The air outside the motel tasted like impending violence and sugar.

Dimitri stood on the gravel lot, a statue carved from obsidian and pure, unadulterated possessiveness. Inside that thin-walled room, the rhythmic thrum of his world, Felicity was finally waking from deep sleep.

His jaw was set so tight it threatened to crack. He wasn’t a husband. Not yet. But in this twisted, hyper-focused landscape of his mind, the technicality was a mere delay in the inevitable. She is mine, his thoughts hissed, a dark, repetitive mantra. They are the prologue. I am the endgame.

He would wait. He was a master of the long game. If another man so much as breathed her in, Dimitri would erase them from the map he had already cleared.

Felicity woke in layers first the ache, then the heat of bodies pressed around her, then the steady drums of heartbeats that weren’t hers. She stretched, arching her back until her joints popped, and her fox ears flattened with satisfaction.

She kissed them. Every single one. Victor got the corner of his mouth because he was closest and already watching her with that unblinking intensity that made her stomach flip. Voss got his jaw because he turned at the last second with a smirk that said he’d done it on purpose. Damien got his throat because he was pretending to sleep, and she knew it. The way his pulse jumped under her lips confirmed everything. Ivan got his scarred knuckles, because his hand was already resting on her hip like it belonged there, and it did, Lucan got a forehead kiss because under that masculine energy he puts out he just wants to be treated like a baby, and finally Exile got a kiss on the nose because she wanted to do eskimo kisses with him but he got jealous everyone else got a kiss not him.

She cast heal on herself and groaned as the golden light sank through bruised and well-used muscles. "Thank god for heal, or I’d be..." She paused. Considered. "Yeah. I wouldn’t be able to live like this."

Voss leaned across and pressed his mouth to her forehead, lingering there like he was memorising her temperature. "Even if you didn’t have it, we would have worked it out." His thumb traced her cheekbone. "And lucky you, you have us to help you with everything. Now let’s get you washed and dressed."

Felicity grumbled, but her tail was already swaying. She wasn’t fooling anyone.

Exile lifted her before she could protest, scooped her clean off the mattress, and stepped into her space with the ease of someone walking through a doorway in his own home. The pocket dimension unfolded around them: clean tile, warm water already running, steam curling against the ceiling.

He chose one of his shirts for her. Oversized, dark grey, soft from a hundred washes. The hem hit her mid-thigh. Then shorts barely visible beneath the shirt and a pair of pink Ugg boots he’d found, god knows where, and kept specifically because she’d squealed when she first saw them.

Felicity felt like a pet or a doll. Exile’s large hands moved with efficient tenderness as he washed her hair, worked soap across her shoulders, rinsed her off with water that was exactly the right temperature because, of course, it was. His fingers combed through her wet strands, and she tipped her head back against his chest, boneless.

She was not going to complain about this. Really.

He dried her with a towel warmed from his body heat, dressed her piece by piece, and when she lifted her arms so he could pull the shirt over her head, his knuckles dragged down her ribs in a way that was absolutely unnecessary and absolutely on purpose.

"Exile."

"Hm."

"That wasn’t part of getting dressed."

"Wasn’t it?" Not a question. His mouth ghosted across the crown of her head as he set her boots in front of her.

Victor made breakfast inside the space, bacon crisped to golden, eggs scrambled soft, french toast dusted with cinnamon, and a glass of strawberry milk so perfectly pink it looked like liquid candy. Her favourite. Every time, without fail, he remembered.

When he set her down at the small table, Felicity looked up at him, and her whole chest went tight with a sweetness that had nothing to do with the meal.

"Thank you for breakfast." She reached up and caught his collar, tugging him down until she could press her mouth to his properly. Soft and slow. Tasting like gratitude and morning and mine. "Love you."

Victor smiled. Not the small, controlled thing he gave the rest of the world. The real one, the one that crinkled the skin around his temples and made him look younger and devastatingly handsome and entirely hers.

Now that everyone had reunited outside, they were a pack of apex predators trying to share a single heartbeat.

"I’m carrying her," Voss announced, and the finality in that statement could have ended wars.

Felicity, adorable in Exile’s stolen shirt, the fabric swimming on her frame and doing absolutely nothing to hide the glow of her skin, the flush still sitting high on her cheeks, blinked up at him. "Voss. I can walk. I’m not a porcelain doll."

"You are carrying the future," Voss said, and he scooped her up before her mouth finished forming the protest. He adjusted her against his back with the practised ease of muscle memory. She used to live here, pressed against the broad plane of his furred wolf shoulders, during the early days when the world was still learning how to be cruel. The morning sickness had stolen this from them for weeks.

"Is the nausea back?" Victor appeared out of nowhere at their side, hovering so close he was practically breathing for her.

"No." Felicity giggled, actually giggled, and her fox ears twitched forward as she nuzzled into the curve of Voss’s furry neck. He smelled like cedar and clean linen and something underneath that was just him, just Voss, and it made her burrow deeper. "I missed this."