Chapter 224: Hilltop
Richard wasn’t afraid of the hoard. He was afraid of the men watching him run toward it.
Felicity felt the shift before she saw anything, that particular drop in the air that happened when her husbands were holding something back, something that had claws and wanted out, and she moved through them the way she always did, not because she had to, but because she knew that right now her presence was the only thing standing between Richard and a very short walk off a very long cliff.
She found Lucan first. He had his jaw locked and his shoulders up around his ears, and every line of him was vibrating with the effort of staying still, and she didn’t say anything clever; she just rose onto her toes and looped her arms around his neck and held on and felt the exact moment something in his chest gave way. He dropped his face into her hair and breathed her in like a man who had been holding his breath for hours and had finally, reluctantly, decided to survive.
"I’m safe," she murmured into his collar. "I’m right here, and I’m safe, and it’s going to be okay."
He made a sound that wasn’t a word. His arms came around her, and she felt the full weight of everything he hadn’t done, every impulse he’d swallowed back down, and she knew it had cost him. "For you," he said, low and rough against her temple. "Only ever for you."
She squeezed him once and moved on because she had to, because there were others, because that was how this worked now.
Exile hadn’t moved from the spot where he’d planted himself at the edge of the road. His fists were opening and closing at his sides in a slow, rhythmic way that looked almost meditative until you understood it for what it was — a man manually running his own systems, one breath at a time, keeping the animal at bay through sheer force of will. His eyes tracked her across every inch of distance between them, not watching the way you watched something, but tracking the way you tracked something you had already decided you weren’t going to lose.
She pressed her palm to his face, and he covered her hand with both of his and held it there, not gently, not even close to gently, the grip of a man who had been counting the seconds since he last touched her and had landed on a number so unacceptable he intended to spend the rest of his life making sure it never got that high again. His eyes fell shut. His exhale came out uneven at the edges, like something fraying.
"Don’t move," he said quietly, and she couldn’t have told you whether it was a command or a prayer or just something he needed to say out loud to make it real.
She stayed exactly where she was.
Behind them, Richard kept his eyes on the road and his thoughts moving because thinking was the only thing keeping him functional right now. He knew the numbers — one female to five hundred males, the brutal arithmetic of a world that had rewritten the rules of biology in a single catastrophic afternoon — and he understood what Felicity was, not just to her husbands but to every high-level beastman out here trying to keep himself from the edge. A stabilising force, something that made the monster inside go quiet. A miracle that had somehow ended up in his vicinity, and he had looked at the two silver cubs pressed against her legs and called them strays.
He could feel Victor’s wings twitching at the corner of his vision. Small movements. Controlled. Worse, somehow, than rage would have been. And Sarge’s breathing behind him had taken on a quality that reminded him of a clock.
"There’s a town over the next ridge," Richard said, and his voice came out raw and scraped-sounding. "Hilltop. I’ve been sitting on the intel; it’s a nest, a big one, hundreds of Level 90 Ferals packed into the valley. I know the layout, every road in and out."
The column didn’t stop walking, but the silence changed texture entirely.
Voss turned his head slowly, amber eyes catching the afternoon light, and looked at Richard the way you looked at something that had just become interesting against your better judgment. "You’ve been holding out on us, Richard."
"I kept it as a backup," Richard said. "In case the teams needed fast levels. But the pack needs it now, and Dimitri needs something to hit."
Victor stopped walking, and because Victor stopped, everyone stopped, the whole column going still on the cracked road while he turned around with the kind of unhurried patience that was somehow more frightening than anything faster would have been. His red eyes settled on Richard and stayed there. "You want to buy your way back in with blood," he said, almost gently.
Richard held his gaze. "I want to lead them into the flats. If I die, your problem solves itself. If I live, the teams get their levels, and Dimitri gets something to destroy." He paused. "Either way, you come out ahead."
Nobody said anything that was answer enough.
The plan came together in the wordless efficiency of people who had long since stopped needing to explain themselves to each other, and Felicity found herself tucked against Damien’s side as they moved toward the ridge, her blonde ears tilted forward, her hand resting low against her stomach the way it had started doing without her noticing, this new unconscious habit that had apparently decided to install itself sometime in the last few weeks.
The view from the top was enough to make even the Snow Team go quiet.
Hilltop sat in a bowl of land below them, a deep concrete valley of a town, and every surface of it was moving. Hundreds of Ferals packed in tight, pacing their restless circuits, their shapes blurring together from this distance into something that looked less like individual bodies and more like a single enormous thing breathing in and out. The air above the valley had a weight to it that fighters learned to recognise.