it exists and is taller than me, I belong on top of it.
Victoria looks up. Her gaze lifts from mine to the kitten perched on my skull, and the way her eyes soften—
There it is.
That thing her eyes do.
The thing that only happens with Ruby and sometimes with me and never with anyone else.
The light behind the void.
“Ruby,” she mutters. The word is tender in a way that nothing else she says is tender, carrying a warmth that the poison and the violence and the room full of corpses can’t extinguish because it comes from somewhere they can’t reach.
“Meow!” Ruby declares with pride.
I pout.
The expression is involuntary and entirely justified.
“I kill fifteen men for you—actually, no, sixteen, cause that fucker is over there—” I jerk my head toward the body I shot from the doorway. “And you acknowledge the kitten that did nothing. I’m offended.”
She smirks.
Very weakly. The expression barely reaches formation before the muscles give up and return to neutral, but it was there—the closest thing to a smile that Victoria produces in the aftermath of combat and poisoning and nearly dying and waking up with a blade against a stranger’s throat while a kitten sits on her feral Alpha’s head.
She looks at Cassian.
The knife has been lowered. Her fingers still hold it—the grip loose now, the weapon resting against her thigh rather than against his carotid—but her storm-gray eyes assess him with the particular focus of a consciousness that is back online and cataloging.
“Oh.” A pause. The word is flat, unimpressed, carrying the particular energy of a woman who has just emerged from a near-death experience and is now being asked to process new social information. “It’s the twin.”
Cassian tilts his head. The motion is slight—a fractional adjustment of angle that communicates curiosity without challenge.
“It?”
“Hmm.” She blinks. Her words are still carrying the slurred edges of the poison’s residual interference. “Don’t know name.”
“Cassian,” he says. “My brother at the doorway is Lucien.”
She nods once. Slow, deliberate, the nod of someone allocating mental resources to information storage while the majority of those resources are still occupied with staying conscious.
“Righttttt.” The word stretches with the sluggish elongation of impaired speech. “And the douche?”
The smirk that passes across every face in the room—mine, Cassian’s, the grin I can hear in Lucien’s exhale from the doorway—is simultaneous and unanimous.
Dominic huffs.
“She better not be referring to me.”
“I am,” Victoria says.