Chapter 229: Breaking Protocol
Absolutely silent.
The hyena had exactly enough ti to understand what that ant before Dimitri stepped fully out of the trees, his gold eyes moving past the hyena entirely, landing on Felicity, checking every inch of her in a single sweep with an expression that was nothing, that was very specifically nothing, before his gaze went flat and professional and returned to the man in his grip.
He had known exactly where she was; he was always tracking her.
Also, once it’s all over, have her in Lucas ’ arms and the team moving at full speed to Bowral. This way, it would be quicker.
before Dimitri stepped fully out of the trees.
He didn’t look at the Hyena. He didn’t even acknowledge the man he was holding by the shoulder, whose collarbone was beginning to audibly creak under the pressure of those white fingers.
Dimitri’s gold eyes moved past the intruder entirely, landing on Felicity. He didn’t blink. He didn’t move. He simply swept his gaze over her, checking every inch of her—her face, her hands, the curve of her belly—in a single, exhaustive sweep.
His expression was nothing. In the cold, ivory mask of the snow leopard, there was a flicker of sothing raw and obsidian-deep. It was a look that was very specifically nothing; it was a possessive, territorial claim that made the rest of the world feel like a blur.
Then, as quickly as it had appeared, the look vanished. His gaze went flat and professional, returning to the trembling man in his grip.
He had known exactly where she was. Despite the dampening field, despite the chaos of the hunt, despite the trackers and the noise.
He had always known exactly where she was.
"You’re trying to steal what belongs to the Pack," Dimitri said, his voice a low, lodic purr that carried more threat than a thousand gaphone screams.
The Hyena tried to turn, tried to swing his baton, but he was a child in the grip of a god. Dimitri didn’t even look as he tightened his hold, the sound of breaking bone finally snapping the silence of the forest.
Dimitri POV
He had known exactly where she was.
That was the thing nobody understood about Dimitri, the thing he had spent the better part of four months making sure nobody understood, which was that he always knew exactly where she was. Not approximately. Not roughly. Exactly, the way you knew the position of an asset in a live operation, the way his brain had been trained to track a target through noise and distance and interference, except that training had nothing to do with it, and he knew that and had been refusing to examine it closely ever since the vineyard.
He let himself examine it now, for exactly the length of ti it took to cross the undergrowth silently, which was not long, because Dimitri did not move slowly.
The vineyard had been a stopover, nothing more. Leaf Team rolling through a settlent that slled like other people’s decisions, Lucan moving ahead to scout, Richard cataloguing exit routes, everyone doing what they were supposed to do. He had been standing at the edge of the market when it hit him, not a sound, not a sight, just a scent threading through the usual post-apocalypse sll of rot and smoke and animal musk, sothing underneath all of that, sothing that had no business being that calm in a world like this one, sothing warm and quiet and so completely certain of itself that every animal instinct he had ever developed or inherited or been born with simply stopped what it was doing and paid attention.
He had stood very still for approximately four seconds.
In his previous life, he would have called that a liability. Dimitri had been many things before the world split open and decided to rewrite the rules of biology, and chief among them was the kind of man who did not stop for four seconds unless stopping was the tactically correct choice. He had been the best in the world at what he did, which was finding people who did not want to be found and making consequential decisions about what happened next, and the version of him that had existed before the apocalypse would have identified those four seconds as a breach and corrected them imdiately.
The albino snow leopard living in his chest had other opinions.
He had located the scent’s origin the way he located everything, thodically and without advertising the fact, and found that it lived on people rather than a person, threaded through the fabric of certain n’s clothing and skin in a way that ant prolonged proximity, which ant she was real and she was nearby and she was apparently the kind of woman that high level beastn carried the sll of like a second identity. He had heard Lucan and one of the others talking about it later that night, her scent specifically, the way it sat in the back of the throat, the way it made the animal part of you want to lie down sowhere and guard the periter and never leave, and he had stood on the other side of a wall and listened and felt sothing in his chest agree with every word of it in a way that he had categorised as a problem and filed under deal with later.
Later, it had been taking its ti arriving.
When he finally saw her, he had understood imdiately why the n who followed her looked the way they looked, which was like people who had found the one thing the new world hadn’t taken from them and had made a unanimous decision about what to do with that information. She was not what he had expected, which was to say she was exactly what he had expected and worse, small and gold-eared and moving through a camp full of volatile near-level-hundreds with the calm ease of soone who had decided a long ti ago that the world’s opinion of her safety was not her problem, and he had watched her from a distance and felt the albino snow leopard in his chest make a series of very clear statents that he had chosen not to repeat out loud to anyone ever.
Then he had tested his nullification field, the way he always did in proximity to new high-level abilities, routine and automatic, and it hadn’t worked on her.
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