The air on the other side is different. Less recycled. Less controlled. The facility is breathing out. I pull in a breath and feel something loosen in my chest that I'd forgotten was tight.
"Colt," I say.
He glances back at me.
"Thank you," I say sincerely. It comes out differently than I expected it to. Quieter. Without the layer of performance, I usually put between myself and sincerity as a matter of structural necessity.
He holds my eyes for a moment. Then turns back to the corridor ahead.
"Don't thank me yet," he says. Another roar behind us. Closer.
I grin.
"Wouldn't dream of it."
Chapter Five
Zero
Running with an alpha is a deeply humiliating experience. They're faster. They're stronger. Their stride covers ground at a ratio that makes my legs feel like a design flaw, and apparently, hauling an omega through a collapsing murder facility like luggage is considered perfectly acceptable behavior in whatever etiquette tradition Colt was raised in.
"Okay!" I wheeze as he pulls me around another corner at a pace my lungs are lodging formal complaints about.
"Just for the record… legally speaking… this is kidnapping!"
"You're welcome to stay," he says, without inflection, without slowing, without any indication that the option he's just offered is one he considers viable.
Another roar tears through the building from somewhere below us. The floor transmits it as a shudder. Dust and small debris sift down from a crack in the ceiling and distribute themselves across my hair and shoulders.
"Wow," I say, between breaths, "look at that. Sudden and complete conversion to pro-kidnapping. I contain multitudes."
He doesn't respond. Of course, he doesn't. Alphas in motion are a particular phenomenon. They don't recalibrate. They don't doubt the path mid-path.
They move through the world with the forward momentum of something that decided on a direction and renegotiated everything else around that decision. Walls, obstacles, structural complications, chatty omegas. All of it becomes peripheral detail to be navigated rather than engaged with.
My bare feet slap against the cold floor as we round another corner, emergency lighting strobing red at intervals that are starting to feel personal. The facility in crisis looks different than the facility in operation. Same bones, same layout I've memorized through years of forced residency, but stripped of the clinical order that usually makes it feel like something built by people in control of what they're doing.
Right now, it just looks like what it is. A place that hurt people and is now getting hurt itself. I note that I feel almost nothing about that except a faint, cold satisfaction I don't examine too closely.
The air has changed with every corridor we've covered. Under the chemical smoke and the iron smell of things that have gone wrong, his scent runs like a current through everything. It’s smoky, sharp, and supported by something warm that has no business being warm in a building actively in the process of structural failure.
Every time I pull in a breath, my chest does something physiologically suspicious.
"Okay," I mutter, low, to the part of my brain that keeps lighting up like an instrument panel, "we are not imprinting on the first alpha we encounter during a crisis. That's a known cognitive bias. We have standards. We havedignity."
Colt glances down at me mid-stride.
"Talking to yourself again."
"It's a coping mechanism. Mind your own business," I mutter.
"How's it working out," he asks, eyeing me out of the corner of his eye.
"Mixed results," I manage to wheeze out.
We push through a security door that hangs off one hinge, frame bent outward, the lock mechanism on the floor in three pieces. Beyond it, the hallway is worse than anything we've passed through yet. A corridor that took the brunt of something and shows it in every surface. I don't look at the shapes on the floor long enough to inventory them. I look at the walls instead.
The claw marks are back. Deeper here. More of them. My Omega instincts shudder, and I may or may not have pressed closer to Colt. If asked, I will be pleading the fifth. The claw marks are running parallel in sets of four across the composite surface at a height that requires me to recalibrate my threat assessment upward in ways I find profoundly unwelcome.
