Arik carried Liam out of Marin's office without using ether.
The corridor had already been cleared.
No one spoke as he passed.
The guards along the diplomatic palace walls lowered their eyes, not because they had been ordered to, but because there was something in the way Arik held Liam that made looking directly at them feel like trespassing. Liam's head rested against Arik's shoulder, his face pale and still, the monitoring seal beneath his collarbone pulsing faintly beneath the open edge of his shirt.
The second injection had taken him under completely.
His body was still fighting. Arik could feel it through the bond: the slow contraction of inflamed channels, the aching pull around the places Felix's poison had tried to knot itself, the exhausted rhythm of a body that had been forced to endure too much and was now obeying medicine because consciousness had finally lost the argument.
Liam did not stir.
The doors to his bedroom opened before he reached them.
