The slate slipped from Kieran's fingers, cracking against the hospital floor with a sound like a gunshot. The words on the screen: 'Genetic match probability: 99.8%' burned behind his eyelids even as he stared at the broken pieces. Twenty years. Twenty years of mourning a sister who hadn't died in some dirty Traverse seedy bloody birthing suite, but had instead been smuggled into the underbelly of the Beta-dominant traverse, poisoned by suppressants, starved of parental pheromones that would have bonded her to their father.
Cait Agneau is his sister. His sister is Cait Agneau. The realization hit Kieran like a physical blow—that trembling girl with the hollowed-out cheeks, yellowed skin, and silver eyes, the one who flinched at shadows and smelled like poisoned gardenias. The accountant. The runaway. The girl who nearly died in Accounting three floors below his office because some Beta-dominant bastard had been feeding her ground-up aconite in high levels and calling it medicine. His fingers twitched toward the comms unit at his wrist, then froze. This wasn't a revelation to share over unencrypted channels. Not when the walls might be listening—not in a hospital hallway
The experts thought his sister had died, didn't they? The odds were astronomically low that she would have survived birth and infancy in the Traverse without Omegan care. His father must have spent those last desperate moments as she attacked and mocked him, pouring pheromones into Yvette's veins like liquid gold, praying to gods that didn't listen—just so the baby's lungs might inflate with air instead of collapsing like paper sacks. And after? Someone must have stolen an Omegan male from the records, some forgotten name in the missing persons archives, forced him to kneel beside Yvette's bed like a living pheromone pump while Caleb watched with that cold, clinical satisfaction.
The missing Omegan wet nurse, he presumed her had been some forgotten casualty, someone thought to be dead in a riot? An ABO soldier dragged from the front lines, or worse, an innocent plucked from the Omegan quarter? Kieran's stomach twisted at the thought of some faceless male, probably long dead by now, shackled to Yvette's bedside like a pheromone-generating machine. His own father had been the one who drafted the emergency protocols for Beta-Dominant Omega-assisted births after all; Aris Rose knew better than anyone what would've been required to keep an infant Omega alive in the Traverse without the proper infrastructure.
'
Whoever they took—he wouldn't have lasted more than a year.'The thought hung bleakly in Kieran's mind, ugly and intrusive. Omegas pushed past their limits, didn't recover—they burned out, pheromone glands hemorrhaging until their bodies shut down. Especially in the hands of Purifiers.
Silas rounded the corner at a jog, ice-blue eyes scanning the floor, 'how was he going to look at Kieran after this. It changed things. Their pheromonal exchange would end.'
Silas nearly ran into Kieran. He was in scrubs, his soiled clothes dripping in the washroom of Cait's hospital room. "So, that is some pretty big news?" His gaze flicked to the shattered slate, then back to Kieran's face. "What the fuck? What's wrong?"
Kieran exhaled through his teeth. He'd known Silas since they were both pissing their pants at the Alpha-Omega Academy; he had trusted him with worse secrets than this. But this wasn't just a secret. This was a livewire, a grenade with the pin half-pulled, the kind of truth that got people disappeared if the wrong ears caught wind. "How is she?" he said, looking at the bedraggled appearance of his friend.
Silas felt scent blind from being in the room with her; Kieran's usual soft pheromones were nonexistent in his nostrils." Rough. Doctor Jameson and the team are working on her right now." Kieran looked at Silas, his eyes felt hot from the threatening tears.
Silas shifted, his broad shoulders blocking the fluorescent glare from the overhead lights. "They're trying to stabilize her," he said, voice rough. "Before I left, the endocrinologist said her system's reacting to the antidote like she's been drowning in suppressants since puberty. Which is sadly likely the case." His fingers twitched, like he wanted to reach out but didn't know where to put his hands. "Kieran. The DNA results. Have you told Aris yet?"
Kieran swallowed. Telling their father meant making it real—meant admitting they'd all failed her. "No. Not until we're sure she'll survive the night." He glanced toward the closed door where Cait lay, wires snaking from her frail wrists like IVs were the only thing stitching her soul to her body. "And not here. Not in this glorified Beta clinic with its paper-thin walls and Purifier sympathizers on staff. Normund Hospital in Marseille has an entire Omegan wing—private, secured. She'd be safer there."
