Chapter 487: Shut the hell up.

Damien.

"Adrein, shut the hell up and grab his legs!" I roared.

My hands were already covered in Noah’s dark, hot blood as I forced his trembling shoulders to the side, rolling him onto his right flank. He was choking, his throat clicking with a terrible, wet sound as the dark poison flooded his mouth.

"Damien, he’s dying!" Adrein shrieked, his voice rising into a sharp, hysterical register. He was still pacing, his hands shoved into his hair, his eyes wild with terror as he looked back and forth between Noah’s bloody face and Maria’s motionless form on the cot. "He’s dying right in front of us! If Maria wakes up and finds out—"

"I don’t give a damn about what Maria thinks right now!" I yelled, dropping my shoulder down to pin Noah’s hip against the dusty floorboards. "If you don’t help me clear his airway right this second, there won’t be anyone left for her to blame! Move your ass!"

That snapped him out of it. Adrein flinched, the sheer authority in my voice slamming into him like a physical blow. He dropped hard to his knees, his boots sliding through the dark red pool on the floor, and grabbed Noah’s ankles, holding his thrashing legs down against the wood.

"Lean him forward!" I grunted, digging my fingers into the collar of Noah’s leather coat. I hauled his chest down toward the floor so the blood wouldn’t drain back into his lungs. "Come on, Noah. Spit it out, man! Push it out!"

Noah gave another violent, whole-body convulsion. His spine arched, his hands clawing uselessly at the rough floorboards, leaving bloody drag marks in the dust. A heavy, sickening wave of blackish blood and bile erupted from his throat, splattering across the wood between my knees.

The stench hit me immediately—a sharp, metallic smell mixed with the unmistakable, sour burn of dark wolfsbane. It was the exact same bitter poison that was suffocating Maria’s bond thread, only Noah had ingested it directly.

"It’s wolfsbane," Adrein choked out, his chest heaving as he held Noah’s legs down. His eyes were wide, tears cutting clean streaks through the grime on his pale face. "Daniel didn’t just lock him up, Damien... he tried to poison him in that cell, and he tried to execute him before he moved on Maria."

"I know," I rasped through my gritted teeth, as my arms were shaking from the strain of holding a two-hundred-pound Alpha down while he seized. "Keep him on his side! Don’t let him roll back!"

Noah let out a long, agonizing gasp, his lungs whistling as fresh air finally fought its way past the fluid in his chest. His heavy body shuddered once, twice, and then slowly went limp against my hands.

For a terrifying three seconds, he didn’t breathe at all.

"Noah?" I whispered, my voice trembling as my heart seemed to drop straight into my stomach.

I stared at him for a second, barely able to process the stillness of his body before panic surged through me.

I shoved my bloody hand against his neck, pressing my fingers and thumb firmly against the side of his throat. My thumb dug into the pulse point beneath his jaw as I desperately searched for any sign of life.

"Noah! Breathe, damn it!" I shouted, my voice cracking with fear.

Adrein immediately let go of Noah’s legs and scrambled forward on his knees. He leaned over my shoulder, his face tense with panic as his eyes remained fixed on Noah.

"Is his heart beating?" he demanded, his voice shaking. "Damien, is he breathing?!"

"Shut up and let me feel!" I snapped, unable to tear my attention away from the faint sensation beneath my thumb.

My blood ran cold as I waited.

For one agonizing moment, I felt almost nothing. I pressed harder, holding my breath as I concentrated on the smallest movement beneath his skin.

Then, underneath my thumb, a faint, heavy throb struck against his artery. My chest tightened, and there it was.

’Thump. Thump.’

It was slow—frighteningly slow—but it was there. A half-second later, Noah’s chest expanded with a long, ragged, whistling breath, his lips parting as a thin trickle of dark crimson ran down his chin.

I collapsed backward onto my heels, letting out a breath I felt like I’d been holding for ten minutes. "He’s breathing," I rasped, wiping my bloody forehead with the back of my sleeve. "His heart is still pumping. He got the worst of it out."

Adrein slumped against the leg of the nearby wooden table, dragging a trembling hand over his face. He was covered in sweat and blood, his breathing coming in shallow, ragged hitches.

"He was choking on it, Damien," Adrein whispered, his voice shaking violently as he stared at the dark puddle between us. "If we hadn’t been right here... if we had left him out in the mud..."

"We didn’t leave him," I said, my voice dead and quiet as I reached over and grabbed a dirty rag from the floor, wiping the blood from Noah’s mouth and chin so he wouldn’t breathe it back in. "He’s still fighting. Just like Maria."

I turned my head to look across the small room.

Maria was still lying on the dusty leather cot by the hearth. The fire I had built was crackling softly, throwing warm, amber shadows across her pale skin. She hadn’t moved. She hadn’t even stirred when Adrein was screaming or when Noah was choking on his own blood. She just lay there, wrapped in her heavy furs, looking so fragile against the dark wood that it made my chest ache with a dull, suffocating pain.

Adrein followed my gaze, his expression crumbling instantly. The panic had faded, replaced by that dark, hollow despair that had been eating at him all night.

"Look at them, Damien," Adrein said softly, his voice barely carrying over the crackle of the fire. "Look at what we’ve brought them to. Noah is lying in a pool of his own blood on the floor, and Maria is barely breathing on a cot."

"Adrein, don’t start," I growled, though the fight had drained out of my own voice, leaving me feeling completely hollowed out.

"How am I supposed to look at her if she opens her eyes?" Adrein asked, leaning his head back against the table leg and staring up at the rotting wooden beams of the ceiling. A single tear tracked through the dirt on his cheek. "How do I tell her that we locked Noah in a hole, and that’s why he’s bleeding out right now? She trusted us, Damien. She didn’t want any of this war... she didn’t ask to be our mate."

"She didn’t," I agreed quietly, grabbing a clean corner of the fur blanket on the cot and tucking it tighter around Maria’s neck. Her skin was warm now—the hearth fire had done its job—but her pulse beneath her skin was still small and faint. "And we made mistakes. Terrible ones. We were so obsessed with keeping control that we didn’t see Daniel sliding the knife into our backs."

"I forced her," Adrein rasped, his voice breaking as he squeezed his eyes shut. "When she tried to run, I was the one who pulled the bond thread tight. I thought if I held on hard enough, she’d see that we were protecting her. But if she hates me for this... if she wakes up and looks at me like I’m the monster who let her die... I won’t be able to take it."

I stood up from the floor, my knees popping in the quiet room. I walked over to Adrein, reached down, and grabbed him by the shoulder, squeezing tight until he opened his eyes and looked up at me.

"She isn’t going to hate you," I said, my voice firm, driving the words into him like iron nails. "Because we are going to get her through this night. We are going to protect her, we are going to keep Noah breathing, and when Aidan and Davian finish with Daniel, we are going to put an end to Vincent."

Adrein swallowed hard, his chest heaving as he looked down at Noah’s limp form, then back at me. "And if she still wants to leave after all of it?"

I looked over at Maria’s quiet, peaceful face in the firelight. The thought of letting her walk away cut through my Alpha soul like a hot blade, but looking at the blood on my hands and the state of my brothers, I knew the truth.

The fact Adrien keeps emphasizing the word ’leave’ makes it hard for me to want to be selfish.

"Then we let her go," I said softly. "No tricks. No bond pulling. But to give her that choice, she has to survive tonight."

Adrein slowly nodded, reaching up to wipe his eyes. "Yeah. Okay."

"Good," I said, turning back to Noah. "Now help me haul him closer to the fire. We need to keep his core warm before the shock sets in."