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 camearound 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.
