Trixie didn’t speak right away.

His eyes tracked the corridor—not idly, not distractedly, but with intention. He was thinking. Calculating. Past the thick-glass partition and the reinforced steel doors waited something unspoken. Something classified. And dangerous. The inner lab breathed with machines, blinked with sensors, and hummed like something alive.

When he finally turned back to Debbie, the air seemed to shift.

"Wait here," he said.

No tenderness. Just a directive, clipped and final.

"Radiation levels spike past the second corridor."

He didn’t wait for her response. He was already walking, already gone. The door groaned open, mechanical and reluctant, before sealing him inside with a sound that seemed too close to a coffin lid.

Then Debbie moved.

Whatever softness she had been wearing—the fluttery concern, the careful gestures around her belly, the light cadence of her voice—shed off her like a snake peeling out of old skin. Her posture shifted in increments: first the tilt of her neck, then the arch of her spine. Her eyes lost their fog. She blinked once, slow. Intentional.

Her face no longer held a mask of warmth. She looked at me like a surgeon might look at a body on a slab.

"You look like hell," she said, the smile gone, her voice stripped down to its bones. "Must be hard, carrying the weight of miracles."

I didn’t answer. My stare stayed fixed on a point just beyond her shoulder, cold and focused, the only resistance I still owned.

She closed the distance between us.

"No comeback? No defiance today?" Her voice dripped condescension. "Thought so."

I could feel the heat of her breath now. It smelled sweet—artificial, rotted fruit sweetness, like something trying too hard to be alive. She tilted her head, mock-curious.

"They’re draining you like an old well, and you just keep giving. That has to be exhausting."

From her coat, she pulled a glass vial, opaque and black as ink. She turned it in her fingers, letting it catch the lab light.

"It doesn’t matter how many times you crawl back from the brink, Selena. Eventually, even gods run out."

I blinked slowly. She mistook it for fear.

"Want to make it interesting?" she whispered. "A wager. If he saves you, I disappear. If he saves me... you? You're erased. No resurrection. No echoes."

She leaned in until her lips nearly grazed my ear. "Spoiler alert: He won’t pick you."

Then she moved fast.

Grabbed my hand. Slammed it against her throat.

And in the same breath, she uncorked the vial and swallowed its contents whole.

Her body reacted instantly.

A strangled gasp cut through the air as she collapsed to the ground, her limbs seizing violently. Foam gathered at her lips, thick and white. Her back arched off the tile like she was being lifted by invisible strings.

My heart slammed into my ribs, legs frozen in place, mind blank with a sharp, animal panic.

Then I heard it.

Trixie’s voice.

It wasn’t a shout. It wasn’t concern.

It was a command ripped from something deeper.

"Debbie?!"

The clang of boots hit the metal floor in a rhythm that was both furious and inevitable. He burst through the lab door, eyes scanning, not breathing, already seeing too much.

He dropped beside her, knees hitting the tile with a hollow thud. His hands, usually steady, trembled as they found her face.

"Debbie? Debbie! No, no, stay with me—"

Her eyes were rolling. Her chest convulsed. Her fingers clawed at her swollen stomach, smearing sweat and blood across the fabric.

He turned to me.

And something in him cracked open.

"What the hell did you do?!"

I couldn’t even form a sentence.

Dr. Hemlock stormed in behind him, took one look, and dropped his clipboard. It hit the floor like a gunshot.

"Alpha—the fetus is losing oxygen. We either harvest now or lose everything."

Trixie’s head snapped toward me. There was no time left in his face. Only decision.

"Then use her. Now."

Steel cuffs clamped around my wrists before I could even scream.

“No… no—don’t you dare—no.”

Trixie dropped. Not like a warrior collapsing in defeat. No, he sank like a man unraveling in real time, hitting the floor with none of the grace expected of an Alpha. His voice—what was left of it—splintered around her name.

He gathered Debbie’s face in both hands, his forehead pressed hard against hers, like he could will her back into her body. Like proximity could reverse poison.

“Debbie. Debbie, look at me,” he whispered. “Stay here. Don’t leave. Don’t—”

She twitched. Just once. Maybe it was recognition. Maybe it was just death flexing her fingers.

And then his head snapped toward me.

Something inside him snapped with it.

The grief burned off his skin in an instant, replaced by something far older. Wilder. What stood in his place now wasn’t a man—it was the core of something feral and barely restrained.

“You,” he said through his teeth. No title. No name. Just that one word, ripped clean of civility. “What the hell did you do?”

I opened my mouth, breath caught mid-throat, but nothing came. What could I even say?

He was already halfway to his feet, shoulders bunched like a storm winding itself tight. His hands trembled, and I didn’t know if it was grief or fury or both—but his wolf was there, just beneath the skin, panting to get out.

“Alpha!”

The sound cracked across the room—Dr. Hemlock, arriving like a scalpel drawn too late. His coat flared behind him, his face pale and slick with urgency as he took in the scene: Debbie convulsing, her mouth foaming, her fingers digging raw lines into the swell of her own belly.

“The fetus is losing oxygen,” Hemlock said, all breath and calculation. “Rapid drop. If we don’t extract immediately, we lose the subject. And her.”

Trixie didn’t turn right away.

He stood motionless, breathing once—twice. Then his jaw shifted. Something silent passed between his teeth.

When he did look at me, it wasn’t hatred. It wasn’t confusion.

It was something emptier. Something final.

He didn’t ask. He didn’t warn.

“Use her.”

Two words. Flat. Dry. Like the clink of a knife on steel.

I didn’t even feel the restraints snap in until I hit the slab. One second I was upright—the next, the cold bit into my wrists and ankles and shoved the breath out of my lungs. Steel bands groaned into place, the hiss of hydraulics sealing me into a position I couldn’t even fight.

My heart slammed against my ribs. “Trixie, don’t—please—listen to me, this isn’t—”

He didn’t look. Not once. Not a flicker.

He just turned his back and knelt beside her again, brushing the hair off Debbie’s clammy forehead like they were alone in the world.

His voice, when it came again, was quiet. Almost gentle.

“She’s the one carrying the pup,” Hemlock said, wiping down silver instruments. His hands didn’t shake. “But Selena is the original. She’s the last clean link to the regenerative line. If we lose her…”

“Take what you need,” Trixie murmured, still stroking Debbie’s cheek with a tenderness that made my skin crawl. “I want that pup breathing.”

Hemlock hesitated. His eyes shifted between us—between me and the man who had once stood in front of bullets for me.

“You mean…” the doctor said, glancing at the monitors. “All of it?”