Silas exhaled sharply through his nose, the scent of chamomile and burnt honey spiking with agitation. "Do you think she's stable enough to transport?" His gaze flicked to the slate shards on the floor, the damning genetic match still glowing faintly on the largest fragment. "Because if we're moving her, we need to do it *now*, before anyone realizes who she is. Before Caleb catches wind."
Kieran's jaw tightened. Marseille was three hours by armored medevac, three hours where Cait could crash mid-flight, where her body might decide twenty years of poison was finally enough. But Silas was right—every minute in this hospital was a gamble. "Call your father," he said finally. "Tell him we need the Thorne grav-jet prepped with a full medical team, 'yours', not the hospital's. And Silas?" Kieran's voice dropped, barely audible over the hum of distant monitors. "Y-your hand, is that what I think it is?"
Silas hesitated, then turned his palm downward. The skin on top of his hand was unmarked except for a faint, intricate pattern—a 'Flower of Life', or 'Rose of Venus' in full bloom, as vivid as fresh ink loomed just beneath the surface. It looked less like a tattoo and more like something had reached inside him and rearranged the pigment at a molecular level. "It is darkening," he murmured. "After she... after the knotting. I thought it was just sweat at first." His thumb brushed the mark, testing. "Does the Rose Clan have mate marks like this?" It was complex. So complex.
Kieran's breath caught. This was the family sigil; it hung in his father's office. A place Silas had never entered. There were centuries-old sketches of the legendary Omegan queen Lyra branding their chosen warriors with their pheromonal, simple marks that pulsed with the rhythm of a shared heartbeat. But those were myths, weren't they? Stories told to children about the old world before the Traverses and wars. Except the proof was right there, blooming across Silas's pulse point like a declaration written in blood and biology.
The intercom crackled overhead—some Omegan orderly calling for a cleanup in Wing C—and the sound snapped Kieran back to the present. He caught Silas's wrist, fingers pressing just above the mark. "Don't let anyone see that," he hissed. "Not until we're out of this dome. If the Purifiers catch wind that a Rose heir has imprinted on an Alpha..." He didn't need to finish. The broken slate on the floor was proof enough of what happened to inconvenient truths.
Silas flexed his hand, watching the sigil shift under his skin like ink in water. "Jameson saw," he admitted, voice low. "When he came in to discharge me. He didn't say anything, but his scent spiked." The memory tightened his jaw. Civilian omega doctors weren't trained to recognize mating marks; their textbooks called them fairy tales. But Jameson could be a risk, a temporary one.
Kieran's nostrils flared. "Then we promote him." The words were clipped, tactical. "Head of female omegan endocrinology at Normund or some bullshit. Effective immediately."
Silas snorted, rubbing his thumb over the darkening sigil. "And who signs that order? You don't have the clearance, and my last 'promotion' of a physician ended with half the ABO Medical Board threatening to resign. Unless your father—"
"Not my father." Kieran cut him off sharply. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting jagged shadows across the cracked slate. "Buy the hospital," he said suddenly.
Silas blinked. "I could." His tongue pressed against the back of his teeth, considering. The monthly allowance he received could absorb a dozen failing beta hospitals without denting it. A surface hospital would not cost much, "But it'd take weeks to push through acquisitions. And right now?" His gaze flicked to Cait's door. "Best play is still telling Aris. Even if he skins me alive for imprinting on his daughter before he knew she existed."
The admission hung between them, raw. Silas had imagined his future a thousand ways—boardrooms, contracts, some polite breeding arrangement with a minor omegan house to secure an heir. Never this. Never her. His pulse thudded strangely under the mark, like it was counting down to something inevitable. He'd spent years dodging the dynastic matchmaking his father arranged, the careful politics of pheromone-brokered alliances. Now fate had shoved him into the deepest one possible with a girl who smelled like poisoned gardenias and didn't even know her own lineage.
Silas exhaled sharply through his nose. "Your father already hates me for taking you to Chicago," he muttered. "Now I get to tell him I've knotted his long-lost daughter halfway to death, and she painted her family crest on my fucking wrist. This is going to be delightful, but I can win Aris."
A monitor beeped down the hall—too regular, too rhythmic. Like a countdown, neither of them could stop. Kieran rubbed the side of his neck, fingers pressing into the scent gland there as if he could physically push back the pheromones threatening to leak. His smile was a nervous, flickering thing—the kind that happened when someone handed you a live grenade and called it a gift.
"Here, the change of clothes you ordered. Along with the women's wear. Are you sure about the sizing?" Kieran asked, nudging the duffel at Silas's feet with his toe. The clothes just seemed too small for an adult woman to wear. "You smell like her desperation pheromones and hospital antiseptic."
