"Sure," he says, voice back to its usual flat affect. "Lead the way."
They disappear down the hall, Bane's bulk making Felix look even leaner in comparison. The silence they leave behind feels loaded, like the air before a thunderstorm.
Juniper stretches like a cat, then fixes Carlisle and me with a look that makes my pulse spike.
"Well, well," she purrs, and fuck me if that tone doesn't go straight to my cock. "Looks like I have you both all to myself now."
I laugh, but it comes out awkward and strangled. "What, uh... what did you have in mind?"
She rises from the couch with the kind of fluid movement that makes me think of nature documentaries about predators. The dangerous kind. The kind that play with their food before they eat it.
"Follow me," she says, slinking past us toward the hallway. "I'll show you in the bedroom."
Carlisle and I exchange a look. He shrugs, that insufferable smirk playing at his lips like he knows exactly what kind of trouble we're walking into and can't wait to dive in headfirst.
We follow her because we're idiots. Because we're alphas and she's our omega and our biology is screaming at us to follow her anywhere, even if it's straight into hell. Because despite everything, despite the attempted murder and the complicateddynamics and the fact that she's basically claimed by another omega, we can't help ourselves.
She leads us to her room, pushing open the door with a flourish.
"Welcome to my domain," she announces.
The room looks like a tornado hit it. Or maybe several tornadoes. Having a party. While drunk.
Clothes are scattered across every surface, the bed's unmade with sheets twisted into incomprehensible knots, and there are at least a dozen pillows in various states of arrangement that makes no logical sense. Books are stacked in precarious towers, there's a collection of what appears to be stolen hotel soaps arranged on the dresser even though I have no fucking idea how or where she would have gotten those, and—is that a radio in the corner?
Through the connecting bathroom door, I can see Felix's room. It's military-precise, everything squared away and organized with the kind of obsessive attention to detail that speaks to years of having to be ready to run at a moment's notice.
The contrast is so stark it's almost funny.
Juniper flops onto her disaster of a bed, bouncing slightly. "So here's the thing. This room? It's wrong."
"Wrong how?" I ask, genuinely curious despite myself.
"Wrong like..." She waves her hands vaguely. "Like the feng shui is fucked. Like the energy is bad. Like it needs to be completely rearranged or I'm going to lose my mind."
Carlisle's studying her with that intensity he usually reserves for planning someone's death. "You want us to help you rearrange furniture."
"I want you to be my big, strong alpha movers," she corrects, batting her eyelashes in a way that's so over the top it circles back around to being genuinely charming. "Since you're so concerned about my wellbeing and all."
I groan. Of fucking course. Here I thought... I don't know what I thought. That she wanted to do something that didn't involve manual labor and playing interior designer to her chaos.
"The bed needs to face the window," she declares, already directing traffic. "But not directly. Like, at an angle. A specific angle that I'll know when I see it."
"This weighs eight hundred pounds," I point out, already moving to one end of the massive bed frame.
"That's why I need big, strong alphas," she says sweetly. "Chop chop."
We spend the next hour rearranging everything, usually with Juniper perched on it and directing. Multiple times. Because nothing feels "right" to her extremely specific and constantly changing standards.
"No, no, no," she says for the fifteenth time as Carlisle and I position the dresser. "It needs to be three inches to the left. No, that's too far. Back to the right. Actually, let's try it against the other wall."
Carlisle sets down his end with the kind of controlled movement that suggests he's reached the end of his rope. "Juniper. Darling. Light of my life. Are you nesting?"
She freezes. "What? No. That's... no. I'm just... organizing."
"Organizing," he repeats, using the same tone he used on me earlier. "By having us move the same piece of furniture countless times to marginally different positions while you collect soft things in increasingly specific arrangements."
"I'm not collecting soft things," she protests, clutching the armful of pillows she just retrieved from the closet.
