Ravyn had told himself that things couldn’t get much worse than what had already happened out on that track, but how wrong he was.

He stood there and felt the full weight of it settle over him as he turned to look at the warriors still seated on the ground — Fred, Kevin, Diane, and Audrey, their heads tipped forward, eyes averted, studying the dirt between their knees with tremendous focus.

But the mockery was there anyway. You didn’t need to see someone’s face to feel it coming off them.

Ravyn’s jaw tightened. He looked at Fred specifically. Fred was closest to the gym, closest to a solution, and said, low and clipped, "Go get your car."

Fred was on his feet before the sentence finished, and Ravyn watched him disappear with speed.

By the time Fred pulled up and drove them to the pack hospital, Seraphine was already moving through the ward from bed to bed with an IV line and a small glass vial in hand, checking charts, murmuring low words to patients, administering what they needed herself rather than leaving it to the medical staff.

She hadn’t missed the way the team here operated as Daisy’s allies, and she wasn’t about to hand off something this important to people who thought of Daisy as their compass.

Ravyn came through the door carrying Daisy, and his eyes swept the room in one fast pass. No Voren, no Damon, but he filed that away for later. He crossed the floor toward Seraphine and kept his voice carefully measured.

"Seraphine." He waited until she glanced up. "Please... treat her first."

He’d tried to say it right and still, she stopped moving and looked at him with a frown pulling at her brow, like what he said made no sense on any level she could locate.

"Why?" she asked.

Ravyn pressed his lips together. "You said yourself that her wolf might be sick. So please just check on her."

Seraphine held his gaze for exactly one beat, then turned back to her current patient and continued working the IV line with steady, practiced hands.

"Too late," she said, without heat, without hurry. "I’m busy." She moved the line to the right position and checked the drip before she added, almost as an afterthought, "And are you planning to pay me for her treatment?"

The question landed in the room like something dropped from a considerable height.

Ravyn found an empty bed along the far wall and set Daisy down on it as gently as he could manage, smoothing her hair back from her face with a hand that wasn’t entirely steady.

Then he straightened and turned, and whatever careful composure he’d been carrying into this room was starting to show the cracks.

"Sera." His voice came out rough at the edges. "Why are you like this? Is this your revenge because I couldn’t love you the way I love Daisy?"

The ward went very quiet.

Seraphine stopped. She turned around slowly, and when she looked at him, her eyes were the kind of cold that has nothing dramatic in it, no storm, no fire, just a flat, clear absence of warmth that was somehow worse than either of those things.

"I used to think you were just foolish," she said. Her voice was even, unhurried, the way a person sounds when they are stating something they have already made their peace with. "But now I understand. You genuinely have no brains." She tilted her head slightly. "If Alpha positions were earned instead of inherited, I doubt you’d even qualify as an omega."

Every patient in that room suddenly found something urgent to look at on the ceiling, on their hands, on the middle distance anywhere that wasn’t the two people standing in the center of it.

They’d seen him embarrass her before. They had watched it happen more than once and each time it had been something to file away quietly, the kind of thing you don’t speak about out loud. But this was different. The tables had turned and the weight to it pressed down on the whole ward.

Ravyn had a limit. Every person has one, and he’d just found the edge of his.

His hand came out and closed around Seraphine’s wrist before either of them had fully processed that he was going to do it. It was the kind of grip that isn’t asking for anything, just taking it, and he felt her go still.

"I have had enough," he said, and his voice had dropped to something low and tightly controlled that was more unsettling than shouting would have been. "You need to understand that this is still my pack."

"Let go of me." The words came out from between Seraphine’s teeth, quiet and precise, her free hand already working to pull back from him, but he held on.

"Not until you apologize."

His eyes had gone red at the rims, and he would not even listen when his wolf, Axel spoke in his mind.

’I told you. I warned you this would happen. You’re standing here losing yourself over Daisy and look at the mess she’s put you in. Look at where you are right now.’

’Shut up,’ Ravyn fired back, and blocked his wolf. There was a limit to what an Alpha was supposed to absorb, and Seraphine had been systematically walking past every boundary he had, one after another, like they weren’t there at all.

"You are going to regret this if you don’t let go of me right now," Seraphine said as a matter of fact, pressing the needle of the syringe in her hand into his arm in one clean, quick movement and pulled it out again.

The puncture closed in seconds, the skin knitting itself back together the way it always does with an Alpha’s body, like the wound had never been there at all, and for just one unguarded moment, something crossed her face.

Not fear. More like the involuntary recalibration of someone who has spent enough time around humans that the simple, fundamental reality of what Alphas are had quietly slipped out of the front of her mind.

She pulled herself back together almost immediately, but it had been there.

Her next move was instinct, a kick to the groin but Ravyn had already read it coming off her body before she committed to it.

"Don’t even try it," he said. His grip tightened, fingers pressing harder into her wrist. "All I want is an apology."

"Then you’ll be waiting forever," Seraphine said, meeting his eyes without flinching, her voice absolutely level.

The grip went tighter still, and she turned her head toward the door.

"Damon!"

The name hit the air and hung there for just a fraction of a second.

It wasn’t Damon who came through the door.

Voren took in the room in the time it takes to draw a breath, Seraphine’s arm in Ravyn’s hand, the red around Ravyn’s eyes, the rigid line of Seraphine’s posture, and then Ravyn was on the floor.

It happened fast enough that the sound of it arrived slightly after the fact, a sharp, heavy impact that resonated through the linoleum and up through the walls.

Voren stood over him, and the stillness coming off him was the most unsettling thing in the room.

"How dare you touch her?"