"Yeah." Silas hesitated, his thumb still tracing the mark on his wrist—the one that pulsed darker every time Cait's vitals spiked on the other side of the door. The duffel's contents were practical and tasteful. Someone had conscientiously packed for him, thinking of all of his needs. Probably Kieran. "You're the best, you thought of everything, I am sorry I ordered you like that," Silas said finally, hefting the bag. The weight of it was familiar—the hidden compartments, the reinforced seams.
Kieran's hands twitched, it had pushed it was too long. He'd need to start on the suppressants again until he could find someone to take Silas's place. His glands throbbed along with the headache as he spaced out. The scent of lemon, chamomile, and honey thickened abruptly as Silas stepped closer—too close, invading the careful space Kieran maintained around himself—and clasped his wrist. Skin met skin with a jolt, pheromones flooding between them in a dizzying rush.
Kieran recoiled instinctively, his free hand flying up to shield his nose. "Christ, Silas," he hissed through gritted teeth, "you're circulating like a rutting buck." The exchange was clinical, efficient—wrist glands pressed together just long enough to transfer what was needed—but Kieran still shuddered when it was over, wiping his arm against his thigh as if he could scrub the sensation away.
Silas flexed his freshly-marked hand, watching the way the sigil pulsed darker with each breath. "Should've warned you," he muttered, rubbing at his own scent glands as if that might dilute the oversaturated pheromones. "Being near her—it's like standing next to a live wire. My system's shot."
"Gross, but thanks. I was putting it off." Kieran said. Kieran's expression flickered between disgust and reluctant understanding. He'd seen the reports—how exposure to high-level pheromones could scramble an Alpha's endocrine system. Usually, it was Alpha-on-Alpha attacks. How it left them twitchy and overreactive, dumping pheromones at the slightest provocation. Since it was with a mate, it had an uncomfortable intimacy that did not belong to him, and he would never want it anyway. Touch disgusted him. He did not know why. He was just different.
The silence between them thickened, awkward in a way it hadn't been since they were teenagers navigating their first disastrous attempts at pheromone exchanges. Kieran cleared his throat, stepping back toward the cracked slate. "Go shower," he said, not looking up. "You smell like she scent-marked you."
Silas's laugh was sharp, startled—but he didn't argue, just shouldered the duffel and turned toward the staff lockers. "You'd be surprised, the upper hand she held. Practically did"
"I don't want to know," Kieran said behind him as he walked towards an empty consultation room. Kieran pulled out a comms unit, his fingers hovering over the encryption codes. One message. That's all it would take to upend their family's life. His thumb pressed down.
Aris Rose's comms unit thrummed against the nightstand at 4:03 AM—three short bursts that yanked him straight from sleep. The projection flickered to life before his fingers even found the device, showing a bag-eyed Kieran standing in what looked like a hospital ward: slate flooring, ferrocrete walls, flickering overheads, the surroundings of an underfunded ABO hospital. Aris was already swinging his legs out of bed before 'Father?' fully registered—because his son hadn't called him that in eight years, not since the screaming match that had sent Kieran storming out of Alba with Silas Thorne's name like a curse on his lips.
Kieran watched through the projection as his father's sleep-soft face morphed into something raw and panicked, the man's knuckles whitening around the comms unit. "Are you hurt?" Aris demanded, already reaching for the emergency 'go bag' he kept beneath the bed. His scent glands flared instinctively—jasmine flooding his bedroom in alarm, he heard the guard shift outside. "Tell me where you are. I can be airborne in twenty minutes."
The offer hung between them, fragile as hospital glass. Kieran exhaled sharply through his nose. His father hadn't asked if he was sick—he'd assumed. Because why else would his estranged son break eight years of silence at 4 AM unless he was dying in some backwater clinic? The realization twisted in Kieran's gut like a knife. He watched his father's eyes dart across the projection, searching for bloodstains or bandages. He almost laughed at the cruel irony—that after all this time, Aris still defaulted to protector mode when it came to his children. Even the ones who were estranged from him.
Kieran leaned forward into the projection's range, letting the harsh fluorescents carve the exhaustion from his face in brutal detail. "I'm not sick," he said quietly, watching his father's shoulders sag with momentary relief before tensing again at the unspoken *but*. "But you need to sit down."
