They were moving through the scrubland at a speed that left no room for further conversation about bushes or streams or the olfactory observations of a water rhino with too much emotional intelligence and not enough self-preservation instinct.

Tommy tried once more, approximately seven minutes in.

"I’m just saying," he said, slightly breathless, "that if we’re going this fast, it’s not about catching up to Lucan."

"It is about catching up to Lucan," Kai said.

"It’s about catching up to who Lucan is with."

"Tommy."

"I’m not wrong."

"You’re not wrong," Kai agreed, "but you keep saying it out loud, and that’s the part that’s going to get you hurt."

Tommy looked at the back of Dimitri’s head, the white fur bright in the strengthening morning light, the set of his shoulders with that particular quality of a man who had made a decision and was in the process of executing it without acknowledging that the decision existed, and Tommy decided that Kai had a point and focused on his breathing.

Richard said nothing, which remained the correct choice, and everyone continued not acknowledging how fast they were moving or why, and the scrubland opened up around them, and the road to Bowral stretched ahead pale and straight, and Dimitri followed it like it was the only thing in the world.

Above them, Thane caught the updraft off the ridge and let it carry him higher, spreading his wings to their full span and tilting into the thermal with the particular pleasure of a golden eagle beastman who had spent too long in tight corridors and narrow spaces and was now being reminded that the sky existed and had opinions about him specifically.

From up here, the column below looked small and purposeful, a thread of bodies moving through the scrub, and at the front of it the white shape of Dimitri, easy to track even from this height, moving with the steady, inexorable pace of something that had decided where it was going and found the concept of obstacles mildly offensive.

Thane watched him for a moment longer than strictly necessary.

He had been watching Dimitri for weeks, since Dimitri noticed Felicity, the way you watched something that you had correctly identified as the most dangerous thing in your immediate vicinity and were still in the process of deciding what to do about, which was the first problem, because he had been deciding for weeks now and had not arrived anywhere useful, or had arrived somewhere and did not particularly like what he found there, which was that the category had shifted, not dangerous in the way of a threat but dangerous in the way of competition.

Before Felicity, Thane had understood the hierarchy of things clearly: Dimitri at the top with the kind of claim that had been established early and thoroughly.

That had been before he watched Dimitri stand in a tree line with his fingers in her hair for four seconds. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

Four seconds was nothing, four seconds was less than nothing, four seconds was the kind of thing you could explain away with proximity and accident and the general chaos of an active field situation, and Thane had watched Dimitri not explain it away and had watched Felicity’s breath come out uneven and had understood that the thing he had been tracking as a professional distance had not been a professional distance at all, it had been patience, the specific infinite patience of a man who was the best in the world at waiting for the right moment and had simply been waiting.

The golden eagle in Thane’s chest ruffled its feathers.

Solid competition, it said, in the way animal instincts said things, which was without words but with complete clarity.

He banked left and let the thermal carry him forward, outpacing the group below, and thought that the road to Bowral was going to be considerably more interesting than the road from the vineyard had been, and that wherever Felicity was right now she was almost certainly unaware that the number of men quietly rearranging their entire futures around her continued to rise, and that she would probably be embarrassed about it if she knew, and that the embarrassment would be completely genuine which was the thing that made it impossible to stop.

He tilted his wings and followed the road south and left them all to it.

The motel had seen better decades.

The sign out front was missing two letters and the pool had something growing in it that Lucan had assessed once and decided not to assess again, but the room locked and the bed was intact and the small electric kettle on the bathroom counter had, against all reasonable expectation, worked when he plugged it in, and that last detail felt like a gift from a universe that owed them several.

Felicity sat on the bed with her back against the headboard and her knees drawn up and her tail curled around her legs, and the tea was in her hands and the steam was rising from it in a thin thread and she was not asleep but she was not entirely awake either, somewhere in the soft exhausted middle ground of someone whose body had been doing too much and had quietly filed a complaint.

Lucan sat on the end of the bed with his back to her and his eyes on the window and the particular stillness of a man who was being very careful not to crowd her, which was costing him something, which she probably knew and probably appreciated and probably didn’t have the energy to address right now.

"You should drink it before it goes cold," he said.

She made a small sound that meant she knew and was getting there.

He listened to her breathe for a moment, the way he had been listening to her breathe since the first time he held her, counting the rhythm of it, making sure it was even, making sure it was fine, making sure she was fine, which she was, which he knew, which did not stop him from counting.