"I had a whole plan, you know," he said low against her temple. "Ten of them. Contingencies for the contingencies." He brushed a loose wave back from her face. "And then you twitch one ear, and every single one falls apart. You’re a tactical nightmare, Fel. Worst asset I’ve ever been assigned."
Her ear flicked again, harder this time, like it had heard him and disapproved.
A rough sound left him, not quite a laugh, something he hadn’t expected to feel with his hands shaking an hour ago.
"There it is." He pressed his lips to the spot between her brows, slow and unhurried, the way he did everything once he’d decided it mattered. "Come on. Open up. I’ve got nothing left to plan, and nowhere I’d rather wait than right here."
Her lashes trembled. Stilled. Trembled again.
His chest pulled tight. He chased that twitch with his lips, pressing a kiss to the peak of her cheekbone, then the corner of her mouth, patient and unhurried, coaxing her up the only way he knew how when strategy had abandoned him.
And Voss, who weighed every word before he spent it, who built futures in the quiet and let his hands say what his mouth would not, stayed bent over her with his palm cradling her jaw, willing her up from the dark one breath at a time.
Her lashes lifted. Vivid blue, hazy and unfocused, found him.
"There you are," he breathed, and the rough thing in his throat cracked clean open. He pressed his forehead to hers, the relief in him too large for words, so he didn’t waste any. He just held her there, her pulse fluttering under his palm, and let himself shake.
"You," she rasped, "smell like wet dog."
A laugh tore out of him, real and helpless, the kind he hadn’t made in years.
"There’s my girl."
—-At the Greenhouse——
"She ran north. Two of the tiger men went with her, one carrying a duffel," Ash answered.
"Then we cut them off," Sarge growled, jaw tight. "Nothing that bitch touched stays breathing after what they pulled at the greenhouse."
The hunt sharpened into a relentless sprint through the dense northern grid of Bowral. Lucan vanished forward in jagged bursts of light, his presence tearing chunks out of any rogue fool enough to hold ground. The tiger guards who’d backed the failed insurrection broke apart, scattering through the stone alleys without their leader to anchor them. Thane flew down a cluster of three, trying to scale a rusted drainage barrier, his grip clamping the last one’s ankle and hauling him back with a bone-deep crunch.
"Where is she?" Thane demanded, slamming the rogue into a brick.
The tiger choked, blood spilling from a split lip, but before he could answer, an arrow from Sam’s crossbow punched through his shoulder and pinned him to the wooden frame. "North," the tiger gasped, golden gaze blown wide with the raw terror of facing Snow Team Beta with no one at his back. "She has the emergency plans. She’s trying to slip through the northern gap."
"There is no gap anymore," Pope said softly, his blade twirling between his fingers as he stepped forward, his smile empty of anything kind. "Only a dead end. No one takes our light."
—- Back at the manor ——
While the cleanup crew tore through the northern area, the command from Dimitri sliced through the tense courtyard air like a razor.
Dimitri didn’t look back as he turned toward the manor doors, but his presence hung over the remaining men like a suffocating storm cloud. "The rest of you, lock this property down. If a stray bird so much as breathes near our boundary, rip its wings off."
Dawn didn’t waste a second. As one of the high-level trackers, he immediately took charge of the inner perimeter.
"Marx, Shadow, with me on the main terrace. I want eyes on the tree line and the valley approach. Dako, Tommy, get to the high roofs. Nothing moves in the sky without Victor or you two spotting it first."
"On ittttt," Tommy said. Dako followed right on his heels, down in the courtyards and the dense, winding hedge gardens surrounding the estate, Casper and Jolt moved like twin forces of nature. Jolt’s fingers twitched, small, dangerous arcs of static electricity popping across his knuckles as his hyper-attuned senses mapped the vibrations through the soil.
"Nothing in the eastern brush," Jolt reported, his voice tight, his eyes darting toward the stone walls. "But the settlement sirens are spiking. The panic down there is pushing people toward our paths."
"Let them try," Casper murmured. Casper’s horse beastman’s frame went utterly motionless in the shadow of the western gatehouse, the fountain mist thickening around his legs until he was more suggestion than shape. The electricity didn’t arc or hiss; it simply lived in him, a low, coiled charge that raised the fine hairs on the stone around his boots and made the iron bars hum at a frequency just below hearing. He didn’t need to hide. He just needed to let them reach for the gate first.
Further out, Rowan and Ash took up the heavy guard. Rowan’s massive horse frame blocked the narrow gate entirely. He was dominant and thick with territorial warnings, rolling down the hill like a physical barrier, forcing the curious and the desperate from the town to turn back before they even reached the first marker stone.
"Ash, check the lower drainage grates," Rowan rumbled, his ears twitching as he caught the distant, crunching sounds of the battle Lucan and Exile were currently waging down in the streets. "The tigers know the layout. They might try to crawl up through the cellars, like the rats they are"
Ash nodded, his expression lethal and his steps making absolutely no sound against the gravel as he melted into the lower courtyard to seal every hidden point of entry.
Inside the manor, the heavy oak doors slammed shut, cutting off the rising clamour of the insurrection.
Voss stood by the heavy glass windows of the bedroom, his chest still heaving, his wolf ears strained toward the bed where Felicity lay.
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