Aris Rose's fingers twitched toward the bedpost, knuckles whitening as he lowered himself onto the mattress with the careful deliberation of a man bracing for impact. His gaze flickered momentarily to Kieran's abdomen—subtle enough to miss if you didn't know him—before fixing back on his son's face with forced neutrality.
"I am sitting. So tell me, are you pregnant?" Aris asked with a wince, each word measured like poured mercury. His nostrils flared instinctively—no telltale gland swelling, no gravid state. Just the same unchanged Kieran, the one that had remained unchanged since puberty, unchanged except for the signs of sleep deprivation.
Kieran exhaled sharply through his nose, recognizing the tell—his father had spent too many years studying Omegan biology to miss the signs. "No, father," he said, voice cracking on the word like thin ice, "I'm not carrying Silas's clutch." He hesitated, watching the minute relaxation of Aris's shoulders before delivering the blow. "It's bigger. I found her."
The silence that followed wasn't silence at all—it was the deafening absence of sound where there should have been shock, denial, anything but this terrible stillness as Aris Rose's hands curled slowly into fists against his thighs. His wedding band—the one he still wore twenty-five years after Elara's death—bit deep enough to draw blood.
"Found who?" Aris whispered, the question barely audible over the static of the projection. His eyes never left Kieran's face, tracking every minute twitch like a man reading his own death warrant.
Kieran exhaled sharply through his nose. "Your daughter," he said, each word deliberate as a surgeon's scalpel. "My sister. Her name is Cait Agneau—likely stolen. She's been rotting in the Beta traverse with a bastard who pumped her full of suppressants until her endocrine system started cannibalizing itself."
Aris's laugh punched out of him—a broken, wet sound that might have been relief if not for the way his fingers spasmed toward his scent glands. "Cait," he murmured, testing the shape of it. "We were going to name her Catherine." His thumb brushed his lower lip, a childhood tic Kieran hadn't seen in decades. "Close enough." Then his gaze snapped back to Kieran, sharp as shrapnel. "Why are you in a hospital?"
Kieran watched the realization hit—the way his father's face crumpled like paper catching fire. "She was also poisoned," he said flatly, "as well as suppressed. I smelled Ophelia's tears on her—she'll need detox just from that alone." The hallucinogenic herb was notorious among Omegans and Omegan physicians; an ancient narcotic that left users twitching through withdrawal while their own pheromones rotted inside them, and a stupid old Omegan folk cure to stave off the symptoms of rut and collapse, that was, until the user died. It was illegal and made its way into the tunnels. Not everyone was a good person.
Aris made a sound like a bone snapping. His palms pressed hard against his eye sockets as if he could physically shove the images away—some Beta-dominant bastard force-feeding his daughter crushed petals while her body ate itself alive. The comms unit trembled in his grip, warping Kieran's projection into a funhouse mirror of grief. "They gave her witchweed? Oh gods!" The words came out shredded. "That—that's what they used on the prisoners during the first outlier uprising. To keep them docile while—" He gagged suddenly, doubling over as his scent glands pulsed sour jasmine.
Kieran watched, numb, as his father retched into the wastebasket beside the bed. The sight should've been satisfying—this man who'd spent twenty-five years playing the unflappable patriarch finally crumbling—but all he felt was the weight of Cait's chart burning against his ribs. "It gets worse," he said tonelessly. "Her bloodwork shows heavy metal toxicity. Mercury, arsenic. Probably from whatever underground quack was brewing her suppressants. I want to move her to a better and closer hospital in Marseilles. I am back in the S.E.T."
Aris lifted his head slowly, saliva stringing between his lips. His wedding band glinted dully in the predawn light as he wiped his mouth. "Normund?" he rasped. "You're right. I'll have the Blackbird prepped—it's the only transport with a sterile isolation chamber." His fingers danced over the comms controls with military precision, even as his breath hitched. "Tell the doctor to start chelation therapy now. Don't wait for the transfer."
Kieran hesitated. The next part would fracture whatever fragile truce they'd built in these last minutes. "Father, don't worry about that. She is already in care," he said carefully, "Silas is here. He's...implicated." He watched Aris's spine stiffen, the way his nostrils flared at Thorne's name. "Biologically." The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on.
Aris's fingers twitched toward his scent glands—an old combat reflex Kieran recognized from childhood. "Thorne?" he repeated, voice dangerously soft. "The boy who stole you away—now he's had my daughter?" The words dripped with venom, conjuring the memory of that last screaming match in Alba's office, Silas standing between Kieran and Ryder Mountbatten's contract like a human shield. 'Your threats don't scare me. You can't force him.'
