Cole’s hand shot up, catching it an inch from his face.
“Dick,” Dax muttered, smirking. “We don’t need playthings. Feed, fuck, fight, and move on.”
Cole rolled his eyes and tossed the paperweight onto the table with a clunk.
“Spoken like a man who hasn’t been laid in a decade.”
Malakai released a tired breath but didn’t intervene.
Sule’s expression remained carved in stone, though weariness flickered briefly behind his eyes as he looked between them.
“None of us has to like this,” he said. “But we protect our own, and Rhen’s blood brought her under clan law. Until we know what she is, she remains contained and protected.”
He paused.
“That does not make her trusted.”
Silence fell like ash.
The fire crackled, casting long shadows across hard faces and clenched jaws. No one moved. No one spoke.
The shift in their world settled into the room like smoke.
There would be fallout.
There always was.
* * *
The fire crackled low, throwing long shadows across the stone walls and the hard lines of Rhen’s silhouette. His hands flexed at his sides as he paced before it, frustration riding him hard.
Veya moaned again, a broken, fevered sound that cut through the silence.
His jaw locked.
The transition had begun.
His blood was inside her now, rewriting her from the inside out and forcing her body across a threshold it had never been built to survive. The tether crawled into place like a living thing, threading itself through bone and blood, tightening around his spine.
He didn’t want this.
Not one fucking part of it.
Rhen grabbed a half-empty bottle of bourbon from the nearby table and poured himself a shot. The amber liquid caught the firelight, gleaming like blood.
He downed it in one swallow.
The burn did nothing to cut the pressure in his chest.
He looked back at the bed.
Veya writhed beneath the sheets, her body slick with sweat, her breathing shallow and panicked. Her visible skin was flushed and clammy, her lips trembling with every strained exhale.
Every convulsion dragged through the tether and raked across his nerves, an invasion that enraged him more each time it happened.
He dragged a hand down his face, jaw clenched and shoulders rigid.
She didn’t know what she was becoming.
