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First he prises something from her clenched, juddering hand—a slim syringe, most of its contents gone—and his expression flickers as he reads the level of it. He says a clipped word to Doc and flicks the syringe across the gap, and Doc catches it one-handed, already reaching into the breast of his white coat to produce something small that he hurls straight back.

Silas snatches it from the air, thumbs it open, and tips whatever’s inside into his own mouth.

Then he seals his lips over hers.

I feel two things at once, with the graceless honesty of a man whose feelings have never learned manners. Relief, because some functioning corner of me understands this is fast-acting, that he’s feeding her something through the one route that’ll cross into her quickest, that this is a save and not a liberty.

A hot, irrational, utterly rabid spike of jealousy, because that is my Omega’s mouth and I haven’t so much as tasted it yet, haven’t earned those lips, and some snarling caveman buried under all my cynicism objects violently to another man getting there first, even like this, even to drag her back from the edge of a grave.

Jealousy, in the middle of a medical emergency, is possibly the most embarrassing thing an Alpha can feel.

I feel it anyway. I’ve never been able to govern the wanting; it’s the one muscle in me that never learned discipline.

Silas keeps his mouth on hers, patient and unbroken, holding whatever he gave her in place long enough to take—and slowly, slowly, the violent shaking eases.

The arch leaves her spine. The juddering gentles, then stutters, then stops, and her body goes limp in his arms.

He lifts his head. And she’s still. So eerily, completely still that the relief curdles instantly back into terror, because limp and quiet is not the same as alive, and I know the difference better than any man should.

“She’s arresting,” Silas says—something about her heart, a word I half understand and wholly hate—and the growl comes roaring back up out of me, because they’re laying her flat now, tearing the orange away from her chest, and strangers in white are descending with paddles and wires, and every protective instinct I own is screaming that they’re hurting her.

It takes six guards to put me down. Six, and a knee in my back, and still I’m half-rising, snarling, watching them hook my Omega up to a machine that’s about to do violence to her on purpose.

The first shock jolts through her.

Her body leaps and falls back.

Still.

And there it is again—the third panic, the one I was promised, arriving right on schedule.

The same clawing helplessness as a kitchen floor twenty years gone, the same unbearable knowledge that all my strength, every brutal useful thing these hands have ever done, is worthless against this. I cannot punch a stopped heart back into rhythm. I cannot threaten death into letting go.

For the second time in my life I am holding something precious while it leaves, and being too strong to help and too late to matter, and the helplessness is a kind of agony I’d genuinely forgotten the flavor of.

The second jolt. The leap, the fall.

Still.

The whole cafeteria has stopped breathing—two hundred lunatics and a dozen guards and three obsessed men all holding the same held breath—and the third shock spikes through her, and this time she gasps.

A huge, ragged, drowning inhale, her chest heaving up off the floor, and she coughs—blood, bright and startling—and her head lolls to the side, and she’s breathing, she’s gasping and hackingand groaning low and weak, and the sound of it is the single best thing these ears have heard since a kitchen long ago went quiet.

Silas is barking orders now, fast and surgical. Lucien answering in the same clipped key, and the room fills with professionals in white and a knot of handlers in jumpsuits and a gurney that swallows her small body and starts to move.

I don’t care about any of it.

I care about exactly one thing: following where they’re taking her.

The guards still pinning me clearly disagree, and we’re briefly relitigating that disagreement with my full bodyweight when Lucien turns his head and looks at me—really looks, reading whatever’s written across my face and finding it legible enough.

“Let him go,” he says. “He won’t be a problem if he can see her.”

It’s the truest thing anyone has said about me in years. The hands ease off. I rise, shake them loose, and follow the gurney without another sound, because he’s right—the leash on me is her, and as long as she’s in my sightline I’m the calmest monster in the building.

They wheel her into a medical bay that smells of antiseptic and ozone, and before long she’s a small still shape webbed in tubes and wires, a clear mask fogging and clearing over her mouth, her vitals scrolling green across a screen I can’t read and can’t stop staring at.

And then—there.