Kieran exhaled sharply. "He housed her first rut, yes," he admitted, watching his father's jaw work. "Saved her life when her endocrine system started collapsing. Would you rather it have been some stranger? Some alpha who didn't know what he was doing?" The hypocrisy tasted bitter—Aris had spent years trying to pair his children off like livestock, and now he balked when biology took its course.
Aris's laugh was jagged. "So Thorne gets two of my children?" he hissed, fingers raking through sleep-tangled hair. "First, he steals my son, now he's bonded to my—" The word 'daughter* caught in his throat like a fishbone.
Kieran rolled his eyes. "Oh, please. You know damn well my contract with Silas was always platonic," he snapped. "And if you'd bothered to read the accords you discuss every year, you'd know his bond with Cait voids ours automatically." He leaned into the projection, letting Aris see the exhaustion etched into his face. "Be angry if you want, but Silas kept her alive, and at my request. That's what matters."
Aris's expression darkened, but the fight drained out of him as abruptly as it came. His shoulders slumped, the wedding band on his finger catching the dim light as he rubbed his temple. "Gods help me," he muttered. "Twenty years, and she comes back to me smelling like lemon and honey." The irony wasn't lost on either of them—Aris had spent a decade trying to breed that scent out of his bloodline, only for fate to deliver it back wrapped in Thorne's DNA.
Kieran softened despite himself. "She's safe. That's what matters," he repeated quietly. "And Silas...he'll keep her that way. There's nothing you can do about it." He didn't say *better than you could*—but the words hung between them all the same.
Aris exhaled sharply through his nose, the fight leaving him in a rush. "I'll be there by dawn," he said finally, voice rough. "Tell Thorne if he so much as breathes wrong near her before I arrive, I'll skin him alive with his own signet ring."
Kieran's mouth quirked. "I'll pass along the sentiment," he said dryly, before severing the connection. The projection dissolved into static, leaving him alone in the hospital hallway with the weight of what he'd just set in motion.
Silas would be pissed. Cait would be terrified. And his father...Aris Rose was a storm about to make landfall. But for the first time in eight years, Kieran found he didn't care. Let the old man rage. Let the world burn. His sister was alive.
That was enough.
Kieran cut the connection mid-sentence, watching his father's furious mouth move soundlessly before the projection dissolved into static. The silence that followed was thick with the unspoken. Twenty years of ghosts crowding the hospital hallway, pressing in until his ribs ached. He flexed his fingers, half-expecting to find claw marks in his palms from holding himself so still.
A knock startled him, three sharp raps that sent his pulse jumping. Silas stood framed in the doorway, his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows, the fresh mating mark on his wrist still angry-red under the stark fluorescents. "Normund's ours," he said without preamble, tossing a data slate onto the consultation table. "Thirty-two percent from the Rossi holdings, another nineteen from the Leblanc estate. Jameson's already prepping the isolation suite." His grin was all teeth, the kind of predatory satisfaction that came from moving faster than their enemies could blink.
Kieran studied Silas's face—the only outward sign of the sleepless night spent negotiating hostile buyouts while simultaneously playing nursemaid to a dying Omega. The man should be fucking comatose by now, not grinning as he'd just won a war. "And the good doctor?" Kieran asked, rubbing at his own throbbing temples.
Silas's smile turned wry. "Took the bait like a starving trout. Apparently, being personal physician to the Silver Rose is worth more than his Hippocratic oath." He leaned against the doorframe, the motion deliberately casual, but Kieran didn't miss the way his fingers twitched toward his scent glands—an Alpha's unconscious check for distress pheromones. "You look like hell."
Kieran snorted. "Feel like it." He glanced at the cracked slate on the floor, the genetic results still glowing. Cait's entire life reduced to percentages and base pairs. "She's luckily asleep. Like I wish I were. My father now knows, and he's going to be a fucking joy as always."
Silas's expression darkened, his pheromones spiking with something sharp and protective—an old reflex whenever Aris Rose's name entered the conversation. "How much did he threaten to skin me?" His thumb traced the fresh mating mark absently, the gesture almost unconscious.
"Standard procedure," Kieran muttered, rubbing his face. "Though I didn't mention the part where you're technically her concubine now. Figured he'd have enough to rage about with just the rut and paperwork." The irony tasted bitter—Silas, who'd spent years dodging arranged breeding contracts, was now irrevocably tied to Cait through biology instead of politics. He did not know how Elias would take this.
