The halls were still when I slipped away.
The smell of wine and sweat and power still clung to my skin like something rotten, but the air outside the party was cool. Clean. It cut into me with sharp teeth. I welcomed the bite.
I didn't stop to think. Didn't stop to feel. I just walked—quiet steps through steel corridors, past motionless cameras that wouldn't turn back on until morning. I knew their schedule. Knew the gaps in the loop. It was the one mercy this place offered: silence, and a few hours of unwatched darkness.
The storage wing was colder than I remembered. Maybe because everything in me was burning.
I keyed in the override.
The lights blinked once before humming to life. Just dim enough not to wake anyone not meant to be awake. Just enough to make shadows stretch like arms across the floor.
They were there—curled in corners, bones too long for their bodies, heads tucked low. The creatures. My creatures.
No one else dared look at them properly. No one else tried.
But I knelt down in front of them like I always did, and waited.
They knew me now. Had learned my scent. My voice. My rhythm.
The one with the fused jaw crept closer first, her talons clicking softly against the floor. Then another slinked behind her—crawling instead of walking, blank eyes fixed on me like I was the only thing they could see.
"I'm sorry I've been gone," I whispered.
They didn't respond. They never did in words.
But I felt it—the shift in the room. The way they leaned toward me, like they had been waiting. Like they had missed me.
"I need your help," I said. "And you'll get what I promised. Blood. Freedom. But only on my command."
One of them growled low in its throat. Another shifted its head, spine cracking unnaturally. I didn't flinch. I held my hand out, palm open.
"Not until I say," I murmured. "You don't move. You don't breathe unless I give the signal. You remember what I taught you?"
They didn't nod. But they listened. I could feel it in the tension in their limbs, the way their claws flexed and then held still, just waiting for the moment.
I pointed to the outline of a figure I'd chalked on the floor earlier—a stand-in for a guard, a target.
"Go."
They surged forward as one, a blur of skin and claws, tearing into the dummy with surgical brutality. But no sound. No howling. No chaos.
Just precision. Control.
When I clicked my tongue twice, they froze mid-movement.
Perfect.
I moved to the next one. Repeated the signal. Again and again until they obeyed instantly, until my voice and my scent meant one thing and one thing only: Alpha.
I didn't need to tell Nyx what this was. She already knew.
This wasn't rebellion.
This was war prep.
And the monsters? They weren't monsters anymore.
They were mine.