The knock at my door came at eight. A uniformed beta holding a wooden case.
"Scent samples," she said. "For familiarization purposes. All registered omegas are included. You have until the opening ceremony to review them."
I took the case. Closed the door. Set it on the desk and stared at it for a long moment.
One hundred vials inside. One hundred omegas, their essences captured and catalogued for alpha consumption. The tradition was old, designed to let hunters identify their targets before the chase began. Some alphas used it strategically,selecting omegas whose scents appealed to them. Others ignored the samples entirely, preferring to let instinct guide them in the field.
I opened the case.
The vials were arranged in numbered rows. I found number fifty-five and lifted it from its slot. The glass was cool against my fingers. A small label read Grace, D. in neat typescript.
I uncapped the vial.
The scent hit me like a hammer blow to the chest. Bergamot and cedar smoke, layered with fear and exhaustion and the sharp edge of oncoming heat. But beneath that, unchanged after all these years, was the foundation I remembered. The scent of a fourteen-year-old boy in a dormitory hallway, looking at me with wide brown eyes, asking without words if I felt it too.
I had felt it. Had never stopped feeling it.
The memory surfaced before I could stop it.
Ashworth Academy. The night before my graduation. Spring air through an open window, carrying the scent of magnolias and cut grass. The hallway outside the library lit only by moonlight, silver-blue shadows stretching across the hardwood floors.
Dalvin had found me there, long hair falling across his face, hands twisting in the hem of his sleep shirt. He'd wanted to say goodbye, he said. Before I left and everything changed.
We'd stood too close. Breathed each other's air. He was fourteen and I was eighteen and I knew it was wrong, knew I should step back, knew that everything about this moment violated the rules we were supposed to follow. But his scent had wrapped around me, warm and smoky and overwhelming, and his eyes had been so wide, so trusting, and I'd felt every cellin my body strain toward him, demanding, insisting, screaming that this was right, this was meant, this was mine.
I'd leaned in. He'd leaned up.
Our lips had been inches apart. Centimeters. Close enough that I could feel the warmth of his breath, could count the darker flecks in his brown eyes.
And Professor Morrison had rounded the corner with a stack of papers, had seen us frozen in that impossible almost, had recognized exactly what she was witnessing.
The fallout had been immediate and total. Our parents summoned to the headmaster's office. My mother's face twisted with disgust as she called it unnatural, deviant, a sickness that needed excising. Dalvin's father cold and calculating as he discussed correction facilities and finishing schools and the importance of separating negative influences.
They'd taken Dalvin that night. I'd watched from my window as he was loaded into a car, his face pale and tear-streaked, his eyes searching the building for me.
I hadn't been able to save him. Had been too young, too dependent, too powerless to do anything but watch.
I'd been eighteen. He'd been fourteen. Those numbers didn't become less ugly with time, no matter how much I wanted them to. The bond recognition had been real — I'd felt it in my marrow, the same biological certainty that every alpha described when they found their match. But biology wasn't morality. A fourteen-year-old couldn't consent to what my body had wanted, and the fact that I'd leaned in that night was a failure I'd carried for twelve years.
My mother had called it deviant. She'd been wrong about why, but she hadn't been wrong that something needed to stop. I hated that. Hated that the worst person in my life had been right about the one thing that mattered most.
I wasn't powerless anymore.
I capped the vial and set it back in the case. My hands were steady. My breathing was even. The rage that lived in my chest had settled into something colder, harder, more useful.
Dalvin was here. Vernon's proxy was coming. The Chase would begin in two days.
I'd spent twelve years building a life from nothing after my family cut me off. Twelve years learning patience, discipline, the precise application of force. I'd shaped raw iron into art. I'd built a business from a single anvil and the refusal to quit.
Now I would shape this situation the same way. Identify the variables. Calculate the approach. Apply pressure at exactly the right points until the outcome I wanted became inevitable.
Vernon Ashby thought he could reclaim what he'd broken. Thought he could send a proxy to drag Dalvin back into hell.
He was wrong.
Dalvin was mine. Had been mine since a hallway in boarding school, since an almost-kiss that had cost us everything. The law hadn't recognized it. Our families hadn't allowed it. But bonds weren't only biological. Some bonds were forged in fire, hammered into shape through years of longing and loss.
I would find Dalvin in that forest. I would keep Vernon's proxy away from him. And when the time came, I would claim what had always belonged to me.
