Evander's POV
The click is tiny—just a dry insect in a dead room—but everything in me hears it.
I move on the sound. One squeeze, controlled, and my round shatters bone instead of skull. The henchman screams, his gun skitters, blood paints the marble in a frantic arc. The blast hits Oddette like a physical thing; she flinches hard, hands flying up, breath ripping short. The whole room freezes. Even the air tenses.
No one expects me to shoot my own man.
My men stare, stunned into silence, recalculating all the math they thought they understood about me. The staff lift their heads a fraction. Hope is a dangerous smell—thin, sweet, and stupid. It leaks from them anyway.
Mine, my wolf says, voice low and absolute. Protect.
She's leverage at best, I answer, cold as habit.
You'll protect her, he warns, or I'll wear you.
The hurt man whimpers, clutching his hand. I don't look at him. I step through the line of guns until I'm a breath from the girl on the floor. White hair pasted to her skin. Silver-gray eyes, cloudy and lost, searching a world that won't answer back. Water beads along her jaw, ticks down her collarbone, darkens the knot of the towel she tied too fast. She's all angles of fear—shoulders pinched, mouth shaking, bare toes curled on the rug like she's bracing against an ocean only she can feel.
I kneel. Every tendon in me pulls tight with the urge to touch. I don't.
"Give me a reason you'll be useful to me," I say, voice flat as ice.
Her head tips toward the sound. "What?" It's not defiance—just confusion, raw and honest. "Useful? I—what does that even…" She swallows. The wet in her eyes wobbles and nearly spills. "My father—" The words die. She doesn't say is he okay; some truths don't need sight to know.
Wrap her, my wolf orders. Take her out of this. Now.
I take assets, I say, not strays.
Say the word, he growls, or I'll tear free.
I shrug out of my jacket and set it around her shoulders without letting a millimeter of my skin touch hers. It's absurdly hard not to. The wool catches the water and drinks it; the heat in the fabric cages her shaking. She seizes the lapels like they might save her life.
"If I spare you," I say, "earn it."
She's breathing too fast, working herself toward a panic spiral that burns oxygen and time. I point at the kneeling line of workers. "Choose one of them to live."
The sound that comes out of her is almost a laugh and almost a sob. "What?"
"One," I repeat.
Cruel, my wolf says.
Effective, I answer.
She'll break.
Then she's useless.
For a second she actually thinks she's still alone with me. Then the silence shifts and she hears it—the contained, muffled terror of the staff, the shudder of a stifled sob, the sticky drag of a shoe sole in blood, the injured man's ragged hissing through his teeth. Realization lands hard. These aren't shadows, they're people who looked after her, carried trays past her, guided her elbow around corners when she was small.
Her chin trembles. "No." She shakes her head hard enough that wet hair slaps her cheek. "I can't. I won't. Their lives matter just as much as mine."
The wolf leans into the bars, watching her like she's light. This is what I said. Heart. You don't crush the thing you want.
I look at the line again—uniform, helpless, waiting for a god they don't believe in. Then I let a smile without warmth touch my mouth and tilt toward her ear. "Then no one does."
The little hope-sigh in the room reverses into a vacuum. Her face goes wrong—blank for a blink, as if her body has to reboot what fear is supposed to look like now. A butler breathes, "Young miss—" before Rook's stare drills the word back down his throat.
"Bag the father," I say, without looking at the corpse. "Burn the rest. She comes with me."
Rook doesn't flinch at the order, but the question is too big to swallow. "Sir… since when do we take hostages?"
I keep my eyes on the girl. "Since she became useful."
She goes rigid. The meaning hits. She reaches out, blind and desperate, and finds me by accident—fingers catching my trouser leg, then iron around my calf. "No. Please, don't—don't kill them. Don't kill them. Please." Her voice splits; the last word shreds itself on the edges of her lungs. Tears spill, hot streaks down a face the world won't show her.
From the line: "Young miss, please—save us—" "Miss Oddette—" "We don't want to die—" The sounds aren't brave; they're the honest, ugly noises people make when the future collapses.
I don't answer any of them. I don't answer her. I put my arms under her in one clean motion and lift. She isn't heavy. She fights like someone who knows fighting is pointless and is doing it anyway—hands pushing at my chest, then slipping, grabbing for anything and missing because she can't see where to hold. The jacket slides; I catch it with an elbow and keep her covered. She twists; my wolf goes feral at the strain in her breath.
I hate you for making her hurt, he says, not roaring now but cold, like a blade pressed to the inside of my ribs. You knew how to end pain. You chose not to.
Pain teaches faster than comfort, I tell him. I'm not here to soothe.
You're here for her, he says with terrifying certainty. Every step you take is a lie you tell yourself. You pointed guns at the sun and complained about the heat.
I shift her higher, as impersonal as I can make something so indecently intimate. Her breath flutters at my neck, small and hot. Her wet hair sticks to my jaw. She hits me with her fist—blind, panicked, uncoordinated—and then immediately gasps, like she's scared she's just broken the only rule that might keep her alive.
Behind us, the grieving, hopeless chorus swells and then fights itself back down. My men don't move. They're watching me like I've grown a second head. In their memory, I have never pulled anyone out of a fire I set. I don't bother fixing the story for them.
Oddette clutches a handful of my shirt and just hangs on, like maybe she can drag herself back to a world where her father is drinking tea and humming off-key in the kitchen. "Please," she says, again and again, quiet now, worn down into the smallest shape the word can make. "Please don't hurt them. Please don't. Please."
Put her down, the wolf orders. We stay. We control what happens. We stop it.
No.
You won't cage me again, he warns. I will take the wheel, Evander. Do you hear me? I will tear my way up your throat and wear your mouth and tell your men what to do if you—
Shut up.
My wolf finally went quiet. Not because he was obeying me, but because I had already made the decision. Once I spoke, there was nothing left to argue.