Chapter 162: Final Destination Meets Pillow Fight

Nova woke up gasping.

Her heart slammed against her ribs so hard she could feel it in her teeth. The room was dark. The moon had moved. The embers in the hearth were almost dead.

A noise came from somewhere near the door. Small. The kind of sound that could be nothing and usually was.

She told herself it was nothing. A guard shifting weight. The keep settling. Stone expanding in cold air. Nothing.

Another noise. Closer. Inside the room.

She tried to sit up. Too late.

Celeste’s hand found her arm and the syringe was in her before Nova’s brain finished processing the silhouette standing over the bed. The pinch was small. The cold that followed was immediate.

"Bye bye, 7709." Celeste’s face was inches from hers, lit by the faint glow of the dying hearth. "This is what my mother should have done the day you were born."

Nova looked down at the syringe in her arm. Then back up at Celeste. Her lips parted but the cold was already spreading and the words were dissolving before they reached her mouth.

Celeste drove a second syringe into Alpha Thunderfang’s neck.

He seized. His entire body locked and then convulsed, his spine arching off the mattress, his hands clawing at the sheets. The seizure was violent and wrong and the sound his throat made was the sound of a man whose nervous system had just been hijacked.

Celeste watched him with the satisfaction of a woman whose plan was executing on schedule. Then her expression shifted. The satisfaction curdled into confusion. Her brows knit.

"Wait. You were supposed to—"

???

Nova woke up gasping.

Her heart slammed against her ribs so hard she could feel it in her teeth. The room was dark. The moon had moved. The embers in the hearth were almost dead.

The purring behind her had stopped.

A noise came from somewhere near the door. Small. The kind of sound that could be nothing and usually was.

She had heard this exact noise before. Thirty seconds ago. In a room that looked identical to this one because it was this one and the noise was the same noise and her blood went from warm to frozen in the time it took her lungs to finish the gasp.

Nova threw herself off the bed so fast the blanket came with her. She was vertical on the mattress before the next heartbeat landed.

Celeste was already inside. Moving towards the bed. Two syringes in her hands, one in each, like she had rehearsed this and fully believed both targets were asleep. She was wrong.

She hadn’t noticed Nova had moved. Her eyes were locked on Alpha Thunderfang, zeroed in on his exposed neck with the focus of a predator who had identified the entry point and was closing the distance.

Celeste glanced up.

The surprise on her face was genuine. Nova was standing on the bed. Vertical. Wide-eyed. Moving at a speed that a woman recovering from silver poisoning, a dislocated shoulder, smoke inhalation, and a Lightning Nectar should absolutely not have been capable of producing.

Nova grabbed a pillow.

It was the only weapon within arm’s reach and she was committed before the thought finished forming. She swung it with her good arm and connected with Celeste’s face so hard the pillow detonated on impact. Feathers exploded across the room like a snow globe designed by someone having the worst night of their life. White down filled the air, coating everything, floating in the low light like the world’s most aggressive confetti.

Celeste stumbled sideways, feathers in her mouth, feathers in her eyes, feathers stuck to the syringes she was still holding because Celeste Starborne did not drop her weapons even when she was being assaulted by bedding.

She recovered and lunged towards Nova.

Nova’s good hand found Alpha Thunderfang’s bedside lamp. Her fingers closed around the base and she ripped it off the nightstand with the commitment of a woman whose weapon had been upgraded from pillow to blunt object and the upgrade was non-refundable.

"ALPHA—" Nova screamed.

The lamp was already in motion. She swung it before she fully looked because looking meant hesitation and hesitation meant syringes and syringes meant the thing she had just watched happen in a dream she was no longer convinced was a dream. The base connected with the side of Celeste’s head with a sound that was half crack, half thud, the acoustic signature of expensive lighting meeting expensive cheekbone.

Celeste’s head snapped sideways. The lamp shattered on contact, the base separating from the shade, glass fragments raining onto the stone floor in a cascade of destruction that was going to require a very awkward conversation with housekeeping.

"YOU CUNT!" Celeste screamed, one hand flying to the side of her head where a welt was already forming that was going to need its own zip code.

Alpha Thunderfang’s eyes snapped open.

His body went from horizontal to vertical in a fraction of a second, the reflexes of a man whose combat training had been waiting for exactly this stimulus and the stimulus had arrived screaming a word that the High Luna would have opinions about.

He did not wake up at the glass shattering. He did not wake up at Nova screaming his title. He woke up at Celeste shrieking a profanity so vulgar it cut through whatever frequency his unconscious brain had been tuned to and activated the emergency broadcast system.

His hand closed around Celeste’s wrist before she could redirect the syringe. The grip was immediate, total, the kind of hold that communicated the negotiation was over and the negotiation had never started.

"How the fuck did you get in here?"

His voice was raw from sleep and layered with his wolf and carrying the particular fury of a man who had woken up to feathers, broken glass, his brother’s mate standing on his bed holding half a lamp, and his dissolved future Luna wielding syringes in his bedroom at an hour that no reasonable person would classify as visiting hours.

Celeste’s other hand moved. The second syringe arced towards his neck.

"ALPHA, SHE HAS ANOTHER—"

Nova’s scream overlapped with the door slamming open. Two guards crossed the room at combat speed, and the first one caught Celeste’s free wrist before the second syringe found skin. The angle of the interception was so close that the needle grazed the air an inch from Alpha Thunderfang’s throat and stopped there, held by a guard whose timing had been the difference between a sleeping Alpha and a seizing one.

Alpha Thunderfang held Celeste’s wrist for one more second. He looked at the syringe in her captured hand. Then at the one in the guard’s grip. Then at Celeste’s face, which was cycling through fury, pain, and the dawning realization that the lamp to the head was going to be the least consequential thing that happened to her tonight.

"Arrest her," Alpha Thunderfang ordered.

"Yes, Alpha."