Chapter 17 The Less Cynical One #4
The motion is careful, controlled—a gradual descent that transitions my weight from his arms to the porcelain with the particular, practiced gentleness of someone who understands that the person he’s transporting has compromised leg function and that the transfer requires more precision than a standard set-down.
The bathroom is small—a utilitarian space adjacent to the laboratory section, tiled in white, functional rather than decorative, carrying the antiseptic scent of a room that is cleaned with the regularity of someone who maintains medical-grade hygiene standards.
“Do your business,” he says, straightening, his voice returning to the clinical register with the ease of a man who has just performed an intimate act of care and is not going to make it weird. “Call me when you’re done.”
“You could just call Hawk.” I say it from the toilet, looking up at him with the particular expression of a woman who is assessing whether to push back on the arrangement and is choosing, for the moment, to test its flexibility rather than its boundaries. “What if I have to go number two?”
He pauses at the doorway.
Looks at me. The gray-blue eyes meet my storm-gray with the patient, unruffled directness of a man who has just been asked about bowel movements by a woman he met hours ago and has apparently cataloged this as an unremarkable conversational development.
“Do your business,” he repeats, the words identical in content but carrying a new emphasis that says I heard you the first time and my answer encompasses all varieties of business. “Call me when you’re done.”
A beat.
“There’s Febreze behind you. And your kitty pop probably smells worse.”
I huff.
“Don’t insult Ruby!”
The defense exits my mouth with a velocity and volume that the void did not approve—the particular, uncontrolled response of a woman whose emotional perimeter has been breached not by threat but by the disparagement of a kitten who weighs less than a bag of flour and has done nothing to deserve olfactory criticism.
Then the second part of his sentence catches up to my processing.
“Wait.” My eyes widen by a fraction. “She’s here?”
“Yeah.” Cassian’s voice carries the faintest trace of amusement—a hairline fracture in the clinical composure that the kitten topic apparently produces. “She’s terrorizing Dominic. Our fearsome leader hates cats, and clearly the little creature knows.”
Dominic.
The Prime Alpha with the aged-whiskey eyes and the devastating presence and the particular brand of dominance that my void stared down for ten minutes without blinking.
Being terrorized by a kitten.
My kitten.
Something happens behind my sternum again.
The flicker. The unauthorized light in the dark room.
This time it’s accompanied by something else—a sensation in my abdomen that might be humor or might be delight or might be the particular, unfamiliar experience of imagining a scene that is inherently absurd and finding the absurdity pleasant in a way that the void cannot categorize and therefore cannot suppress.
Cassian’s expression shifts. A millimeter. The corner of his mouth.
“Let the war wage on.”
He closes the door.
The latch engages with a soft click that leaves me alone in a white-tiled bathroom in an underground lair decorated in designer silks, sitting on a toilet with compromised legs and residual poison in my bloodstream and a feral Alpha somewhere upstairs and a kitten conducting psychological warfare against a Prime Alpha who hates cats.
I kinda like him.
The thought arrives without authorization from the void, without clearance from the security protocols that govern my emotional life, without the extensive vetting process that every person who enters my awareness is supposed to undergo before being assigned a classification above neutral threat.
Odd.
Why is that?
It can’t be that easy to befriend an Alpha.
The data says otherwise. The data says that Alphas are weapons shaped like people—that their designation makes them dangerous by default, that their pheromone influence makes them manipulative by biology, that the history of Omegas and Alphas is a history written in dominance and submission and the particular, systemic cruelty that occurs when one designation is engineered to command and the other is engineered to comply.
And yet.
He noticed I was cold before I shivered.
He asked thigh or neck.
He assembled the injector in five seconds.
He told me his mother is the real power behind the empire, and the way his voice changed when he said it—
And his eyes are slightly darker than his brother’s, and the only person who ever noticed is their mother, and now me.
None of that means he’s safe.
But it means he’s interesting.
And interesting is the first thing I’ve found any Alpha besides Hawk.
Which is either the beginning of something or the continuation of the pattern that put me in Savage Knot in the first place—trusting the wrong person, seeing something real in eyes that turned out to be performing, building a bridge to someone who was already planning to burn it.
Vivian was interesting too.
Vivian was the most interesting person I knew.
And Vivian is dead because she earned it.
I don’t regret that.
I regret the circumstances that made it necessary—the designation, the jealousy, the biological lottery that assigned me Omega and assigned her Not and converted the difference into a weapon she aimed at my life.
But the killing?
No.
I don’t regret the honest thing.
I just wonder if I’ll have to do it again.
If the interesting ones always become the dangerous ones.
If the slightly darker gray-blue eyes and the soft chuckle and the five-second injector assembly are the beginning of a pattern I’ve seen before and survived by ending.
I can only wonder.
The bathroom is quiet. The tile is cold beneath my bare feet. The Febreze sits on the shelf behind me, and Ruby’s distant mew echoes from somewhere above—a small, fierce declaration of war against a man who has no idea what he’s dealing with.
I can only wonder as I sit on the toilet and decide to do my business for the sake of my bladder.