And rust. Old metal and brine and the faint chemical tang of whatever cleaning solution they use on the concrete floors.
I hate this part of the job.
Hate the cold. The echo of our voices off corrugated steel walls. The way my breath fogs in the air even though it's not that cold, just damp enough to seep into your bones.
Atlas handles strategy. Zero handles enforcement. And me? I handle logistics. The boring shit. The spreadsheets and manifests and quality control that keeps this whole operation running. Making sure shipments arrive on time. Making sure the product is clean. Making sure no one's skimming off the top.
Making sure we don't end up in a federal prison.
Tonight's shipment came in from Vancouver. Three crates. Two hundred units of black-market suppressants. No prescriptions. No questions asked.
Our buyers love that.
I watch as Franky—one of our guys, a beta in his forties with a beer gut and a receding hairline and hands that aresurprisingly steady despite the tremor in his left one—cracks open the first crate and pulls out a sample bottle.
The lid squeals as it pops off. Pills rattle inside like teeth.
"Looks good," he says, shaking it. Holds it up to the overhead light. "Same as always."
"Check the batch numbers," I tell him. "Make sure they match the manifest."
He nods and gets to work. Pulls out a clipboard, runs his finger down a list of numbers.
I lean against the wall and pull out my phone. The screen is too bright in the dimness of the warehouse. I squint, scroll through notifications. Three missed calls from Dad. A text from Atlas about a meeting tomorrow.
Nothing else.
No one else.
Franky holds up one of the pills, squinting at it under the warehouse lights. It's small. White. Innocuous. You'd never know what it does just by looking at it. "Ever think it's weird? How much people pay for these?"
"Supply and demand."
"Yeah, but..." He drops the pill back into the bottle. "I'm a beta. This is just a pill to me. But for you guys? For alphas and omegas?" He shakes his head. His jowls wobble. "Must be something else entirely."
I don't respond.
Because he's right. Betas don't get it. They can't.
They don't know what it's like to feel the pull. The need. His jowls wobble. The way an omega's scent can crawl inside your head and make you forget everything else. Make you dangerous. Make you desperate.
I've never experienced it myself. Never been near an omega in heat. Never felt that absolute, consumingurgeto knot and claim and never let go.
But I want to.
God, I want to.
Every alpha does. It's biology. Instinct. The way we're wired. Written into our DNA like a command we can't refuse.
And when you're surrounded by betas all day—people who can't scent, can't understand, can't relate—it gets lonely.
You start to feel like you're the only one who understands what it's like. The hunger. The emptiness. The ache that never quite goes away.
That's why my brothers matter. Atlas and Zero. They get it. They know what it's like to be an alpha in a world that's mostly beta. To feel desires that are primal and overwhelming and impossible to explain to someone who doesn't share them.
We're pack in everything but name. Blood and understanding bound tighter than any formal bond.
It's all I have.
