Chapter 17 The Less Cynical One #3
The words carry a warmth that surprises me as they exit—a note of delight, actual delight, the emotional flavor that I experience so rarely that its arrival is as notable as the observation that produced it.
My eyes do the thing. The thing Hawk talks about when he thinks I’m not listening—the thing that happens when the void’s perimeter is breached by something that my deeper architecture recognizes as good and responds to before the surface defenses can intervene.
The light. The flash behind the storm-gray that makes my eyes look, for a fraction of a second, like they belong to someone who is alive in the particular, vivid way that the void usually prevents.
I smile.
Actually smile. The muscles engage fully—the corners of my mouth lifting, the cheeks following, the expression completing itself with the rare, unguarded totality of a response that my face produces so infrequently that the muscles feel unfamiliar with the configuration, as though they’re performing choreography they learned years ago and haven’t rehearsed since.
“Good thing she got twins.” My voice carries the residual warmth of the smile, the flat affect temporarily displaced by something that sounds, improbably, like humor. “Double the trouble.”
Cassian chuckles.
The sound is soft. So tenderly quiet that it barely qualifies as audible—more a vibration of the chest than a vocalization, the particular brand of laughter that a reserved man produces when something genuinely amuses him and his emotional controls allow a fraction of the amusement to reach the surface.
His gray-blue eyes—the slightly darker ones—carry a light that mirrors, faintly, the one that just appeared in mine.
“Yeah.” A pause. The chuckle’s residue warming his voice by a degree. “You could say that.”
I should not enjoy this.
I should not enjoy making a stranger laugh.
Enjoyment creates proximity and proximity creates vulnerability and vulnerability creates the particular conditions under which a person who shares your secrets becomes a person who uses them as weapons.
And yet.
That soft chuckle sits in the air between us like something worth keeping.
Which makes it something the void should eliminate.
I’ll deal with that later.
The clinical register returns to his voice as he transitions from the warmth of the mother conversation back to the medical assessment that apparently constitutes his default operational mode.
“How are you feeling?” He names the specific poison—the compound identified, the nomenclature clinical, delivered with the precise articulation of someone who knows the substance at a molecular level and expects the patient to appreciate the specificity.
“It’s a bit of a bitch to the nervous system, so your legs will be wonky for a while. ”
“I know.”
The reply carries the weight of a woman who has encountered this particular bitch to the nervous system before and doesn’t need the side effects explained to her because her body has been the laboratory in which the side effects were studied, cataloged, and survived.
My legs are already providing the empirical confirmation—the left one especially, the nerve-damaged limb that carries less sensation than its counterpart on a good day and is currently operating at a reduced capacity that makes good day feel like an aspiration rather than a baseline.
I sigh.
The exhale is involuntary, carrying the particular weight of a body that has an immediate, unglamorous need that it would prefer not to communicate to a man it has known for approximately five hours but that biology does not subordinate to social preference.
“I need to go to the bathroom, though.”
The admission costs more than it should.
Not because the need itself is humiliating—it’s biology, it’s universal, it’s the particular, democratic requirement that doesn’t care whether you’re an Omega with a ten-thousand-plus kill count or a kitten on a windowsill.
But because admitting the need in this context means admitting that my body can’t perform the basic logistical sequence of stand up, walk to bathroom, close door without assistance, and admitting that means acknowledging a vulnerability that the void considers operationally unacceptable.
“Oh,” Cassian says. “Okay.”
He stands.
The motion is immediate—the rolling chair pushed back, his body rising with the fluid efficiency of someone who has assessed the situation and determined the next action without requiring a committee.
“It’s okay.” I say it quickly—too quickly, the words crowding each other on their way out of my mouth with the particular urgency of a woman who can see the trajectory of the next sixty seconds and is trying to redirect it before it arrives at the destination she’s anticipating. “I can just crawl out of the bed.”
Crawl.
Victoria Sinclair.
Kill count beyond ten thousand.
Offering to crawl to the bathroom.
The dignity of it is staggering.
“She doesn’t need to get Hawk,” I add, the correction arriving before it’s been requested because the part of my brain responsible for predicting other people’s behavior has already computed the probability that Cassian’s next action will be to summon my feral Alpha, and the probability is high enough to warrant a preemptive dismissal.
“He probably needs a break or he’ll be an overprotective puppy. ”
“I wasn’t going to get Hawk.”
He says it matter-of-factly—the vocal equivalent of a man correcting an incorrect assumption without making a production of the correction.
Then he steps to the bedside, lowers the hand rail with a practiced motion that suggests familiarity with the mechanism, and before my brain has time to compute the trajectory of this particular development—
He scoops me up.
Into his arms. One arm under my knees, the other supporting my back, the lift executed with a fluidity that I don’t expect and my body doesn’t resist because the motion is too fast for resistance and too controlled for alarm.
I’m suddenly off the bed and against a chest that is warmer than the air and firmer than the mattress and carrying me with an ease that doesn’t match his frame.
I give him a look.
The expression is the void’s standard-issue what do you think you’re doing—eyebrows slightly elevated, mouth set in the flat line that communicates displeasure without specifying its source, the overall composition of a face that has been transported without its consent and wants the transporter to know that consent was not obtained.
“I’m not only cunning,” he says, and his voice is even, unhurried, carrying the particular composure of a man who is fully aware of the look he’s receiving and is choosing to address it with information rather than apology. “But I’m pretty strong despite my slim build.”
He adjusts his grip. The motion is minor—a slight redistribution of my weight that demonstrates, rather than explains, the strength claim he just made. His arms are steady. Not straining. The muscles engaged but not taxed, operating within a capacity that apparently has significant overhead.
“Though you’re extremely light.”
I huff.
The sound is indignant, involuntary, carrying the particular offense of a woman whose body mass has been underestimated by a man who is currently holding it.
“I’m at least one-eighty.”
He practically bicep curls me.
The motion is casual, demonstrative—a single, controlled flex that lifts my body several inches higher in his grip and returns it to its original position with the mechanical efficiency of a man performing a calibration test on equipment he’s confident in.
The ease of it is insulting. The ease of it makes my eyebrows climb toward my hairline in an expression that I don’t control and don’t attempt to because the void has apparently decided that being bicep-curled by a stranger falls outside its emotional jurisdiction.
I gawk at him.
The expression is the closest thing to open-mouthed surprise that my face produces—a fractional parting of my lips, a widening of my eyes, the overall composition of a woman who has been lifted like a dumbbell and is reconsidering her assessment of the man doing the lifting.
“Take away at least five or ten pounds,” he says, and the clinical delivery doesn’t fully conceal the concern underneath. “You’ve probably dropped weight. When all this is over, we’ll feed you.”
We’ll feed you.
The pronoun is plural.
We. As in the pack. As in a collective responsibility that he’s assumed on behalf of people who haven’t agreed to it yet for a woman who hasn’t asked for it.
The void should reject that.
The void does reject that.
The thing behind my sternum that flickered earlier does not.
“I eat just fine,” I mutter, and the protest is genuine in its content and undermined in its delivery by the fact that I’m being carried to the bathroom like a child and my body’s resistance to the arrangement is limited to verbal objection because the physical resistance I attempt—a wiggle, a shift of weight, the particular squirming motion that should communicate put me down—fails miserably.
His grip doesn’t budge. The arms remain steady. The transport continues uninterrupted.
“You’re going to pee on yourself if you keep doing that,” he observes.
I huff.
And go still.
I hate that he’s right.
I hate that the biological urgency of my bladder has sided with the man carrying me over the woman being carried.
The betrayal is comprehensive.
He lowers me onto the toilet.