FORTY-FOUR
FLETCHER
Two days after Dakota gives me her throat, I notice the way she keeps looking for Xeon. She thinks she’s being subtle about it, but I don’t think she realizes how obsessed we’ve all grown with her. We don’t miss a damn thing when it comes to her.
Which is how I also notice the way she stops limping every time she thinks someone might be watching.
Her knee is better. Not even close to healed yet, but it’s better enough that she gets angry every time someone asks about it, which is usually a sign Dakota O’Reilly is recovering.
Her arm has stopped bleeding through bandages and the bruising along her side has faded from an ugly purple to a sickly yellow.
Ellis has officially downgraded her medical opinion from “walking disaster” to “annoying but mobile.” Her words, not mine.
Dakota called it progress.
Ellis called it “good enough to stop whining.”
Both looked equally offended.
The rest of us are learning to take the small victories where we can get them.
Haven Ridge hasn’t really recovered from the Purge Event, as we’ve started calling it.
It’s pretending like it has, which is completely different.
After all, recovered people don’t whisper behind stacked crates and go quiet when bonded Alphas pass by.
Recovered people don’t stare at Dakota’s throat, see three claiming bites, and still wonder if the choice was even hers.
Recovered people don’t watch Mercer’s medical room like the labeled vial of Dakota’s blood she finally allowed him to take might grow roots and start making demands.
The compound has finally learned her name, learned who she is and what her blood might possess, but that doesn’t mean they know her or what her name really means. To most of them, Dakota O’Reilly is still an Immune Omega. A cure and a threat and a miracle they’re all trying not to reach for.
And Dakota isn’t making that easy for ’em.
She walks through Haven Ridge with Maine’s faded hat pulled low, three bites healing on her throat, and a look in her eyes that tells every idiot watching that she belongs to herself before she will ever belong to anyone’s hope she didn’t ask for.
She’s just a woman deciding how much of herself the world gets to survive knowing, and that scares people more than it ought to. Sure does reassure me more than it probably should, though.
I stand across the garage bay with a crate of rifle parts open next to me, pretending to sort through firing pins while I subtly watch her argue with Ellis near the supply shelves.
“What the hell are you even talking about? You said mobile,” Dakota says, throwing her arms in the air like she’s fed up with the conversation.
The bond tells me otherwise. The shit is finding enjoyment in winding the medic up, and that makes my lips twitch with a smile I won’t let loose. That’ll give me away.
Ellis takes a deep breath, pinching the bridge of her nose before she corrects, “I’m diagnosing you with selective hearing. I said annoying but mobile.”
“Exactly. Mobile,” Dakota pushes, looking around like she’s trying to find the problem knowing damned well it’s her. She’s the fucking problem.
“With restrictions,” Ellis growls, almost sounding like an Alpha.
Dakota slaps a hand over her chest like she’s been shot. “Restrictions? In this economy? Are you out of your mind?”
Ellis stares at her.
Dakota stares at Ellis.
Neither woman blinks.
Ewan leans against the side of the truck close by, arms crossed and looking absolutely giddy in a way that tells me he has absolutely no intention of helping.
Kaito is standing next to the open bay doors with his usual murdery statue energy, one hand resting near his knife and stitches finally healing under his shirt.
His expression gives nothing away, but I know he’s finding this thing just as funny as Ewan. He’s just better at hiding it.
Xeon isn’t in the garage. Dakota knows it, and I know because her eyes keep flicking toward the door every time someone passes it.
Not obviously, though.
Dakota O’Reilly doesn’t do obvious unless she’s threatening someone, insulting biology’s mother, or pretending she hasn’t grown madly attached to the people currently rearranging their lives around her survival.
But I notice anyway.
Her gaze catches on empty doorways. Her fingers drift to the center of her chest when Xeon’s name comes over the radio. When she sees him across the yard, she looks away too fast, then rubs that same spot like she’s trying to soothe an ache she hasn’t admitted out loud belongs to him.
Ewan notices it too.
Kaito definitely notices.
And neither of ’em says a damn thing. Neither do I.
She has three bonds now.
Ewan, bright and restless.
Kaito, dark and steady.
Me, solid and warm.
And then there’s a quiet place I can sense through our bond. The place where Xeon should be. The missing thread doesn’t make her any more free, and I can see that much every time she looks for him before she remembers she can’t feel him there.
It makes her look like she’s just missed a step in the dark right after she took three steady steps without assistance.
“Mate, stop brooding at her,” Ewan says without looking my way.
