“Actually,” Luca interrupts cheerfully, leaning against the opposite wall, “he walked into me perfectly fine. Stumbled a bit, but honestly? I’ve seen worse from Misha sober.”
Rafe ignores him entirely. His fingers tighten on my jaw. “You went to Kai instead of me?”
Kai lifts a brow. “He needed a dose. You don’t handle the medical—”
“I handle everything with him,” Rafe shoots back, low and lethal, still holding my face like I might vanish if he loosens his grip. “If he needs something, he comes to me. If he wants something, he comes to me. If he’s bleeding, high, shaking, screaming—he. Comes. To. Me.”
Luca whistles. “Someone’s possessive.”
Kai folds his arms. “Someone’s projecting.”
I blink. A lot. Because the hallway is definitely spinning.
Rafe finally tears his eyes off me long enough to glare at both of them. “And you—both of you—stay the fuck away from him when he’s doped to the moon. If I find either of you sniffing around him again, I’ll—”
“Kill us?” Luca supplies brightly.
“Break something?” Kai guesses.
Rafe bares his teeth. “Start with your legs, end with your throats.”
“Hot,” Luca says, grinning.
Kai sighs. “Exhausting.”
And I sag forward, forehead hitting Rafe’s chest because gravity hates me and so do all my life choices.
He catches me instantly, one arm locking around my waist like he knew I was going down before I did. “Mine,” he mutters under his breath, furious and soft. “Fucking mine.”
I blink up at him. “You’re… really loud for a goalie,” I mumble.
Luca cackles.
Rafe growls.
Kai shuts the door like he’s done with us, then opens the door again like nothing ever happened—calm, expressionless, the way surgeons look before cutting into a live chest—and reaches out with one long arm, fingers closing around Luca’s collar like he’s picking up a badly behaved cat.
Luca yelps. Actually yelps. “Hey—!”
And then he’s yanked backward into the container so fast he barely manages to dig his heels in, and the door slams behind them with ametallic thundercrackthat makes me flinch so hard I nearly collapse again.
My chest jumps. My ears ring. My skin prickles with the echo.
“What thefuck,” I whisper to no one, dazed, leaning into Rafe because I don’t know what else to do with my limbs.
Rafe doesn’t say a word. He just picks me up. Just lifts me straight off my feet like I weigh nothing, one arm under my knees, the other bracing my back as if I’ve done something irreparably stupid and now I’m his problem tocarry.
“Rafe—” I start, but my voice is thin and ruined and the high is still dragging claws across the inside of my skull.
“Shut up,” he growls.
I shut up.
The compound shifts around us, blurry and too bright. I barely register the metal stairs, the heavy doors, the rust stains like old blood smeared across the walls. All I see is him—his throat flexing as he walks, jaw tight, hands warm and unyielding. He doesn’t speak again. Just moves with that monster grace of his—too silent for his size, like the rules of sound don’t apply to him.
When we get to his container, he kicks the door open with his boot and steps inside.
I stop breathing. Because I’ve never seen this room before. Never been allowed in. Never been this close to his world. And the second we cross the threshold, I realize something dangerous.
