I take the handkerchief. Our fingers brush for just a moment, and that same electric shock from before races up my arm. He feels it too—I can tell by the way his pupils dilate and his breathing hitches just slightly.
The fabric smells like expensive cologne and something darker underneath. Something that makes the shadows hiss and retreat.
"What blood type is he?" Doctor asks suddenly, his hands moving over Felix's body with expertise. He's checking pulse points, monitoring breathing, doing all the things doctors do when they're trying to keep someone from slipping away into the dark.
"B negative," I answer without thinking. I know everything about Felix's body, every scar and freckle and the way his pulse jumps when I kiss the hollow of his throat. I know he hates needles but never complains when I have to stitch him up. I know he tastes like winter mornings and home.
I know he's dying.
Elias moves to a small refrigerator built into the helicopter's wall, rifling through bags of blood like he's shopping for groceries. His shoulders tense, and when he turns back to us, his face has gone carefully blank.
"Fuck." The word slips out quiet as a prayer. "We didn't restock after the last mission."
The bottom drops out of my world. No blood means Felix dies. It's that simple, that terrible. I make a sound that might be a whimper or might be a growl, and my hands curl into fists around Jackal's handkerchief.
"I'm O negative," Jackal says, already rolling up his sleeves with movements too fluid to be entirely human. His grin is sharp enough to cut glass. "Universal donor. Lucky lad."
I eye him warily as Doctor sets up the transfusion equipment with practiced ease. There's something wrong about this whole situation, about accepting help from the men we were sent to kill, about trusting these alphas who smell like violence and justice in equal measure.
But Felix needs blood, and Jackal has it, and sometimes survival does mean making deals with devils. I don't know what the price will be, but whatever it is, I'll pay it.
Whatever it is, it's worth it.
The needle slides into Jackal's arm and he doesn't even flinch. Just watches me with those predator eyes while his blood flows through clear tubing toward Felix's still form. It's intimate in a way that makes my skin crawl, this sharing of life between my Felix and this beautiful monster. I have to bite back a growl when I watch the blood go into his veins.
"Feral little thing, aren't you?" Jackal asks, and I realize I didn't swallow it, after all.
"Viper, how long to base?" Bane's voice cuts through the helicopter's noise, rough and commanding.
"Twenty minutes," comes the reply from the pilot's seat. The brown-haired alpha—Viper, they called him—keeps the plane steady despite the wind buffeting us around like a toy.
I can feel them watching me. Bane with his mountain-sized presence and hazel eyes that miss nothing. Jackal with his unsettling smile and blood flowing into my Felix. Even Archer keeps glancing back from the pilot's seat, his warm brown eyes soft with something that might be sympathy. And Doctor, who keeps working diligently, focused but glancing my way every so often.
They want answers. I can practically taste their curiosity, sharp and insistent.
"So," Bane says, settling his massive frame into the seat across from me. He's trying to sound casual, conversational,but there's steel underneath the words. "You two brother and sister?"
The question hits me like a slap. I see Viper's shoulders tense at the controls, see the way Doctor's hands pause for just a moment in their work. Even Jackal's grin falters slightly, replaced by something sharper.
They're all listening. Waiting.
"No," I say simply, not offering more. Let them wonder. Let them guess. Felix and I don't owe them our story.
Bane clears his throat, and I can smell his discomfort mixing with something else. Something that makes my skin prickle. "Mates, then?"
The word hangs in the air between us. I know what he's really asking, what they all want to know. But even if I told them, it wouldn't be the full answer. The truth that the bond between Felix and me defies their understanding of how the world works, how alphas and omegas are supposed to fit together.
"Yes." I lift my chin, meeting his gaze directly. "What about it?"
"Why aren't you marked?" Jackal asks, his voice deceptively casual. The others shift uncomfortably—clearly they disapprove of the question but want to know the answer just as much.
Heat flashes through me. "That's none of your fucking business."
"We're just trying to understand the situation," Bane says in a gentler tone that makes me want to lunge at him and add a few extra scars.
"The situation is that Felix is bleeding out while you play twenty questions," I snap, turning my attention back to the transfusion. Jackal's blood flows steady and red through the tubing, and I find myself silently thanking him even as I want to rip his throat out.
"Tell us about your work," Doctor says without looking up from his patient. His voice is clinical, professional, but I can hear the curiosity underneath. "Might help to keep your mind off it. How long have you been in the business?"
