The man nodded desperately, eyes rolling with terror, but Exile could sll the adrenaline, the strangled hope. He squeezed until the face went slack, then let the body fall. The third male had made it halfway over the counter before Exile caught up, dragging him back to the ground with an almost playful motion. He knelt beside the shaking heap, leaning close enough to taste the fear. "She’s mine," he said, low and guttural. "She will never be yours."
The man sobbed once, then Exile opened his throat. He stood, surveying the carnage, and felt nothing. No remorse, no pity, not even a flicker of satisfaction. Only the cold, consuming need to protect what belonged to him.
He wiped his blade again, slow and deliberate, and licked the blood from the edge. The copper tang settled on his tongue, grounding him. He closed his eyes, conjuring Felicity’s face, every line and freckle burned into mory. The town was a graveyard, and he was its avenging spirit.
He worked his way through the town, thodically hunting down every male who dared speak or even think about the new female. At first, they lingered in small, hopeful clumps, trading rumours and fantasies. It was almost funny, how quickly their bravado collapsed into terror.
The alleys are filled with silence. It was a cleansing, a purge by fire and fang.
He was in the middle of dragging a fox man’s body behind a burned-out storefront when the sound hit him, a sharp, three-note whistle that cut through the ruined streets like a blade. Voss. Or maybe Thane. The signal was unmistakable. Return. Now.
Exile’s head snapped toward the manor, every muscle coiling tight. The whistle ant urgency. It ant Felicity.
He abandoned the fox man without a second thought, lting into the shadows between buildings. His body moved with the fluid, sinuous grace that had earned him his na, slithering through broken windows and across collapsed rooftops, barely disturbing the dust. The copper sll of blood still clung to his skin, but his mind had already narrowed to a single point: get back.
The manor ca into view as he rounded the last corner, and the scene at the front gate stopped him cold.
A crowd. Not scattered stragglers or hopeful loners, a proper crowd, dense and seething, at least two hundred males packed shoulder to shoulder along the broken road leading to the entrance. Wolves, bears, a few scaled ones he couldn’t identify from this distance, all of them radiating that particular hunger he’d been systematically eradicating all day. The air was thick with it, desperation, testosterone, the sharp tang of male aggression.
And at the front, standing apart from the mass with her arms crossed and her jaw set in a hard line, was a woman. Tall, with close-cropped hair and a gaze that blazed even from where Exile crouched on a crumbling balcony. She was shouting at the gates, gesturing wildly, and the crowd behind her shifted and growled in response to whatever poison she was feeding them.
The tiger guards were pouring from the side entrances, their striped forms moving in tight formations, claws extended, and teeth bared. Good. They’d hold the line if it ca to that.
But then Exile saw Victor erge from the main entrance. The winged male moved with that terrible, asured authority, each step calculated, his red gaze burning like embers in the dim light.
Voss flanked his right, calm and watchful, already scanning the crowd with analytical precision.
Damien slithered on the left, all coiled tension and predatory nace, his body angled slightly forward as if he were barely restraining himself from lunging.
They were walking toward the crowd. Toward the woman.
And all Exile could think, watching those three move in formation, was that sowhere inside that manor, Felicity was probably sitting cross-legged on a cushion, completely unaware that three apex predators had just positioned themselves between her and two hundred angry males. Unaware that the entire defensive posture of Snow Team had shifted the instant soone ntioned her na.
That woman. That ridiculous, golden-haired woman who slled of honey and sunlight and made every terrifying bastard in this compound go soft in the head.
Exile dropped from the balcony, landing in a crouch behind a collapsed section of wall, and began working his way along the periter. The shadows embraced him, and he moved through them like smoke, circling wide until he reached the rear of the crowd. He positioned himself behind a rusted vehicle, partially concealed by overgrown vines, and watched.
The woman’s voice carried now, sharp and furious.
"You think you can just hide her? Lock her away like so treasure? She’s not yours to hoard! I want to talk to her, I want to see her! This should be MY HOUSE."
Victor stopped ten paces from the front of the crowd. He didn’t raise his pitch, but the words carried with the weight of absolute authority. "You have no idea what you’re talking about."
There was sothing almost beautiful about the way that male held himself when Felicity was the subject. Every line of his body sharpened. Every muscle locked into a posture that said, plainly and without hesitation: mine.
Not possessive in the way of a man hoarding gold.
Possessive in the way of a man who’d found the only thing in a ruined world worth building walls around.
"I know exactly what I’m talking about!" The woman jabbed a finger toward the manor. "She’s in there. The new female, and every male in this town has a right to- "
"She has no obligation to any of you." Voss’s words, cool and precise, cut through the woman’s tirade like a scalpel. "And you’re inciting a mob. That ends badly. For everyone. For you too."
Exile noticed the way Voss’s jaw tightened on that last sentence. The strategist was angry. Not the explosive kind, the kind that calculated exactly how many bones could be broken before a person lost consciousness. He was thinking about Felicity hearing this commotion. About her ears flattening in distress. About the crease that ford between her brows when she worried about people fighting over her.
Voss hated that crease.
All of them did.
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