Ashley's SUV felt like a pressurized vacuum sealing them off from the rest of the fractured world.
The A/C hissed, fighting a losing battle against the New Orleans heat, while a low, haunting bassline bled from the door speakers. Ashley had the volume turned down, playing some indie track featuring a singer who sounded like she'd been dragged backward through the bayou mud and miraculously survived to sing about it.
It fit the mood perfectly.
Ashley drove with one hand white-knuckling the leather steering wheel. Her other hand tapped a restless, erratic rhythm against the console, trying to bleed off the nervous energy thrumming under her skin. She drove defensively, checking her mirrors every three seconds, treating the familiar, sun-drenched streets like an active war zone.
Ebony sat rigidly in the passenger seat, the belt cutting into her chest. She clutched the cheap plastic hospital vase of unnaturally vibrant lilies in her lap. She stared blankly out the tinted window, watching the historical architecture roll past. She wasn't sightseeing; she was conducting a paranoid inventory of the streets, making sure the world hadn't fundamentally changed while she was unconscious. She kept expecting to see black transit vans idling in the shadows.
Raphael was in the back seat.
He didn't slouch against the upholstery. He didn't lean his head against the glass. He sat perfectly centered, his posture straight, hyper-alert, and terrifyingly still. He took up a suffocating amount of space, his broad shoulders practically brushing both rear doors. His body didn't seem mechanically capable of doing "casual." He looked like a fully loaded weapon resting quietly in its case, the safety completely off.
Ashley caught his dark reflection in the rearview mirror, her eyes narrowing in lingering suspicion. "Okay, logistical question. Do you have a car or a truck parked somewhere downtown? Because I'm not driving back to the medical district later this afternoon to fight my way through a crowded hospital parking garage."
"I took my bike," Raphael said. His voice was a low, subsonic vibration that easily cut through the bassline, rumbling right into the floorboards.
"Of course you did," Ashley muttered, a bitter mix of amusement and deep exhaustion lacing her tone. "Alright, Action Hero. Where do you need it dropped off? My driveway in the Garden District is tiny, and my neighbors treat neighborhood watch like a competitive blood-sport. They'll call the HOA on a rogue Harley."
Raphael's golden-brown gaze flicked briefly to the back of Ebony's head—a quick, involuntary check on her well-being—before he answered. "Give me the address."
Ashley blinked, momentarily thrown by the flat demand. "Oh. Right. Duh." She rattled off the address of the historical Baptiste family home.
Raphael didn't ask her to repeat it. He calmly pulled a thick, encrypted burner phone from his pocket and typed it in. Ebony watched his hands in the reflection of her side mirror—massive, heavily scarred across the knuckles, and terrifyingly steady. They were the hands of a man who dismantled human bodies with surgical precision.
"You got that?" Ashley asked, glancing in the rearview mirror.
"Sent," Raphael replied, slipping the phone away. "My team is bringing it."
Ashley nodded slowly, her jaw tight, like she'd actively decided not to ask who his "team" was for fear of the horrific answer. She let out a rattling sigh that temporarily deflated her shoulders. "So… what happens now?"
Ebony's spine stiffened against the leather seat. She didn't turn to look at Raphael. She kept her silver eyes pinned to the passing street signs, her heart rate ticking upward. He's going to use me to catch them, she reminded herself, crushing the flutter in her stomach. I'm the bait. That's the plan.
Ashley kept pushing, her voice careful but still holding its usual blunt-force edge. "Like—are you going back to wherever you came from? Are you staying in New Orleans? Are you planning on following us into our house?"
Raphael didn't flinch. He didn't offer that fake, reassuring smile James Knighton had weaponized against them.
"I'm staying close," he said. It wasn't a suggestion. It was a statement of territorial fact.
Ashley's brows lifted in the mirror. "Close how? Give me parameters."
Raphael's voice dropped an octave, chilling the air in the cabin. "With you. Or near you. Until I know she's permanently safe from the syndicate."
Ebony swallowed hard, her throat clicking audibly in the quiet car. Those specific words, spoken by a lethal stranger still faintly smelling of dried blood and scorched ash, should have made her survival instincts scream. She should have been demanding Ashley pull the SUV over and call the cops. She was being used as a tactical asset by a black-ops mercenary.
