29. Zeir #2
“You’re going to be okay. I know it hurts.
I know you’re scared. But I’m not leaving and neither are you, so let’s both stay right here and you can bleed on my coat because that’s what coats are for, apparently.
This particular jacket has absorbed more bodily fluids in the past month than in the previous three years combined and that is a sentence I never expected to say out loud. ”
The trembling slowed. Sera’s muzzle pressed against Lumi’s knee—seeking contact, seeking warmth. The instinct of an injured creature turning toward the nearest source of safety.
Lumi curled around her. Both hands pressing down. Both knees on the cold tile. The warmth of it between her fingers.
“I’ve got you. I’m not going anywhere.”
He came around the corner in wolf form.
Black fur. Silver streaks. Red on his muzzle—not his. His eyes swept the hallway: shattered partitions, overturned furniture, claw gouges in marble, emergency lighting washing everything red.
Then he saw them.
Lumi. On her knees. Hands pressed against the ruined fabric. Arms soaked to the elbows. Shaking. Fierce. Her jaw set with the focused determination of a woman who had decided that this wounded girl was hers and nothing was going to move her.
Sera’s muzzle rested against Lumi’s leg. The young shifter’s breathing had steadied. The bleeding had slowed.
The shift took seconds. He crouched beside her—human, bare, bleeding from a shallow cut along his forearm where one of Korr’s mercenaries had gotten close.
“Hey.” Lumi’s voice was wrecked. Her hands didn’t move from Sera’s wound. “Your pack member needs a medic. I’ve been applying pressure but I don’t know—I don’t know how wolf healing works and she’s young and she’s scared and I—”
“You did everything right.” His hand covered hers—over the fabric, over the stain, over the place where she’d been holding his pack intact with her bare hands. “Lumi. You did everything right.”
The pack medic—a shifter with field training—arrived sixty seconds later. Lumi didn’t move until the medic confirmed the wound was manageable and Sera was stable. Then she sat on her heels, looked at her stained fingers, and exhaled.
Keanu appeared behind her. His shirt was ruined—foam, blood, the general wreckage of a man who’d tackled a wolf in business attire. He crouched beside her. Put his hand on her shoulder. Didn’t speak.
Mika was next. She came down the stairwell at speed, phone still in hand, and stopped dead when she saw Lumi’s arms.
“Oh, Lu.”
“I’m fine. It’s not mine.”
“I know it’s not yours. That doesn’t mean you’re fine.
” Mika sat on the other side. The three of them in the wreckage—best friend, brother, and the woman who’d held a wounded stranger while chaos erupted around her.
Nobody spoke for a full minute. Sometimes the people who show up don’t need to say anything. They need to be there.
Dawn.
The studio was wrecked. Partitions lay in ruins down the hall.
Stone gouged with claw marks that would never buff out.
The fire-retardant foam had solidified into a pale crust across the third-level hallway.
Nyx’s team moved through the building with quiet efficiency—documenting, photographing, securing.
The studio couch. Both of them.
Lumi tucked against his side, legs curled beneath her, still wearing the ruined coat. The blood had dried dark—a map of where her hands had been, her forearms, the front of her shirt. She looked like she’d been through a war. She had.
He’d found clothes—sweats, a spare shirt from the gym bag Kael kept in his office. The cut on his forearm had been cleaned and taped. Minor. The adrenaline was long gone, replaced by the exhaustion that followed a shift and a fight and hours of aftermath.
“I held your pack member.” Her voice was small. Raw. “Sera was so scared and I didn’t know what else to do.”
His arm tightened. “You protected one of mine.”
She was quiet for a moment. “She is yours. That makes her mine too.”
The words landed in his chest and stayed. Not a declaration. Not a grand gesture. A statement of fact from a woman who’d dropped to her knees on cold marble and held a bleeding packmate because belonging wasn’t a ceremony—it was a choice made at midnight with blood between your fingers.
Nyx appeared in the doorway. Her gaze moved from Lumi’s stained arms to Zeir.
“Korr escaped. Injured—Kael caught his shoulder, one of the sublevel wolves tore his flank. But he reached the east fire escape before we could secure the building.”
At large. Wounded. More dangerous now.
Lumi’s fingers curled into his shirt. She could read the shift in his posture—the way his expression locked down when a threat remained open.
Nyx paused. Looked at Lumi.
The nod was small. Final. Different from the one she’d given at the security orientation. That nod had said: You asked the right questions. This one said: You held Sera. You stayed.
Nyx left.
Lumi pressed closer against his side. “I got blood on my favorite jacket.” Muffled against his shoulder. “That jacket survived three years of indie publishing. It did NOT survive tonight.”
His mouth pressed against her hair. “I’ll buy you a nice new one.”
“You can’t replace emotional attachment with money.”
“I can try.”
“How nice are we talking?”
His arm pulled her closer. He pressed his cheek against the top of her head.
Outside, Nyx’s team secured the perimeter. The corridor bore the marks of what had happened.
Inside the studio, on the couch, a woman who’d chosen his pack slept against his side. The ruined leather still pressed against her chest.
He didn’t sleep. He watched the dawn fill the windows and planned what came next.
Korr was still out there. Slade was still funding the war. The legal battle still ahead.
But the woman against his side had held Sera and called her mine and that word—that single, devastating word—had rewritten every calculation he’d made about what strength looked like.
He breathed her in.
She slept.
He kept watch.