There are moments in life when you realize that fate has a terrible sense of humor. Aaron was having one of those moments right now.

His sister had just smiled at him — the kind of smile that was simultaneously sweet enough to rot your teeth and dangerous enough to rot everything else — and told him, in the most politely worded threat he had ever received in his life, that she knew his secrets.

Both of them.

The eyes and the lump on his back.

The lump that was, in fact, his wings folded up so tightly that they looked like a mild spinal deformity to anyone who didn’t know better. Whether Ariana knew they were wings specifically, Aaron wasn’t sure. What he was sure about was that she knew enough, and in the grand game of "who has leverage over whom," Ariana had just flipped the entire table.

"What do you mean?" Aaron asked.

Gone was the warm, brotherly voice. Gone was the soft smile and the casual friendliness he had been performing for however long this conversation had been going on. It disappeared like a stage curtain dropping, because there was simply no point in playing the role of harmless, ordinary Aaron when someone was actively threatening to hand him over to government scientists who would presumably dissect him with great academic enthusiasm.

Ariana, for her part, did not even blink at the sudden personality change.

She might as well have been watching someone switch a television channel. Mildly interesting. Completely expected.

"What else would I mean?" she said, a cold little smirk sitting comfortably on her lips like it had paid rent to live there. "I am simply saying that I know you were a human, brother. So the existence of those eyes and that lump on your back can only be explained by a mutation, bloodline integration, or demonification."

She listed them the way a professor lists exam topics. Casually. Terribly.

Aaron said nothing. Partly because he was processing. Mostly because there was nothing particularly good to say.

Ariana took his silence as an invitation to continue, which it absolutely was not, but she continued anyway.

"On the suspicion of any of those three cases, the government can take you into custody for further testing." She tilted her head slightly, as if explaining something to a slow student. "And do not worry, no amount of money or begging will get you out of that. Research and finding a way to become the top amongst all eight races is humanity’s goal."

She paused. Smiled a little wider.

"Of course, that’s a mere pipe dream. But who’s going to explain that to those geezers? Certainly not me."

Aaron stared at her.

His gaze had gone from cold to something beyond cold. Something that had passed through the ice stage entirely and come out the other side as a sort of quiet, simmering, deeply personal fury. The kind of fury that comes not from anger alone but from the deeply uncomfortable feeling of being completely, thoroughly, and inescapably cornered.

Because she was right.

He hated that she was right.

If the government got their hands on him, it would not be a pleasant experience. These were people whose stated ambition was dragging humanity to the top of a food chain that currently included seven other races, most of which were presumably bigger, stronger, and significantly more terrifying than the average human. People with goals that insane did not tend to be gentle about their research methods. They would not offer him tea and ask politely about his wings.

He would simply become a very educational footnote in someone’s thesis.

Voluntarily going with Ariana — with his sister, who had just blackmailed him with the cheerful efficiency of someone who had clearly been planning this for a while — was genuinely the better option. And that was the worst part. Not the threat itself. Not the blackmail. But the fact that she was correct, and he had absolutely zero cards to play in return.

He had no leverage. No escape route. No clever comeback that would untangle this situation.

He ground his teeth together.

"You better not let anything happen to them," he said quietly, his voice low enough that it carried its own kind of weight. He met Ariana’s eyes directly, letting her understand, without any further elaboration, that this was the one condition he was putting forward and it was not negotiable.

Ariana did not even have the decency to look remotely intimidated.

"Don’t worry, brother," she said pleasantly. "Your girlfriends are my in-laws. I will make sure to keep them safe. Even the third one — though with her background she barely needs any security."

"Keep a couple on her just in case," Aaron added, because even when you’ve lost a negotiation entirely, you can still manage the minor details. It wasn’t generosity. It wasn’t warmth. It was the last remaining shred of control he had, and he was exercising it briskly, like a man making the best of a bad situation with whatever dignity he had left.

Which, at this point, was not a lot.

Ariana didn’t seem to mind his tone. She was too busy being visibly, almost embarrassingly delighted about the whole arrangement. She had gotten what she wanted. She had gotten him. For her research. Her brother, the winged, strange-eyed, probably-not-fully-human subject of scientific interest, was coming with her voluntarily.

