Felicity's Beas Chapter 230: You’re trouble

Chapter 230: You’re trouble

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 his brain had been trained to track an asset 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.

The dampening field had hit him from thirty yards out, a frequency he recognised from the tech side of his previous life, military grade, designed to suppress beastman abilities, and he had felt his nullification flicker and kept moving anyway because the only thing the dampening field told him was that soone professional had co for her specifically, and the only thing that mattered was the direction Lucan had taken her and the gap in the undergrowth and the sound of her heartbeat, which he could track at fifty yards on a bad day and considerably further on a day like today when every animal instinct he had was running at full capacity and loudly refusing to be professional about it.

He stepped out of the trees with his hand already on the hyena’s shoulder.

He didn’t look at the man. He didn’t acknowledge the creaking of the collarbone under his grip or the way the dampening frequency stuttered and died as his nullification field swallowed it whole. He looked at her, swept every inch of her in a single pass, her face and her hands and the curve of her stomach, checking for damage the way he checked everything, thoroughly and without wasting ti, and he found none, and sothing in his chest that had been wound very tight since Lucan had disappeared with her into the scrub released a fraction of a degree, which was as close to relief as Dimitri allowed himself in the field.

His expression gave nothing away. He made sure of that, locked it down in the half second between finding her whole and returning his gaze to the man in his grip, the professional sliding back into place over the animal with the ease of long practice, and the albino snow leopard in his chest said sothing he chose not to translate.

He had known exactly where she was.

He had always known exactly where she was.

The hyena tried to raise his weapon, and Dimitri tightened his grip until the attempt stopped being a realistic option, and the collarbone finished the conversation it had been having for the last thirty seconds, and the undergrowth went quiet, and Lucan was staring at him from three feet away with an expression that Dimitri was not going to examine right now or possibly ever.

Felicity was staring at him, too.

Not with fear, which he had expected and prepared for, and not with the polite careful neutrality she deployed around people she hadn’t decided about yet, which he had also prepared for. She was looking at him with the specific soft attention of soone who had noticed sothing and was deciding whether to say it out loud, her silver ears tilted slightly forward and her tail curled close and her eyes moving over his face in a way that made the professional part of him want to take three steps back and the albino snow leopard part of him want to take three steps forward and neither of those options was available right now.

"You ca from the trees," she said, and it wasn’t a question; it was an observation with sothing underneath it, and Dimitri said nothing because nothing was the correct tactical response and also because he did not trust himself to speak at this particular mont without saying sothing that could not be unsaid.

Lucan’s eyes moved between them with the sharp, careful attention of a man who had been watching Dimitri for months and had recently started arriving at conclusions he wasn’t sharing with anyone yet.

"Get her out," Dimitri said to Lucan, without looking at either of them. "Full speed. We move towards Bowral tonight."

Lucan stepped forward and his arms ca around Felicity and she turned to go with him, and that should have been the end of it, and it would have been the end of it except that she moved too quickly and her hair caught, a single strand snagging on the rough bark of the branch beside her, and she made a small sound and reached up automatically and Dimitri’s hand was there first.

He didn’t think about it. That was the honest answer. His hand moved before any part of him had weighed the decision, fingers finding the strand with a precision that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with the fact that he had been acutely aware of every inch of her since the mont she had co through the undergrowth and his nullification field had looked at her and decided she was exempt from its authority, and he worked the strand free with the careful deliberateness of a man handling sothing he had no right to be handling and doing it anyway.

It took four seconds.

Four seconds of his fingers in her hair and her gone very still and Lucan gone very still and the undergrowth gone very still and the albino snow leopard in his chest pressing its forehead against the bars so hard it shook.

He stepped back before she turned.

He was not looking at her when she looked at him, because he was a professional and he was the best in the world at not looking at things, and he heard the small breath she took and he heard the way it ca out slightly uneven and he filed that away in a place he was never going to open.

"Thank you," she said quietly.

He nodded once. Precise. Final.

Lucan’s arms tightened around her, and they were gone, teleporting away in the clean, silent way Lucan moved, and the undergrowth settled back into stillness, and Dimitri stood in it and let the wall reassemble itself brick by brick with the patience of a man who had been doing this for a very long ti and was very good at it.

The albino snow leopard said nothing.

It didn’t need to.

It had felt her hair between his fingers and it had felt her go still and it had counted the four seconds and it was going to be thinking about those four seconds for considerably longer than was reasonable, and Dimitri was going to let it, just this once, just here where nobody could see, because she was safe and she was whole and she was on her way to Bowral and the wall was back up and none of this had happened.

He turned back toward the road.

His expression gave nothing away.

It never did.