The warmth is the part that’s derailing me. Absurdly, dangerously good warmth—not the electric-blanket variety, not the radiator’s mechanical approximation, but the deep, organic heat that only a living body produces. The kind that radiates from skin and muscle and the furnace-like metabolism that Alpha biology runs on, turning them into personal heating systems that Omegas are biologically wired to seek out like moths chasing something they know will eventually burn them.
This pillow feels like it was pulled from a toaster oven.
This pillow is breathing.
My mind is taking its sweet time to play catch-up. The gears are grinding, rust-stuck, processing information at a speed that would earn a failing grade in any tactical assessment. I feel mentally drained despite having just woken up—the bone-deep cognitive exhaustion of a brain that ran too hot for too long and is now operating at minimum capacity while it rebuilds whatever the fever scorched.
Something happened last night.
I know this the way you know you’ve been in a car accident before you open your eyes—the body remembering what the mind hasn’t reconstructed yet. There are pieces. Fragments. The taste of iron in the back of my throat. The ghost-sensation of cold water against skin. A door opening. A voice—deep, measured, carrying the scent of burnt vanilla—saying something about a fire. And then…
Nothing.
A gap where memory should be, black and smooth as a lake surface at midnight.
When I stir, my body responds with a full-body protest that starts at my skull and cascades downward through every musclegroup like a chain of dominoes collapsing. My neck aches. My shoulders feel like they’ve been carrying sandbags in my sleep. My thighs burn with the hypersensitivity that I associate with the constellation tattoos being aggravated?—
The scratching. Last night. Before the shower.
Right.
I groan.
The sound is involuntary and deeply unattractive, the auditory equivalent of a woman who has been assembled from spare parts and insufficient sleep. I force my eyes open, knowing that the day isn’t going to wait for me to achieve full cognitive restoration before demanding my participation. I normally wake at four a.m.—a habit carved into my circadian rhythm by over a decade of shifts that start before sunrise—so at least I’m probably not behind schedule.
What time did I even go to bed?
What time is it now?
Why can’t I remember anything after opening my front door?
My eyes open further.
And immediately find a chest.
A moving chest. Rising and falling with the deep, rhythmic cadence of someone in genuine, unguarded sleep. The kind of breathing that suggests total relaxation, complete trust in the surrounding environment, and the cardiovascular efficiency of a man whose resting respiratory rate runs lower than most people’s active one.
A shirtless chest.
Shirtless.
My brain stalls again, harder this time, the cognitive engine grinding to a halt like a car hitting a wall at speed. Because the chest I’m pressed against—the chest I’ve beensnugglinglike a goddamn body pillow with emotional attachment issues—is bare. Skin. Muscle. The kind of dense, tactical physique that doesn’t come from gym vanity but from years of operational conditioning that has turned a human torso into something that could be studied in an anatomy course titledWhy Evolution Favored the Predator.
And there are tattoos.
Familiar tattoos.
Norse runes tracing the ridgeline of a collarbone I have not seen in years. Wolf iconography wrapping a bicep that is significantly larger than the last time it existed in my field of vision, the ink denser, the designs more intricate, additions layered over a foundation I’d only ever glimpsed in academy locker rooms and the one sparring session where he’d fought shirtless because the Montana summer had turned the gym into an approximation of hell.
I know these tattoos.
I know this chest.
I know this scent.
My eyes trail upward.
Slowly. With the morbid, inevitable pace of someone ascending a staircase they already know leads to a conclusion they’re not prepared for. Past the throat—thick, corded, the tendons visible even in sleep. Past the jaw—sharp enough to qualify as a weapon, clean-shaven, the bone structure of a man assembled by genetics that understood intimidation as an art form. Past the mouth?—
