Page 11 of The Steel Beast’s Heart

The brothers move through the common room below me. Finn pulls a duffel from under the stairs and heads for the garage. Rex talks to Diesel in the corner, both of their faces set. Colt stacks the papers on the table into a folder, snaps the laptop shut. Chain leans against the far wall with his phone to his ear and one hand on Morgan's shoulder. She sits in the chair beside him with both hands on her belly.

Knox waits at the foot of the stairs. Tom faces him.

"Can you ride?" Knox's voice carries.

Tom doesn't answer for a beat. His shoulders stay square. His hands hang at his sides, and his medical kit rests on the bench behind him, packed and zipped, because Tom never leaves a room without knowing where his kit is.

"Yes."

Knox watches him for a second longer. Then he nods and turns away.

The compound shifts around me for the rest of the afternoon. Bikes pulled from the garage, saddlebags packed, fuel checked. I watch from the periphery and learn how it works through the women: Sarah runs logistics from the kitchen table with a phone in each hand. Jess inventories the emergency supplies in the basement. Nina takes the children upstairs. Garrett stays. I hear Knox tell him that, and Garrett nods once and turns for the garage. Jax—the prospect, the wolf shifter with the wired energy and the restless hands—stays too. Two Cascades allies arrive in a truck before sunset.

The compound's full strength rides out at dawn. What stays behind is Garrett, Jax, the allies, and the women and children.

And me.

The fox kit needs her evening nebulizer at eight.

I lift her out of the carrier beside the hawk's cage and carry her to the garage wrapped in a towel, teeth bared above the terry cloth. Less than three pounds and fights like thirty. The wheeze has thinned since arriving at the compound—a crackle now, not the wet rasp that kept me up three nights running—but the treatments don't stop until the crackle does.

Tom has the nebulizer assembled when I get there. Mask, tubing, the medication I measured this morning. I pin the kit against my chest, one hand on her head. He cups the mask over her muzzle.

"Thirty seconds," I tell him. "She'll fight at twenty."

She fights at fifteen. Back legs kicking, teeth snapping at the mask edge, and Tom holds steady with his hands covering the kit's face. He reads my grip and matches it, his fingers settling against mine.

The kit stops fighting. Medication hisses through the mask. I count to thirty and Tom pulls it at twenty-nine seconds.

I set her back in the carrier. She curls up, shows me her teeth one more time, and then goes to sleeps.

Tom cleans the nebulizer parts and hangs them on the pegboard. I take the kit back upstairs. He doesn't follow.

Two hours later, Tom comes to the apartment at ten. I'm sitting on his bed in his shirt with a raptor care manual open on my knees because reading about something I already know by heart is better than thinking about the door I'm watching.

His glasses have slipped down his nose. They never stay where he puts them. He stands in the doorway for a long moment before he speaks.

"I need to tell you something about tomorrow. We have to ride out to a place called Bloodstone in the mountains," he says. "Knox is challenging for leadership of the orc clans. Single combat."

I close the book and set it on the nightstand.

"How long are you going to be gone for?"

"Two days. Maybe three."

He looks at me. I look at him. Last night fills the space between us without either of us saying a word.

Two days without the full club. Poachers escalating. Humans First out there somewhere with their flyers and their rage and their willingness to hurt people. And the man I've been leaning into for two years riding into the mountains to keep his brothers alive.

I don't ask him to stay.

I get up from the bed. I cross the room, and his body tenses as I close the distance, I put my hand flat on his chest, over his heart, and hold it there. My palm against the coarse fur and the muscle underneath, the heat of him bleeding through my skin.

The purr starts before he can stop it.

It rolls through his chest and into my palm and up my arm, I feel it in my ribs, in my throat, in the soles of my feet on the cold floor. The sound fills the room. His whole body vibrates with it, and his eyes drop to my hand on his chest, his jaw goes slack, his eyes half-closed, and he doesn't try to stop it this time.

"Come back in one piece." I keep my voice steady. "I'll need someone to correct Finn's species identifications, he always butchers it."