Mated To The Alpha Triplets (SPICY)

Chapter 12

DARREN’S POV

I caught her before she hit the floor.

My arms moved before my brain told them to - pure instinct. She folded into my chest and I pulled her against me. The moment I did, every single thing in my body went still.

That had never happened to me before.

I had been in battles. I had stood in rooms full of chaos, noise and danger and kept my head completely clear. I was trained for it, built for it - every Lycan prince was.

Stillness under pressure was the first thing our father had ever taught us. But this was different. This was not the stillness of discipline. This was the stillness of something finding what it had been looking for without knowing it was searching.

My Lycan settled inside me. He’d never gone still for anyone. He growled protectively inside me.

She fit perfectly in my arms.

I looked down at her face. Even like this - unconscious, bruised, her bottom lip split and swelling, dried blood at the corner of her mouth - she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. Her lashes were dark against her cheek. Her hair had fallen across her face and I moved it away without thinking.

Up close her scent hit me properly for the first time. Her scent was something warm and clean underneath all the blood and fear. Honey, maybe. It smelled like something like rain on dry ground, something that made my Lycan push forward.

“Mine” he said.

It was as simple as that. There was no argument, no question.

I told him to be quiet. He didn’t listen.

"Darren." Bastian's voice came from somewhere to my left.

I didn't look up immediately. I was still looking at her face. I didn't entirely trust myself to look away. I adjusted my hold on her, making sure her ribs - which had taken a bad hit, I had seen it - were supported properly. She made a small sound, barely audible, somewhere in the back of her throat. It wasn’t a pain sound. It was something more like the sound of someone who has been running for a very long time and has finally, for just one moment, stopped.

"Darren." Bastian again. His tone was firmer this time.

I looked up.

My brother was standing over me holding a blanket he had pulled from somewhere in the house. His eyes moved from Cassie's face to mine.

"She needs to be in the car," he said. "It's cold and she needs to be flat. Her ribs-"

"I know about her ribs." I stood up with her still in my arms.

Bastian wrapped the blanket over her. He tucked her in the blanket very carefully.

We got her to the car. I laid her down across the back seat, adjusting the blanket until it covered her properly, making sure her head was cushioned. She didn't stir. Her breathing was even but too deep.

I stood outside the car door for a moment longer than necessary.

Then I closed it carefully and went back inside.

-

The house felt different now that the noise was gone.

In the middle of a fight, a room is just obstacles and targets. When the fight is over, you see it for what it actually is. This was a small house. It was clean, or it had been. Someone kept it carefully, arranged the few things they had with intention.

There was a row of hooks by the door with two coats on them. There was a hand-drawn picture pinned to the wall near the kitchen, the kind a child makes, the proportions wrong, the colours too bright, clearly precious to whoever put it there. In the corner of the kitchen there was a single artificial yellow flower in a cracked vase that had somehow survived the violence.

My eyes went to the floor where the blood was dried.

Bastian had come back inside. Castien was leaning against the far wall, arms crossed. His dark eyes moved around the room with that calculating look of his. Castien was the quietest of the three of us. He spoke less and processed more, and when he did speak it was always worth hearing.

Right now he was looking at the floor and at the walls and cataloguing everything the way he always did.

Smalls was sitting on the remains of what had been a chair, pressing a cloth against the cut on his ribs. He was pale under his dark skin but his eyes were alert. He would heal. Lycan guards healed fast - not as fast as princes, but fast enough.

"We should talk," Bastian said.

We moved outside. The night air was cold. We stood a few feet from the front door.

"The attackers," Castien said first.

He didn't say anything else. He didn't need to.

I ran my hand over my jaw. "I know."

"We left nothing to question," Bastian said.

They were right. We shouldn’t have killed them. We should have let one of them live, at least.

But seeing Cassie hurt on the floor….it made me see red. It made my Lycan dangerous. I knew my brothers felt the same.

We had gone in with full force and we had ended it. The men were dead. Whatever they knew - whoever had sent them, whatever the reason, whatever this was connected to - had died with them.

"Cassie's mother was a palace maid," I said. "This was targeted. Someone sent them specifically to that house."

"Someone who knew Cassie would eventually come home," Castien added.

"Or who didn't care about Cassie and only wanted the mother," Bastian said. "Or both. We don't know yet."

"We need to know," I said. "Because if this is connected to what we came here for-"

"We don't jump to conclusions," Castien said flatly.

I let it go. He was right, technically. But my Lycan was doing that thing again where he was running several steps ahead of my rational mind, and the conclusion he was jumping to had less to do with politics and more to do with the girl unconscious in the back of our car.

I pushed that aside then looked at Smalls. "What else do you have?"

Smalls straightened against the wall of the house. He was still pressing the cloth to his ribs.

"I went back for the body," he said.

Something in his tone made all three of us go still.

"Went back?" Bastian said.

"Before I came out here." Smalls met each of our eyes in turn. "I went to bring her inside properly, to cover her." He paused. "She's gone."

The three of us said it at the same time.

"What?"