But Eli's face kept slipping away, replaced by hazel eyes and broad shoulders and the scent of cedar and iron that had wrapped around me all night. Min-ho. Waiting outside. Patient. Present. Close enough that I could smell him through the gaps in the stone, and every breath I took made the heat burn hotter.
I needed to move. Needed to find another alpha, someone who wasn't Min-ho, someone whose claim wouldn't destroy my custody case. But moving meant leaving this shelter. Moving meant exposing myself to whoever was hunting in these woods.
Moving meant making a choice I wasn't ready to make.
A sound outside the rocks. Not Min-ho's steady presence. Something different. Footsteps, deliberate and quiet, circling my position. The methodical pattern of a predator assessing its prey. A scent on the wind that made my stomach clench with fear even through the haze of heat.
Iron and gun oil. Cold purpose. Nothing human underneath.
Mercer had found me.
I heard him complete one circuit around the rocks. Then another, slower, testing the angles, looking for weaknesses. The tracker in my arm pulsed with each pass, the red light blinking faster as he drew closer.
"I know you're in there." His voice carried through the gaps in the stone, flat and patient. "Your alpha friend is gone. Chasing a false trail my associates laid for him. It's just you and me now."
My heart slammed against my ribs. Min-ho wasn't here. I was alone with Vernon's proxy, heat-drunk and barely functional, trapped in a crevice that had become a cage.
"Come out quietly, and this can be painless. The senator just wants you home. He's willing to forgive the past year if you cooperate."
Forgive. The word sent ice through my veins, cutting through the heat fog with the precision of a blade. Vernon didn't forgive. Vernon punished. Vernon had spent eight years teaching me exactly what happened to omegas who defied him, and running away on the night of his bonding renewal ceremony was the ultimate defiance.
If Mercer took me back, Vernon wouldn't just hurt me. He would break me. Would make sure I never had the strength to run again.
And then he would find Eli.
I scrambled deeper into the crevice, looking for another way out, but the rocks were solid on all sides. No exit. No escape. Just cold stone and the sound of Mercer's footsteps getting closer.
"Last chance," he said. "Come out, or I come in after you."
I didn't answer. Couldn't answer. My throat had closed around the terror building in my chest.
A hand reached into the crevice and closed around my ankle.
He dragged me out of the rocks with brutal efficiency.
My fingers scraped against stone, nails tearing, leaving bloody trails on the gray surface. I kicked and thrashed, but the heat had stolen my coordination, turned my muscles to water, left me weak and desperate and utterly unprepared for violence. The world blurred at the edges, reality fragmenting into sensations without context. Cold air. Hard ground. The iron grip on my ankle dragging me toward ruin.
Mercer pulled me into the open and flipped me onto my back. His face loomed above me, ice-blond hair disheveled, cold blue eyes assessing me with clinical detachment. Blood crusted along his hairline from some earlier wound, but his movementswere precise, controlled, unimpaired. His scent wrapped around me, wrong and invasive, nothing my body wanted.
"Should have come quietly," he said.
His hands found the collar of my shirt and tore.
The fabric ripped down the center, exposing my chest to the cold mountain air. I gasped, tried to curl away, but he pinned my wrists above my head with one hand while the other worked at the waist of my pants.
"The senator wants you back," Mercer said, his voice conversational, almost bored. "Didn't specify what condition. Just alive and bonded."
No. No, no, no.
I bucked beneath him, trying to throw him off, but he was too heavy, too strong, too trained. His knee pressed between my thighs, forcing them apart, and I felt his hand slide beneath the waistband of my pants, fingers cold and impersonal against my heated skin.
"Stop fighting. It'll be over soon. One quick claim, and then we're on our way back to Virginia. The senator will handle the rest."
A sob tore from my throat. This couldn't be happening. After everything I'd survived, everything I'd sacrificed, I couldn't end up back in Vernon's hands because I was too heat-stupid to fight off a single alpha.
Mercer's hand moved lower. I squeezed my eyes shut and wished for unconsciousness, for death, for anything that would spare me from what was about to happen.
Then the weight vanished.