'What if he was too late and she died and Silas was crippled by it?' Kieran thought disheartened. Silas's mother's own indifference fucked him up, he said he'd rather breed a male omega than raise a child without its biological mother around.
Silas exhaled sharply, the scent of lemon and honey thickening in the air. "We'll deal with him later." His gaze flicked toward Cait's room down the hall, where the steady beep of monitors underscored the silence. "Right now, she's alive. That's what matters." The unspoken 'barely' hung between them like a blade.
Kieran felt like chewing his fingertips. A habit that Silas knew all too well meant he was stressing out. It was about to get infinitely complicated from here. They would need to pull some talent to save her. He knew Silas did not like sharing his things. Silas was a territorial menace. He had once literally thrown an omega for touching his uniform at school. What would he do to someone who touched his mate, even with the accords governing him? Then there were all the promises Father had made if the 'Silver Rose' was found.
Kieran looked at Silas with tired eyes. He hated Omegan gossip rags that had teased his father and grandfather's desperation. If he had known, he would never have negotiated with that mad Dutchman who was now technically Cait's first fiancé, Using the promise of being her consort if she was found, the seawalls were necessary and needed.
The 'King of the North' was still a danger, and Silas would be furious if he found out. He only knew all the details because of George and Abel. Plus, there was the head of Father's stupid 'The Silver Rose' movie that romanticized Yvette's disappearance and Cait's 'kidnapping'—the one they'd rushed into production, a year after Yvette's 'abduction'—had stoked obsession among Alpha males wanting to claim the 'lost princess.' It was a logistical nightmare.
Silas's nostrils flared, catching the spike in Kieran's distress pheromones. His gaze sharpened. "You're hiding something," he said flatly, fingers tapping the doorframe in a slow, deliberate rhythm. The scent of citrus soured between them, warning against deception.
Kieran exhaled through his nose. "Not hiding," he lied smoothly. "Just thinking about logistics. We'll need to keep her isolated until her immune system stabilizes." He didn't mention the betrothal contract—signed in blood and legally binding—nor the army of suitors who'd spent years fantasizing about the Silver Rose. Some problems were best handled with a scalpel, not a hammer. You did not excise a tumor without imaging it first, after all.
Silas's lip curled. "Jet's inbound. Jameson's prepping her transport team—paid enough to ensure discretion." His fingers twitched toward his comm unit, where encrypted transfer confirmations blinked in rapid succession. "Those who know who I am. Nobody knows about her but us in Jameson, thankfully."
A soft chime interrupted them—food delivery. Kieran accepted the bland protein packs without comment, tearing into the first with mechanical precision.
"Gods," Silas said as he stared at the unappetizing slab, his stomach recoiling from the idea of sustenance when Cait's scent still clung to his clothes—gardenias wilting under poison. He ate anyway. These were meals here; they were his emergency rations in America, kept in kits for when they did field work to build 'character'.
Kieran watched him chew with clinical detachment. "You realize this changes everything," he said finally, tracing the rim of his water canister. "The recent accords, the treaties, the entire fucking power structure—all predicated on her being dead. This is going to be a headache that you will have to be patient about." Silas's silence was answer enough. Some truths didn't need stating.
The protein slab turned to an unpalatable mush in Silas's mouth. He forced it down anyway, swallowing against the bile rising in his throat. The faint chemical aftertaste lingered—artificial, engineered, the kind of sustenance bred for necessity, not pleasure. His stomach twisted. 'And she ate this shit,' Silas thought, *probably thought it was a feast.* The realization hit him like a gut punch.
Kieran smirked, tipping his chin toward the half-eaten ration. "Gourmet," he drawled in an American accent that usually made his friend laugh, voice laced with bitter amusement. "For people like Cait, this is privilege. Be thankful." His silver eyes glinted with something dark—the unspoken *she survived worse* hanging between them like a noose.
Silas's fingers clenched around the empty wrapper. The plastic crumpled with a sound like old bone snapping in the streets. He didn't trust himself to speak—not when every instinct screamed to raze the fucking Traverse to the ground, to tear apart every Beta-dominant bastard who'd dared let a queen starve. Instead, he exhaled sharply through his nose, the scent of scorched honey thick in the air. "Fuck," he muttered. A prayer, a curse, an oath—all wrapped in a single, shattered word.
.