No neighbors. No passing cars. No one to hear me scream.
The furniture was expensive but sparse: a massive bed—the one I was currently sitting in, surrounded by the nest I'd apparently built in my sleep, a dresser, an armchair, a small writing desk. No phone on the nightstand. No laptop on the desk. No television, no tablet, nothing that could connect me to the outside world.
I slid out of bed, my bare feet hitting hardwood floors that were warmer than they should have been. Heated, I realized. Of course they were heated. They'd thought of everything.
The first thing I checked was the windows. They looked normal enough. Large panes of glass, wooden frames, the kind of thing you'd expect in a mountain cabin. But when I pressed my hand against the glass, I felt the thickness. When I knocked, the sound was wrong—dense, solid, not the delicate ring of regular glass.
Reinforced. Probably bulletproof. Definitely Ava-proof.
I tried the latch anyway. It turned easily, but the window didn't budge. Sealed shut. Painted to look like it opened, but sealed completely.
I moved to the next window. Same thing.
And the next.
The bedroom door wasn't locked—I discovered that when I finally worked up the courage to try it—but what I found beyond wasn't exactly freedom. A hallway, beautifully appointed, lined with doors that led to a bathroom with no windows, a closet filled with clothes in my size that I'd never seen before, and what looked like a small sitting room with windows sealed just like the bedroom.
At the end of the hallway, a larger door. This one was locked.
I examined it carefully, looking for weaknesses. Heavy wood—real wood, not the hollow-core crap in my apartment. The hinges were on the other side, inaccessible. The lock was electronic, a small keypad glowing softly beside the handle.
I tried random combinations. My birthday. My mother's birthday. The address of the Harper estate. Nothing worked. After about ten attempts, the keypad beeped three times and went dark.
"Lockout protocol," said a voice behind me, and I spun so fast I nearly fell over.
Ethan stood at the end of the hallway, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his broad chest. He was tall, over six feet, like all of them, with dark hair that fell across his forehead in a way that might have looked careless if I didn't know better. Everything about Ethan was deliberate. His hair was styled to look effortless. His posture was calculated to appear relaxed. Even the way he watched me, with those piercing green eyes that matched my own but held none of my warmth, was a carefully constructed facade designed to make me underestimate him.
He was dressed casually, dark jeans that hugged his lean frame, a gray cashmere sweater that probably cost more than my car, but there was nothing casual about the way he studied me. His face was all sharp angles: high cheekbones, a jaw that could cut glass, lips that rarely smiled and never meant it when they did. He was handsome in a cold way, like a sculpture you admired but didn't dare touch.
Cedar and old books and ozone. His scent hit me like a physical force, making my knees weak and my core clench with shameful, desperate want. I hated him. I hated all of them. But my body didn't seem to have gotten the memo.
"Ten incorrect attempts triggers a thirty-minute lockout," he continued, pushing off the wall and walking toward me withunhurried steps. His long legs ate up the distance between us, each stride measured and precise. "After that, it resets. But I wouldn't bother trying again. The code changes every six hours, and even if you somehow guessed correctly, the door only opens for biometric confirmation from one of us."
"Fingerprint?" I asked, backing up until my shoulders hit the locked door.
"Retinal scan." He stopped a few feet away, close enough that his scent wrapped around me like a blanket I couldn't escape. This close, I could see the flecks of gold in his green eyes, the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw, the way his sweater stretched across shoulders that were broader than his lean frame suggested. "We've been planning this for three years, Ava. Did you really think we'd use a lock you could pick?"
I didn't answer. Just glared at him with all the hatred I could muster. He smiled, a slight curl of his lips that didn't reach his eyes. Nothing ever seemed to reach his eyes. But there was something almost like warmth in it. Appreciation, maybe. Like I was a puzzle he was enjoying solving.
"You should eat," he said, tilting his head slightly as he regarded me. "Mason left breakfast in the kitchen. And before you ask—no, we haven't drugged it. We don't need to. Your body is doing all the work for us."
"I'm not hungry," I lied, crossing my arms over my chest in a futile attempt to create some barrier between us.
"You're lying. I can smell the hunger on you." Ethan's nostrils flared slightly, and something dark flickered in those cold green eyes. "I can smell everything on you, actually. The fear. The anger. The arousal you're trying so hard to pretend isn't there. Your scent is leaking through your blockers, Ava. Has been for weeks. That's how we knew you were ready."
"Ready," I spat the word like a curse, my hands clenching into fists at my sides. "Ready to be kidnapped? Ready to betrapped? Ready to be—what, exactly? What is this? What do you want from me?"
"We want you to be ours." The simplicity of it stunned me into silence.
"We want you to accept what you are," Ethan continued, his voice calm and clinical, like he was explaining a mathematical proof rather than my abduction. He took another step closer, and I pressed myself harder against the door, wishing I could melt through it. "What you've always been. What you were always going to be, no matter how far you ran or how many pills you swallowed or how hard you tried to pretend you were something other than what nature made you."
"An Omega," I whispered.
"Our Omega," he corrected, and the possessive sent a shiver down my spine. I told myself it was revulsion. It wasn't.
"You can't just—" I stopped, started again, my voice shaking despite my best efforts to control it. "This isn't how it works. You can't just take someone. You can't just decide that I belong to you and expect me to?—"
"Accept it?" He raised one dark eyebrow, a gesture so familiar it made my chest ache with memories I didn't want. "No, I suppose we can't. Not yet. But your heat is coming, Ava. Your suppressants have failed—we made sure of that—and there's nothing left to hold back what your body wants. Within the next forty-eight hours, you'll go into the first real heat you've had since you were fifteen years old."