I frown. “I ain’t brooding.”
“Oh, my bad,” he scoffs, moving one headphone from his ear. “You’re aggressively thinking in her general direction.”
“I’m checking parts.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Hate to point this out to you, but you’ve actually been holding the same firing pin for the past five minutes. You looking for gold in there or something?”
I look down.
Damn it.
Dakota’s eyes cut to us and Ewan smiles at her. She narrows hers.
Kaito, unhelpful as ever, says, “He’s brooding.”
I set the firing pin down and glare at him. “Don’t you have somewhere quiet to stand and terrify people?”
“I’m already doing that,” he points out.
“Very productive.”
“Efficient,” he corrects, never losing sight of the woman we’re down bad for.
Dakota points at all three of us. “I don’t actually have selective hearing. I can hear all of you just fine.”
Ewan’s smile widens. “That was the point, Tiny Terror.”
Her glare tries its best to sharpen, but it fails around the edges. She’s tired and healing, irritated by care but tempted by it anyway. She’s alive, and I hold on to that tightly. For one whole breath, I let myself hold on to it.
Then her hand goes to her chest again. Not to the place where the bond sits, but lower. More instinctive.
Her eyes shift past Ewan toward the open bay doors. Xeon stands outside in the yard, half-shadowed by the late evening light. His black hair moves slightly in the wind, and his attention locks on Dakota before it moves anywhere else.
She freezes. Not much, but it’s enough that I catch it. If I caught it, so did the others. His face gives away less than nothing, but his shoulders change. A small shift, some quiet answer he can’t send through a bond he doesn’t have.
Dakota drops her hand and Xeon looks at it.
Then he looks at her throat. Then away. Pain moves between the empty space between them like a sound too low to hear and my bond with Dakota tightens.
Not with jealousy. No. This feels more like the ground under my feet has just started noticing the cracks.
Before I can decide to move closer, Dakota turns sharply back to Ellis.
“I’m mobile,” she says sternly.
Ellis’s gaze flicks from her to Xeon and then back again. “Physically, yes. Emotionally? I’m actually not even licensed for whatever shitshow this is.”
Dakota scowls. “Rude.”
“Accurate,” Ellis counters, then she turns on her heel and leaves Dakota standing there glaring at her back.
That should be funny. It almost is.
But then the air changes.
At first, I think it’s just the smoke from the outer burn pits shifting with the wind, but the smell is all wrong. It’s chemical-sharp. Bitter enough to scratch the back of my throat, completely wrong for the garage, and wrong for anywhere near the Omega housing.
My head lifts before the first siren blares. Kaito moves at the same time. Xeon turns toward the north hallway, and Ewan’s smile completely disappears. Dakota turns to stone where she stands.
The alarm screeches across Haven Ridge a second later, one long blast. Then another. Then three short bursts that turn everybody in the garage from annoyed to armed.
Outer defense breach.
“Everybody down!” Valeria’s voice cracks over the radio. “West wall compromised. Repeat, west wall compromised. Multiple Dead redirected toward the outer defenses. Smoke on north access. Visibility low.”
Redirected.
Dakota’s eyes find mine across the garage. She heard it, too.
Kaito is already moving toward her. Ewan pushes off the truck and I cross the bay in three long strides, but Dakota doesn’t wait for any of us to form a wall around her. She steps toward the open doors. Of course she fucking does.
“Dakota,” I call, and she looks over her shoulder.
I swallow back the first words that rise.
Stay back. Let us handle it. Get behind me.
All those easy, useless things that won’t do me a damned bit of good. The bond in my chest burns with them, but I don’t say them out loud.
Instead, I ask, “Where do you want us, Darlin’?”
For half a second, with sirens howling and radios crackling around us, her face changes. Not soft, exactly, but something very close to it. Soft’s cousin. Twice removed.
“Right next to me,” she answers, knife already in hand.
My chest locks. “Yes, ma’am.”
Ewan appears on her right, gun in hand and headphones hanging around his neck now. “I’ll be honest, I was kind of hoping for heroically in front, but next to is also very lush. Very romantic and shit.”
“Don’t make me regret bonding you first,” she sighs, no bite in it but a sternness that isn’t coming from annoyance toward the Welshman. More that she’s zoned in on her surroundings and doesn’t have the energy left to properly spar with him.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Ewan chimes, right before he replaces the headphone over his ear without the music playing.
Kaito reaches her left and says, “Medical will be targeted.”