Instead, something ancient and previously frozen solid inside her chest simply unclenched. It was like her fractured soul had been holding its breath in the dark, waiting its entire existence to hear that unwavering promise.
Ashley glanced sharply at Ebony, reading her sister's silence. "Is that what you want, Eb?"
Ebony's mouth opened. The brutally honest answer rose to her tongue far too fast: Yes. I want him exactly where I can see him.
She hesitated, biting the soft inside of her cheek until she tasted copper. She was a brilliant scientist. She had a PhD. She understood logic and data. She didn't know how to logically explain to her human sister that she wanted a dangerous apex predator standing near her as badly as she wanted oxygen.
"I don't… know," Ebony said quietly, the lie burning her tongue. She swallowed again, forcing the truth out sideways, making it sound like trauma rather than instinct. "I just—I don't want to be alone right now. Not after the alley. If he thinks they're coming back… I want the security."
Ashley's combative expression softened for a fraction of a second, heartbreak flashing in her dark eyes, then hardened right back into her impenetrable armor. "Cool. Then nobody leaves the property. We lock it down."
Raphael's molten gaze met Ashley's in the rearview mirror. "They'll send someone else to finish the contract."
Ashley blinked, the warm color visibly draining from her cheeks. "You know that for a fact? Or is that just an educated, paranoid guess?"
"I don't guess," Raphael said.
That single, devastating sentence landed hard. Even the low, rhythmic bass of the music felt like it dipped, as if the world had paused on its axis to listen to the predator make his grim assessment.
Ebony's knuckles turned stark white as her grip tightened around the plastic vase. The Permanent Collection. The reality of it bled through her mind. They didn't want to kill her. They wanted to turn her into biological hardware.
Ashley exhaled a long, shaky breath, gripping the steering wheel until her hands shook. "Okay. Fine. So what's your actual plan, then? Like a real, actionable, tactical plan. Not just 'I'll handle it' superhero bullshit."
Raphael didn't answer right away. He turned his heavy head and looked out the back window, his hyper-vigilant eyes tracking a generic dark grey sedan that had been perfectly mirroring their route for two consecutive turns. He memorized the license plate, the make, the model, and the silhouette of the driver in three seconds. The sedan finally turned off at the next traffic light, heading toward the commercial district. Raphael didn't relax his posture an inch.
"My plan is simple," he said, turning back to face the front. "I keep my eyes constantly on her. I keep you both moving smart, off the digital grid. And my tactical team keeps working the bigger problem from the shadows until the threat is eradicated."
Ashley held up a hand. "Your team—so there actually is a team out there."
"Yes."
"And they're… what? Private security contractors? Black-market mercenaries? A cartel?"
Raphael paused. He was actively choosing the safest, most digestible version of the truth to hand to the human. He couldn't tell her that her sister was currently being guarded by a Pride of apex jaguar shifters who had just finished reducing a riverfront warehouse to smoldering ash.
"Something like that," Raphael murmured.
Ashley let out a harsh, cynical snort. "You sound like every lying guy in this city who says he 'works in logistics' on Hinge, and then turns out to be an undercover fed with three ex-wives and a drinking problem."
Raphael didn't outright smile, but something in the hard lines of his face shifted. A slight relaxing of his heavy jaw suggested he found her abrasive nature genuinely amusing. He respected the fire in her. He could literally smell the latent pyrokinesis humming in her blood. She was a weapon that didn't know she was loaded.
Ebony caught the subtle shift in his expression in the mirror.
It made her battered stomach flip for stupid, deeply inappropriate reasons. Bait, she ordered herself. You are bait. Stop looking at his mouth.
Ashley shifted the terrifying topic to something she could actually control. "Parents update, by the way. I talked to Mom while you were changing. They're already on a transport flight out of the green zone. They should be back in the States late tonight, assuming no major delays at customs. Tomorrow morning at the latest."
Ebony nodded, processing the timeline. She looked back at Raphael in the mirror, suddenly remembering he was a towering interloper who knew nothing about her personal life beyond the worst, most violent night of it.
"Our parents travel a lot," Ebony said softly, feeling the strange urge to explain her life to him. "They're humanitarians. They dedicate their lives to global relief missions. They were out of the country volunteering at a remote refugee clinic when… everything happened."
