Cole’s gaze lowered briefly.
They had all seen him.
Leena’s blood drying over his hands. His body left on the floor after Sule took her from his arms. The emptiness in his face as though something fundamental had been torn out and left nothing capable of bleeding behind.
“If Rhen breaks,” Cole said quietly, “he will not do it gently.”
Malakai’s expression tightened.
Cornering him will make it worse.
“And leaving him alone might give him enough time to decide there is nothing left worth controlling,” Dax replied.
Cole looked between them.
Neither was wrong.
Rhen had always understood discipline as a leash placed upon violence, not a cure for it. Leena had been the only person he allowed close enough to touch that leash without losing the hand.
Now she was gone.
“The newly turned female is another risk,” Cole said.
“If she loses control while Rhen is already unstable, the tether becomes another point of pressure inside a fractured house.”
Malakai’s gaze shifted toward the entrance as though he expected Rhen to appear there, silent and bloodstained, drawn by the sound of his own name.
We watch him,Malakai signed.We do not corner him.
Dax folded his arms.
“For how long?”
Malakai held his gaze.
Until watching is no longer enough.
The training center fell silent except for the slow creak of the punching bag’s chain.
Cole looked at the bag, at the shallow dents his fists had left in the leather, and then toward the reinforced doors separating them from the compound above.
The heir remained upstairs without his mother. Sule was locked inside a grief that had already become a vow. Rhen was carrying a tether he had never wanted alongside the one loss capable of stripping restraint from him, and somewhere beyond the weakened wards, Marcella was waiting for the right moment to move.
Leena’s death had not created a single fracture.
It had revealed all of them.
Chapter 16
Dax did not return from patrol with clean hands.
He rarely did, although tonight the city seemed sharper around the edges, as though it had finally stopped pretending to be harmless. New Orleans usually offered him enough noise to disappear inside. Music spilled through open doorways, tourists laughed too loudly, and drunken men made decisions they would regret by morning. Heat, neon, and the constant pulse of life normally made the hunt easy and allowed the hours to pass without resistance.
Tonight, the noise only made everything feel wrong.
Dax moved through the streets like a shadow with purpose, vanishing from one corner and appearing at the next before anyone noticed the missing distance. He kept to the darker seams of the city, following alleys that smelled of rain and piss, narrow lanes behind closed clubs, and the wet stretch near the river where the air clung to his skin like a warning.
His senses remained tuned too high after the catastrophe at the stronghold. He heard a distant siren cutting across the city, the squeal of a rusted door hinge, and the sudden acceleration of a human heartbeat behind a shuttered window.
