“Why’d you run, Martinez?”
The voice is familiar in the way that recurring nightmares are familiar—you know the shape of them, the rhythm, the specific frequency that makes your skin crawl. The leader. My pack’sAlpha, stepping forward from the shadows with the unhurried confidence of a man who knows the prey has nowhere left to go.
“Your heat’s on the edge.” Laughter from the shadows behind him, the sound wet and ugly, blending with the rain in a harmony that makes my stomach lurch. “We’re supposed to help you through it. That’s what the captain said. Team support. Standard protocol.”
Standard protocol.
As if there’s a protocol for this. As if bureaucratic language can sanitize what they’re actually saying.
I huff, pressing my back against the wall, feeling the cold brick through my soaked uniform like a second spine—hard, unyielding, the only thing between me and collapse.
“I can handle it myself.” My voice comes out stronger than my body deserves—steady, controlled, carrying the authority of a woman who has commanded rooms full of men and refused to let biology be used as a weapon against her. “I don’t need your aid. So just leave me be.”
Leave me alone.
I’ve always been alone. I know how to survive alone. I don’t know how to survive you.
They tsk.
The collective sound—synchronized, deliberate, mocking—ricochets through the alley like gunfire. The leader steps closer, and the streetlamp behind him catches enough of his face to reveal the expression I’d learned to associate with the worst moments of our arrangement: the dark, hungry gleam in his eyes that has nothing to do with Alpha instinct and everything to do with the specific cruelty of a man who enjoys power not as a responsibility but as a sport.
“That’s not the way to help your pack, Officer.” Another step. His scent pushes through the rain—rancid, wrong, thepheromones of an Alpha who has confused domination with desire. “This is a team play.”
I shake my head.
The motion is violent, instinctive—wild in a way I don’t allow myself to be, the controlled composure that defines my every waking moment shattering against the reality of this moment. My icy blue hair, soaked and heavy, whips across my face.
“My heat,” I hiss, the words tearing from my throat like shrapnel, “has nothing to do with team anything. I don’t want to fuck you right now. Any of you. Soleave me alone.”
He chuckles.
The sound is soft. Almost intimate. The chuckle of a man who has heard the wordnoso many times from this particular Omega that it has become part of the foreplay he’s constructed in his head.
Another step. Then another. Close enough that the rain falls between us like a curtain neither of us can see through clearly, close enough that his scent overpowers the rain and the concrete and the copper taste of my own fear. His body pins me against the wall without touching—the proximity itself a cage, his height and his breadth and his Alpha pheromones creating a physical barrier more effective than chains.
I glare up at him.
But my vision is blurring. Rain and tears—not tears, never tears—blending on my cheeks until the world becomes an impressionist painting of shadow and threat and the white gleam of teeth that are too close, too sure, too hungry.
His smirk widens.
Proud. Satisfied. The expression of a man who believes he has already won.
And then he whispers—quiet enough that the rain almost steals it, loud enough that it brands itself into my brain with the permanence of a scar?—
“I wasn’t giving you an option to decide, Officer.”
—
My eyes snap open.
Not the gradual surfacing of someone waking from sleep. The violent, full-body detonation of a nervous system that has ripped itself from unconsciousness with the same desperate force that I’d used to rip myself from that alley. My spine arches off the mattress, every muscle engaging simultaneously in a contraction so severe that it propels me backward, my back slamming against the headboard with a crack that sends pain lancing through my shoulder blades and doesn’t matter—doesn’t register—because the pain in my body is nothing compared to the howling electrical storm inside my skull.
Not real.
Not real not real not real?—
But my body doesn’t believe me.
