I’m about to be seized—I can feel the grasping intent of them closing in, the rough hands a half-second from my arms—whenmy eyes snag on a pair across the chaos that stops my breath more thoroughly than Annalise ever managed.
A patient who has no business being in this wing. No business being anywhere near a cafeteria full of unrestrained Omegas.
Riot.
He’s watching me the way one watches a creature behind observatory glass, total and unblinking—but the expression riding that hard pale face isn’t the hungry approval I’ve come to expect from him.
It’s wrong. Worried. The most dangerous man in the building is staring at me across a sea of screaming bodies with naked worry carved into him, and then he’s moving, shoving through the crush toward me as guards bellow commands that bounce off him like rain off stone, and for the first time in longer than I can recall I am genuinely, completely confused.
Why on earth is he coming to me?
It makes no sense. I’m the entertainment, the exhibit, the thing his kind looks at and wants. None of them come running.
They watch me bleed and burn and dance with the same fixed hunger, and not one of them has ever broken cover and crossed a room full of guns to reach me.
That isn’t how the wanting works.
The wanting keeps its distance. And yet here he comes, this feral impossible man, throwing off two orderlies like coats, and the worry on him is so foreign and so total that some small starved animal in my chest sits up and notices it before my mind can talk it down.
That’s the part that frightens me, in the end—more than the blade, more than the poison threading cold through my veins.
Not that a dangerous man is charging toward me through a riot. That I’m glad of it. That somewhere under the tactics and the costume and the careful, lifelong arithmetic of needing noone, a piece of me has already decided his arms are a place I’d let myself fall.
I built this whole self specifically so that wouldn’t be possible.
Three days.
It took three days and a worried look to find the crack in a fortress I spent decades sealing, and I don’t have time to be furious about it, because the floor is already coming for me.
My nose wrinkles.
Something metallic threads through the cafeteria’s scent-soup, bright and coppery and close—closer than the blood on the floor, closer than Annalise. I lift my free hand to my upper lip, and it comes away wet and red.
A nosebleed.
Slow fat droplets of my own blood, beading bright against my fingers.
Huh.
I blink, and the blink takes too long, and when my eyes open again the world has gone strange and underwater—the screaming muffled to a far-off murmur, the bright cafeteria light smeared soft at the edges, every sound arriving a beat late and wrapped in cotton.
A wave of cold sweeps up through me from somewhere deep, a glacial tide rising fast, and I know this feeling. I have met this feeling before, on the worst nights of an experimental adolescence, in white rooms with kind voices and unkind needles, and the recognition lands with grim, distant clarity.
Damn.
This Annalise really did a number on me.
Half a dose and I’m already coming apart at the seams, my own traitor body folding under it, and somewhere far away and academic I think: a full dose would have killed me where I stood, and that was the plan, and the only reason I’m still standing tothink this thought at all is a strangle so clumsy it interrupted my own murder.
There’s a joke in there. I’m too cold to find it.
The frost has reached my chest now, and my heartbeat is doing something arrhythmic and wrong, stuttering like a record skipping, and the edges of the room are folding inward toward a single shrinking point of light.
There’s no time to brace for it.
The cold crests, my knees give out from under me like cut strings, my eyes roll back toward the rigged and dripping ceiling, and the very last thing I comprehend before the dark takes the rest—the only thing—is the sudden certainty of arms.
Big ones.
