6. Rhykor #3
Cassia cuts him off with the blunt precision of each dismissal she's ever delivered. She takes his arm and examines the injury, and the man uses the contact as an excuse to lean closer.
"Careful now, doc. I bruise easily."
"Then stop getting burned." She reaches for the antiseptic.
"Maybe I merely needed an excuse to visit." He pitches it low, conspiratorially, angling his head to catch her eye. "Heard the best medic in the district was also the prettiest. Figured I should verify for myself."
A violent possessiveness rips through my thoughts.
Primal rage grips my hands and arms, spreading to my chest and surging through my veins with a ferocity that makes the air in the alcove ripple and warp.
Heat bleeds from my palms until the concrete glows, hairline cracks spreading outward from my fingers.
My vision narrows to a single, razor-sharp focus, watching the man's hand resting on Cassia's forearm, his fingers against her skin as if he has any right to be there.
A growl magnifies in my throat, subsonic and terrible, vibrating through the walls hard enough to rattle instruments on the shelves.
The curtain between me and the main room sways.
Cassia's head turns sharply toward the alcove; she heard it, felt it, that primal frequency that means threat in all languages.
I'm halfway on my feet before I catch myself.
My claws extend without my permission, digging furrows into the concrete floor.
The thermal reading in the alcove climbs to the point where the gauze on the nearest shelf is beginning to curl at the edges, and the taste in my mouth is copper and violence, driven by a possessive fury so overwhelming it obliterates rational thought.
I want to walk through that curtain to rip the man's hand off Cassia's arm and shatter his fingers.
The urge to pin him on the wall and pour heat into his chest is almost undeniable, a need to make him understand—viscerally and permanently—that this woman is mine, and touching her is a death sentence I will enforce with religious devotion.
The man is innocent. He's flirting with a medic in a clinic. The man has done absolutely nothing wrong.
And I want to kill him so badly my teeth ache.
I make myself stand down. Gritting my teeth, I command my claws to sheathe and drag the heat back into my core.
Maintaining this restraint demands more from me than any war I have ever fought, especially when every instinct I possess snarls at me to claim and protect.
These ancient imperatives anchor so deeply in my biology that resisting them feels like trying to hold back the ocean with nothing but my bare hands.
Mother Serak's warning echoes through the red haze: Resistance feeds the instincts. It sharpens them. Turns them feral.
She was right. The longer I spend near Cassia, whatever this is—this nameless, irrational compulsion I refuse to dignify with Varrik's words or Mother Serak's prophecies—winds tighter.
The touches and the arguments, along with the charged silence in this cramped underground clinic, push the instincts closer to a breaking point, approaching like a detonation countdown.
If I stay, I will hurt someone. It might be the next man who touches her, or it could be a patient who stands too close. Worse, I could hurt Cassia in some moment when the instincts override conscious thought and the predator I kept leashed finally slips its cage.
I wait until the man leaves, bandaged and oblivious to how close he came to dying in a medical clinic. Once Cassia steps into the back corridor to check on Elias, I finally stand and fold my healing wings against my back before moving toward the hole in the ceiling.
Cassia catches me at the curtain.
"Where are you going?" She blocks my path with her body, bravely or foolishly, and whichever one it is, it infuriates and terrifies me equally. "Your wings need more time to heal. You've got at least another day before?—"
"I have to leave."
"Why?"
Because I almost murdered a man for touching your arm.
Hearing his voice directed at you made me want to burn this entire building down.
Every second spent in this clinic—breathing your air and watching you stubbornly care for these people—makes it impossible to remember my conditioning as a weapon.
And weapons are supposedly incapable of falling in love.
"Perimeter check," I grind out. "My territory needs attention."
She stares at me, and I watch her measure the lie, turning it over and holding it up to the light. The falseness of it is clear. I see her eyes narrow and notice the tension gathering across her shoulders, betraying that she has caught me.
My response is a quiet and unreadable "Then by all means, go check your perimeter."
I leave through the ceiling, wings screaming in protest, and fly until the distance between me and Ash Alley is wide enough to mute the maddening gravity of her presence.
It takes a long time.
However, the distance still remains insufficient.