Ashley added, her voice strained, "Mom's currently about to blow a physical hole through the fuselage of that plane with her anxiety. Dad's the supposed calm one, but he's still… not calm. He's terrifyingly quiet."
Ebony's pale lips twitched. "He acts calm. It's a practiced coping reflex."
"Right," Ashley agreed quickly. "He performs calm because he has to. Mom is real calm. Like… the kind of 'I will quietly ruin your life, dismantle your organization, and salt the earth where your house stood' calm."
Raphael's intense gaze flicked to Ebony again, tracking the shifting expressions on her face. "They'll be staying with you at the house?"
"Yes," Ebony said. "They'll want to be there. They won't let us out of their sight."
Ashley rolled her eyes dramatically. "They're gonna want to interrogate the entire universe, starting with the NOPD, and ending with whoever the hell you are."
Ebony shifted uncomfortably in her leather seat and stared blankly out the window again. "I don't want them to freak out. They have enough stress dealing with actual global crises."
Ashley's harsh tone softened. "They're gonna freak out, Eb. That's literally their job description as parents. They'll just do it while aggressively cooking massive amounts of comfort food and pretending they aren't having rolling panic attacks in the kitchen."
Raphael's voice came from the back seat, a steady, unshakable anchor in the storm of their anxiety. "Good. More people close to you is better right now. The more eyes on the perimeter, the harder it is for a strike team to approach undetected."
Ashley narrowed her dark eyes. "You seriously sound like you're planning to post up on the front porch with a rifle like a highly trained guard dog."
Raphael's eyes didn't leave the passing street, endlessly scanning the environment for threats. "If that's what it takes."
Ebony swallowed over a dry, tight throat. Logically, she should have felt smothered and alarmed by a massive, heavily scarred stranger staking a physical claim to her safety like that. He was using her to get to the syndicate. It was tactical.
But she didn't feel smothered.
What she felt was undeniably safe. And she was terrified and deeply confused about why safety suddenly felt like the violent man sitting in the back seat.
The music on the stereo shifted to something lighter, but Ashley reached out and turned the volume down anyway, killing the mood to force a serious conversation.
"So tell me this," Ashley said, her voice dropping the sarcasm. "Do you think James Knighton was working exclusively with local talent? Or was that heavily armed black van in the alley outside contractors brought in for the job?"
Raphael's heavy jaw tightened, the thick muscle ticking rhythmically under his bronze skin. "Both."
Ashley frowned deeply. "That's really not comforting."
"It's the honest truth," Raphael said flatly, refusing to coddle them. "Knighton was a high-level broker. He had local scouts, but the extraction team in the alley was heavily armed, highly trained, and well-funded. They were corporate."
Ebony's throat went tight, a sharp spike of cold fear piercing through the lingering fog of the sedative. "So… even with James dead, I'm still an active target."
Raphael's answer came fast. "Yes. They want your mind. They won't just close the file because one broker failed."
Ashley hissed through her teeth. "Okay. Well. We're not doing fear all day. We're doing actionable plans. That's what we do in this family. We plan. We execute."
Ebony let out a small, shaky breath. "Ashley…"
"I know," Ashley said, her voice turning vulnerable. "But if I stop talking, if I stop planning, I'll start spiraling into a massive panic attack, Eb. So. Plans."
Ebony didn't reply. She stared down at the impossible lilies resting in her lap. The flame-tipped petals looked brilliantly fresh and impossibly hydrated, almost as if they'd perked up even more on the short car ride.
She didn't reach out to touch them.
She purposefully didn't stare at them for too long.
That was an old, ingrained survival habit too—don't linger on the anomalies, don't invite unwanted attention, don't let normal people notice the unexplainable things happening around her. She'd been doing that her entire life, hiding her subconscious connection to the earth. Whenever she was highly emotional, plants thrived, seeds sprouted, and the air smelled of oncoming storms. She kept it locked down, buried beneath her scientific logic.
From the back seat, Raphael leaned forward slightly. His sharp, predatory golden eyes landed directly on the unnaturally vibrant flowers for a long, heavy beat, then flicked away almost instantly, as if he'd caught himself staring at something intimate and private.
His dark brow furrowed.
It was the look of a man who thought he was seeing something that defied the established laws of biology. He recognized the elemental magic. He knew what she was.
But he didn't say a word about it out loud.