Well. Voluntarily was a strong word.

"Okay, brother!" she announced, pumping her fists with an energy that was almost aggressively cheerful given the circumstances. She nodded with the innocent enthusiasm of someone who had most definitely not just committed blackmail. "I will be back in half an hour!"

And then she left.

Aaron stared at the space where she had been standing and spent approximately three seconds contemplating what his life had become before deciding that overthinking about Ariana was a path that led nowhere useful.

There were more important things to focus on. Specifically, the two women sitting at the table with him who were looking at him with varying degrees of worry and affection.

"Are you really going to be okay, love?" Eva asked.

She had already shifted her chair closer to him in that effortless way she had, and before Aaron had fully processed the question, she had pressed herself against his arm with her usual complete lack of spatial boundaries.

Specifically, the part of her that was most prominently pressing against him was her chest.

Now, Aaron was a man of many thoughts and several ongoing crises, but he had to admit, in the quiet and honest corner of his mind, that whoever had first claimed that certain physical attributes of the female form carried some form of magical stress-relieving property had been speaking complete and documented truth.

His breathing actually slowed down. The irritation actually faded. It was almost scientific.

Unfortunately, he was not the only one who had discovered this particular comfort zone.

"HEYY!"

A tiny head burst out of Eva’s cleavage like a very small, very angry mushroom-hatted revolutionary.

Alyssa — who was, in fact, a tiny mushroom person that Aaron had, embarrassingly, almost entirely forgotten was tucked inside Eva’s clothing for the purpose of resting — waved her miniature arms in furious protest.

"Stop poking me!"

Eva looked startled. Aaron looked at the tiny furious figure. The tiny furious figure glared at everyone within glaring distance.

Aaron reached forward, wrapped his hand around the protesting Alyssa, and deposited her firmly into his jacket pocket before she could continue her rebellion.

"I’ll take her along too," he said, with the energy of a man making reasonable logistical decisions in the middle of a crisis. "She might grow more in a lab environment. She’ll just be deadweight to you two otherwise."

Alyssa made a muffled sound of outrage from inside the pocket.

Eva, who had instinctively moved to cover herself the moment her unexpected passenger had made her dramatic exit, nodded thoughtfully. "That actually makes sense. Maybe they’ll be more interested in her than in you, and you’ll come back safely."

She said this with such genuine hope that it was almost sweet, despite the fact that she had essentially just suggested using a tiny mushroom person as a decoy.

"Nothing will happen to you."

Claire’s voice cut through the moment cleanly, and both Aaron and Eva turned to look at her.

She met Aaron’s eyes, and whatever she was feeling was all right there — the love, the worry, the care, everything sitting just below the surface of her steady gaze. She had seen him fight recently. She knew, better than anyone at this table, exactly what he had become and how fast he was still becoming it.

"And we won’t slack off here either," she continued. "From the fight earlier, I realized how right you were and how fast you were growing."

Aaron opened his mouth, probably to say something about not stressing or not worrying or some other completely reasonable and deeply unnecessary thing.

"Aaron."

Claire stepped forward, put one finger gently on his lips, and then replaced the finger with her lips instead.

Time did what time does during moments like that. It stopped being relevant.

When she pulled back, there was a thin strand of connection between them that was deeply romantic to two of the three people present and deeply irritating to the third.

"Take care," Claire said softly.

Eva’s eyes had gone wide. Then blank. Then calculating.

Claire noticed. She smirked. Directly at Eva. With intent.

Eva had never moved faster in her life. She grabbed Aaron, kissed him, and then — because apparently half an hour was enough time to do things thoroughly — made absolutely certain that her farewell was definitively, architecturally, and in every measurable way more memorable than Claire’s.

Claire watched with the expression of someone who had started a competition and was now being forced to respect the results.

And just like that, between the blackmail and the tiny mushroom rebellion and the kisses and the quiet words of love, half an hour disappeared completely.

Ariana knocked on the door exactly on time.

She was still smiling.

She was going to be insufferable about this.