His chest rumbled a low, satisfied purr that vibrated through her ribs and settled somewhere beneath her sternum. "Good, because I’m not putting you down until Bowral."

"You’ll have to put her down for my day," Damien said from behind them, and the hunger threaded through those words was so thick Felicity felt it brush across her skin like fingertips.

She turned her head just enough to catch his gaze over her shoulder. Dark and patient. Burning with the kind of want that didn’t shout, it waited, and it watched. It remembered every sound she’d ever made and planned to collect more.

Her tail curled involuntarily. She buried her face back into Voss’s neck and pretended her cheeks weren’t on fire.

"Damien," Voss said mildly, still walking, "she’s on my back. You’re scaring her."

"She’s not scared," Damien replied. "She’s blushing, a different animal entirely."

"Both of you, stop," Felicity mumbled into Voss’s shirt collar, but her tail was wagging, and everyone could see it, and she wanted to die a little.

They continued down the main road. The sun tracked across a bruised sky, and the cracked asphalt stretched ahead like a scar. Part of the team peeled off, Victor’s sharp hand signals sending them toward a cluster of gutted storefronts. Looting and clearing. The wet crunch of zombies being dismantled echoed distantly.

Felicity slept through most of it. Voss’s stride was steady as a clock, and the rhythm of his breathing lulled her under like a tide.

When she woke, the light had shifted to amber. Late afternoon. Her cheek was creased from Voss’s fur, and her mouth tasted like sleep.

She noticed it immediately.

The cracks.

Subtle, but there are fractures running through the composure of every man around her. Victor’s jaw was too tight. Damien’s gaze tracked her with an intensity that bordered on feral. Ivan’s hand kept finding reasons to touch her, her ankle, her wrist, the small of her back, when Voss finally set her down to stretch. Even Voss himself was keeping her too close, his fingers pressing into her hip bones with a possessiveness that wasn’t quite casual, when she was off his back for a wee or a stretch.

They were crazed. All of them and wound tight with something primal and aching, the need to prove themselves thrumming beneath their skin like a second heartbeat.

Felicity watched Ivan snap at Damien over nothing, a misplaced water bottle, and watched Damien’s lip curl back to reveal teeth that were definitely sharper than they’d been this morning.

Victor inserted himself between them with a look that could have frozen magma, and Voss was already calculating exit strategies; she could see it in the way his gaze darted between them.

Her big, ridiculous, terrifying babies.

She pressed her palm flat against her belly, still barely showing, just the faintest curve and felt the tiny flutter of life beneath.

They needed her, not just her body, not just her power. They needed her attention. Her hands on their skin, her mouth saying their names. Reassurance that she was here, alive, theirs, not going anywhere.

Felicity made the decision between one breath and the next.

One day each while they were on the road. One day, the world narrowed to just two people, and everything else fell away. She would soothe them and listen to them and remind them with her hands and her words and her body that she was theirs as completely as they were hers.

She caught Voss’s hand and pressed her lips to his palm.

His entire body stilled. The tension in his shoulders released by a single, visible degree.

"I have a plan," she murmured against his skin.

His thumb swept across her lower lip "Tell me."

"Later." She smiled slowly, promising, full of things she wasn’t going to say in front of everyone. "But you’ll like it."

Damien appeared at her other side as he’d materialised from the shadows themselves. "Will I like it?"

"You’ll love it," Felicity said, and the way his pupils blew wide was deeply, unfairly satisfying. "Now behave, all of you, I’m watching."

Ivan huffed out a breath that might have been a laugh. "Yes, ma’am."

Victor said nothing. But his hand found the back of her neck — just resting there, thumb stroking the soft skin behind her ear, and the possessive weight of it said everything his mouth wouldn’t.

By evening, they had reached a sheltered grove. While the others set up a perimeter with Tommy currently "guarding" the campfire by staring at it until his eyebrows singed, Felicity pulled Damien away to a private corner of the camp.

"You’re wound up like a spring, Damien," she whispered, pulling him down to sit on a fallen log. She began to massage his shoulders, her small hands surprisingly strong.

Damien let out a jagged breath. "It’s just... having you back. Seeing Dimitri act like a maniac, I feel like I’m losing my edge."

"Tell me about before," she urged, her voice a soft hook. "Before the end, before the beast, who was Damien?"

It took an hour of gentle pestering and "cute" pouting, but he finally cracked. He talked about a life of cold discipline, of being a man who never had anything to lose until he met a blonde fox with a wit that cut deeper than any blade.

Damien let out a long, shuddering breath. He looked at her, really looked at her, searching for the "cute and clueless" girl he usually protected. But today, she was just a listener.

"I wasn’t a good man, Felicity," he began, his voice dropping into a gravelly register. "Before the world ended, I was high up in a gang. I was the one they called when things went south. The one who worked alone, the one who handled the ’matters’ no one else wanted to touch."

He leaned in closer, his eyes narrowing as he watched for her reaction. "I breathed in the violence day in and day out, it was just waiting for the call to go handle a problem... or to kill someone."