Ebony noticed his silence, too—and her chest tightened painfully, because she'd been desperately hoping he wouldn't notice her secret at all. She was already hunted for her scientific brain; she didn't want to be perceived as a freak on top of it.
Ashley's commanding voice pulled her out of her spiraling thoughts. "Okay. Home rules are now in full effect," she said, pulling the SUV onto their wide, tree-lined street in the Lower Garden District. "No opening the heavy oak door for strangers. No answering weird, unlisted numbers on our cell phones. If someone shows up pretending to be an Amazon driver, I'm immediately calling the cops, and then I'm calling Mom to handle the fallout."
Ebony managed a small, exhausted smile at the sheer absurdity of it all. "Okay."
Raphael added quietly from the back, his tone absolute, "If anything feels off, even a fraction of a degree—a smell, a shadow, a sound—you tell me immediately."
Ashley shot him a deeply territorial glare in the rearview mirror. "She tells me."
Raphael didn't argue the human hierarchy. He simply adjusted it to fit his reality. "Both."
Ashley paused, considering the tactical advantage of having a lethal shadow on their side, then nodded once, sharply. "Fair."
The large, imposing Baptiste family house came into view. It was a stunning piece of historical architecture—heavy, dark green storm shutters, intricate wrought-iron railings wrapping around the first and second-floor porches, and thick, vibrant jasmine climbing the support posts like it owned the foundation. The dense, slightly overgrown garden out front was stubborn, wild, and incredibly alive.
Ashley pulled the SUV smoothly into the narrow brick driveway and killed the engine.
The quiet that followed the death of the motor felt heavier than it should have. It was the silence of a besieged fortress waiting for the first wave of the attack.
"Alright," Ashley said, her voice steadying as she took a deep breath, preparing to transition from designated driver to active guardian. "We're home. We go inside. We eat. We rest. We don't freak out."
Ebony nodded, unbuckling her seatbelt with trembling, bruised hands.
Raphael got out of the back seat first. He moved with liquid speed, circling the rear of the vehicle to open Ebony's passenger door before her hand even reached the interior handle.
Ebony started to open her mouth to say she was perfectly capable of doing it herself—then, looking up at his massive, waiting form, the way his body blocked out the sun and cast her in protective shadow, she didn't.
He offered his large, heavily scarred hand.
She took it without a second of hesitation.
She desperately tried not to think about how natural his calloused grip felt against her soft skin, or how her earth magic seemed to hum happily at the contact. He's just securing the asset, she told herself brutally. Don't read into it.
Ashley grabbed her heavy leather tote bag from the backseat and stood in the brick driveway, looking closely at Raphael like she was still deciding exactly what threat-level box he belonged in.
"So you're really staying here," she said, assessing him from head to toe.
Raphael's golden-brown gaze met hers—direct, highly controlled, but not rude. "Yes."
"And you're not leaving her," Ashley said, delivering the words as a concrete statement of fact rather than a question.
"No. I'm not."
Ebony's throat tightened painfully, and she hated how much a deeply buried, instinctual part of her soul loved hearing that single, uncompromising word.
Ashley exhaled a long breath, blowing a feral auburn curl out of her face, then nodded slowly as if she'd reached an executive decision. "Okay. Then you're officially inside my house, and that means one thing."
Raphael waited patiently.
Ashley pointed a stiff, manicured finger directly at his incredibly broad chest. "You tell me if anything changes. If you suspect someone followed us from the hospital. If your mysterious little tactical team learns something new about James's corporate employers. I don't like surprises in my home."
Raphael's answer was simple, deep, and absolute. "You'll know."
Ebony stepped slowly inside the cool, dark, air-conditioned foyer of the house with them, the vibrant lilies still clutched tightly in her arms, and tried desperately to convince her racing heartbeat to calm down and act normal.
Because she didn't fully understand what was rapidly, aggressively happening between her and Raphael.
But as the heavy, historical oak door clicked shut behind them and the deadbolts slid loudly into place, sealing them inside, she understood one terrifying thing with crystal clarity:
On Friday night, she had walked blindly into a high-end restaurant thinking she was going on a clumsy, charming date with a normal man.
On Saturday afternoon, she was walking into her childhood home tethered to an apex predator who had firmly, unilaterally decided he wasn't ever letting her out of his sight again.
And the scariest part of the entire ordeal?
It didn't scare her the way it should have.