Chapter 25
Sebastian
The flower turned to black powder in under thirty seconds.
I'd seen it happen a thousand times before, but I still watched with the same detached fascination. Three drops of my blood. Corruption spreading through living tissue like cancer. Then nothing but ash.
My hand didn't even hurt anymore. The surgical cut across my index finger was already closing, Alpha healing kicking in despite the poison coursing through my veins. I squeezed out more blood and let it drip onto a potted orchid.
Dead in twenty seconds flat. Blackened roots, withered leaves, just a husk in expensive dirt.
Thirty years of this shit. Thirty years of experimental suppressants turning my blood into fucking battery acid.
The medications kept the beast at bay—barely—but they'd turned everything in my body toxic. My blood killed plants on contact. My saliva could knock out a grown man. Even my sweat carried enough residual compounds to cause hallucinations in anyone stupid enough to get close.
And she'd swallowed it.
She'd bitten through my skin, drawn blood, and I'd felt some of it slide down her throat when she gasped. Enough to drop a horse. Enough that I'd expected her to start convulsing within seconds.
Instead, she'd just gotten drowsy. Disoriented. Like she'd had a couple drinks, not ingested a cocktail of experimental gene therapy and synthetic hormones that should have shut down her nervous system.
I reached for the test tube—her saliva, clear as water, collected while she slept. My hand actually trembled as I uncapped it. Not from weakness. From whatever the fuck had happened when her teeth sank into my arm and my beast, for the first time in three decades, actually shut the hell up and listened.
Three drops onto a fresh white rose.
The petals darkened. Discoloration crept through the veins. But the flower stayed upright. Stem firm. Leaves green.
I waited a full minute for it to die.
It didn't.
Then I mixed them—my blood and her saliva, equal parts, swirled together until they turned pale pink. Dropped the mixture onto a third rose.
The black corruption stopped spreading. Then it pulled back. Slowly, like watching a video in reverse, the darkness retreated toward the stem and faded to nothing.
The rose lived.
"This isn't fucking possible."
My voice bounced off the metal walls. Below, the city sprawled in the pre-dawn darkness, completely oblivious to the fact that everything I thought I knew about my own biology had just been proven wrong.
I gripped the examination table hard enough to dent the steel. The pocket watch pressed against my ribs through the silk robe—my brother's ashes compressed into black diamond, ticking away seconds I'd thought were numbered. Thirty years old. The age when Alphas started losing it. When the beast stopped being a tool and became a death sentence.
The suppressants bought me time, but at a cost. Every year the dosage increased. Every year my blood became more toxic, my body more of a walking biohazard.
And she'd just changed the fucking equation.
Not just survived my blood—neutralized it somehow. Her saliva had reversed the corruption like it was nothing. Like thirty years of accumulated poison was just a minor inconvenience to whatever she was.
"What are you?" I asked the empty lab. "What the hell are you?"
The door opened without a knock. Only Marcus had that kind of death wish.
"Boss. Your hand's bleeding."
"No shit."
"Should I—"
"No. Pain keeps me sharp." I finally looked at him. Black tactical gear, carefully blank expression, but I could see the tension. "She bit me tonight."
His eyebrows shot up. "Sir?"
"Right here." I showed him the crescent of tooth marks. "Drew blood. And when she did, the beast calmed down. First time in thirty years."
Marcus went very still. The kind of still that meant his brain was working overtime.
"Boss, that's incredible. We could send her to the biomedical facility, extract samples, run some—"
The porcelain dish exploded against the wall next to his head.
He barely flinched. Just enough to show he got the message.
"Let me make something crystal fucking clear." I walked toward him slowly. My eyes had already shifted—gold slits instead of amber. "She's mine. My property. My private collection. Nobody touches her. Nobody studies her. Nobody even looks at her without my permission. Are we clear?"
"Crystal, sir. I apologize—"
"You were thinking she's a resource to exploit. That's your problem, Marcus. Always so practical. But she's not a resource."
"Then what is she?"
"Mine."
The word came out as a growl. His throat bobbed as he swallowed.
"Understood."
But I wasn't done. The beast was awake now, pointing out things I'd tried to ignore. Like how Marcus's eyes had lingered on her legs last night when I carried her to the car.
"Last night. Outside the greenhouse. How long did you stare at her legs?"
All color drained from his face. "Boss, I didn't—"
"Four seconds. I counted. Four seconds of looking at what's mine."
"It was reflex, she's beautiful, anyone would—"
"Anyone?" Venom dripped from the word. "You think anyone gets to look?"
"No, sir—"
"Two hundred laps. Two thousand push-ups. Handstand till dawn. Fall once, start over."
Silence. Then: "Yes, sir."
His footsteps retreated. Door clicked shut. Just me and my roses and my fucked-up revelation.
I pulled out the pocket watch. Nineteenth-century silver, engraving worn smooth from my thumb. Inside, the black diamond gleamed. The mechanism had been modified—specific positions of the winding crown could unlock her collar. Only I knew the sequence.
Only I ever would.
I stared at my reflection in the dark window. Behind me, three roses: dead, dying, impossibly alive.
"What are you?" I asked her ghost. "What did they make you?"
No answer. Just city lights and the tick of my brother's ashes and this uncomfortable truth settling in my chest.
I locked the surviving roses in a specimen case. Evidence for later, when I decided how much truth I wanted to rip out of her.
Then I cleaned up, methodical and controlled, doing what I did best when the beast wanted me to do something stupid.
Like go back to the greenhouse. Wake her up. See if her mouth would calm me the way her bite had. See if she could survive another dose of my blood, or if last night had been a fluke.
Don't.
I pressed my palm against cold glass. Below, Marcus was probably starting his laps. Above, the moon hung fat and bright. Three days from full. Three days until I'd barely be holding on.
She's not a solution. She's a fucking complication.
But when I walked past her greenhouse on the way to my room, I stopped. Just long enough to see her silhouette through frosted glass, curled up safe in that massive bed, completely unaware she'd just destroyed my entire worldview.
Unaware that she'd survived something that should have killed her.
Unaware that she might be the only thing in this world that could touch me without dying.
I didn't go in.
Went to my room instead. Lay down in sheets that felt wrong—too cold, too empty. Sleep didn't come, but for the first time in months, the insomnia didn't feel like torture.
It felt like waiting for something.