Chapter Ten: Fought Over

She heard her own name through the wall before she meant to.

Sloane had gone looking for water, nothing more, bare feet quiet on the stone floor past midnight, and she’d almost reached the kitchen when Griffin’s voice stopped her cold, low and rough in a way she hadn’t heard from him before.

“We can’t keep pretending we’re all just going to share her like that’s a simple thing to ask of anyone.”

“Nobody said simple.” Cassian, quieter, more careful. “But fighting each other over theories isn’t going to make it simpler.”

“It’s not a theory that Dax looks at her like she’s already his. It’s not a theory that you’ve started tracking her whole day like it’s a project you’re managing. And it’s not a theory that I....” Griffin stopped himself hard enough that Sloane heard the silence land like a slap.

“That you what,” Dax said, voice flat.

“Nothing.”

“Say it.”

“Drop it, Dax.”

“No. You started it, finish it. That you what.”

A long pause. Sloane’s heart pounded so loud she was sure it would give her away, but she didn’t move, couldn’t move, standing frozen in the dark hallway while three men she barely knew argued about her like she was a variable none of them could solve.

“That I don’t know how to want something that isn’t mine to want alone,” Griffin said finally, quiet and raw. “That’s what. Are you happy.”

Nobody answered that. Sloane pressed her palm flat against the cold wall, feeling something crack open in her chest that had nothing to do with the mark this time.

“She’s not a thing to divide up,” Cassian said eventually. “And she’s not something any one of us gets to claim either. That’s the part none of you seem to actually be hearing.”

“Then what is she,” Griffin said, and his voice had gone hard again, defensive. “Because I don’t know how to plan for a version of this where she matters to all three of us equally and none of us knows what that even looks like in practice.”

“Maybe you stop trying to plan it,” Dax snapped. “Maybe you just let it be real instead of turning her into a logistics problem you can’t solve fast enough.”

“That’s rich, coming from you. You fell for her in a day.”

“At least I’m not standing here arguing about the shape of my feelings instead of just having them.”

Sloane had heard enough.

She stepped into the doorway before she could talk herself out of it, and all three of them went dead silent, guilt flashing raw and unmistakable across every face in the room.

“How long,” she said, voice shaking, “were you planning to have this conversation without me in it?”

“Sloane" Griffin started.

“No.” She held up a hand, and it trembled, and she hated that it trembled, hated that they could see it. “I stood out there and listened to you talk about me like I’m a resource being split three ways. Like I’m something to divide and manage and plan around. Do you have any idea what that feels like? To hear the people whose touch lights up my own skin argue about who gets to want me instead of just asking me what I want?”

Nobody spoke. Dax looked like he wanted to cross the room and couldn’t make his feet move. Cassian’s jaw was tight, eyes down. Griffin stood frozen, hands curled at his sides like he didn’t trust them not to reach for her and get it wrong.

“I’ve spent my entire life being nobody’s priority,” Sloane said, and her voice cracked straight down the middle on the last word. “I taught myself not to need anyone because nobody ever stuck around long enough to be needed. And now I’ve got three men whose touch feels like coming home, and instead of any of you telling me that means something, I get to overhear you arguing in a hallway about whether I’m a problem to be managed.”

“That’s not...." Griffin’s voice broke off, nothing coming after it.

“Then tell me what it is.” She stepped further into the room, chest heaving, refusing to look away from any of them even as her eyes burned hot with tears she refused to let fall. “Tell me right now, all three of you, and don’t you dare think about it first. Is this about love? Or is this about survival — about your bloodline, your curse, your family line not dying out? Because I need to know which one I am to you before I let myself feel anything else.”

The silence that followed was the loudest thing she’d heard all night.

Griffin’s mouth opened. Nothing came out. Cassian looked down at the floor like the answer might be written there. Dax, the one who never hesitated about anything, who said exactly what he felt the second he felt it, stood frozen with his hands half-raised like he’d started to reach for her and lost his nerve halfway.

Three heartbeats passed. Then four. Then five.

None of them answered fast enough.

And Sloane realized, standing there with her whole chest cracked wide open in front of the only people who had ever made her feel wanted, that the silence itself was the answer she’d been terrified of all along.

She turned to leave. She didn’t know where, didn’t care, just needed air that didn’t have all three of them breathing it too.

That was when the horn sounded.

Not a car horn. Something older, deeper, a long low note that rolled through the entire compound like a struck bell, and every single one of them went rigid at the exact same instant, the argument forgotten, three years of practiced instinct snapping into place before Sloane even understood what she was hearing.

“That’s the border alarm,” Cassian said, already moving.

“That’s not a patrol alarm.” Griffin’s voice had gone flat, cold, alpha-hard in a way that scraped every hair on Sloane’s arms upright. “That’s the alarm for a breach.”

Dax was already at the window, and whatever he saw there drained every trace of color from his face.

“Griffin.” His voice cracked on the name. “You need to see this.”

Sloane crossed the room before anyone could stop her, and looked out past his shoulder into the dark tree line beyond the compound wall, where dozens of eyes had begun to glow gold in the black, too many to count, too still to be anything but waiting.

Someone had finally come to collect.