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His scent wraps around me, amplified by the speed and the open air—woodsmoke and warm iron, worn leather and gun-oil and the faint smoke of whiskey, all of it streaming back over me like a banner I get to wear.

I press my cheek between his shoulder blades and breathe him in and feel the last of the watched-thing tension drain out of my spine. For three years and more I have been a specimen under glass, a problem to be managed, a body whose every twitch was data. Out here, hurtling through nowhere with my arms locked around a killer who’d die before he let me fall, I am nobody’s case file.

I am just a woman on a bike in the wind, and the freedom of it is so enormous it borders on holy.

And the Omega in me is not unaware of the rest of it, either—the way the machine purrs its low filthy rhythm up through both of us, the heat of him solid between my thighs, the flex of muscle under my hands every time he leans us into a curve.

There is a reason they say a woman never forgets her first ride, and I am beginning to understand that the saying has very little to do with motorcycles. Every time he banks the bike and I have to tighten my grip, every time the engine’s growl vibrates straight through my bones, a slow spark of want curls low in my belly and refuses to be reasoned with.

He knows it, too.

I can tell by the way his hand drops to squeeze my knee at a red light, the way his scent thickens with smug satisfaction. The menace planned this. The menace knew exactly what putting me on the back of his bike would do.

The day becomes one long adventure with no destination at all, which is the entire point of it.

Riot takes me everywhere and nowhere—through tiny one-stoplight towns where old men wave from porches, past hidden scenic overlooks he seems to know by instinct, to a roadside diner with cracked vinyl booths where we demolish a stack of pancakes and he steals the bacon off my plate and I threaten his life with a fork.

We stop whenever anything catches us, beholden to no schedule, no plan, no committee. A waterfall tucked deep in the woods, roaring silver over black rock, where the mist beads in my hair and Riot watches me laugh with an expression I can’t quite name.

An antique bookshop where I lose an hour and he loses his patience and then loses it again, contentedly, leaning in a doorway watching me hoard old volumes on weaponry and folklore. A field gone riotous with wildflowers. A lake so glass-still it holds the whole sky inside it, a perfect doubled world.

It is the most ordinary day imaginable, and that is precisely what makes it extraordinary.

I have lived a life of extremes—penthouses and prison cells, wedding nights and funerals, stages and straitjackets, every moment of it cranked to some terrible operatic pitch. I have never once had this. The small, unglamorous, perfect nothing of a day spent wandering with someone for no reason but the wandering.

No stakes. No performance. No body count by sundown.

Just pancakes and waterfalls and a man stealing my bacon, and somewhere in the sheer mundane beauty of it I understand that this—not the drama, danger, not the grand gothic romance of monsters—this quiet ordinary happiness is the thing I was truly robbed of. And it’s the thing he’s handing back to me, oneroadside diner at a time, like it costs him nothing, like I was always meant to have it.

And the whole time, he photographs me.

I don’t notice at first—he’s subtle for such a blunt instrument of a man—but somewhere around the wildflower field I catch him at it, his phone angled my way, and I realize he’s been doing it all day.

Filling his camera with candid stolen moments I never knew he was taking.

Not posed. Not curated. Just… me. Me laughing at the diner with syrup on my chin. Me reaching up into the waterfall’s spray. Me cross-legged in the wildflowers with a stupid grin, me silhouetted against the mirror-lake, me caught mid-word and mid-motion in a hundred small unguarded instants.

Every laugh. Every smile.

Every single moment where I look, apparently, genuinely free.

“You’re a creep,” I inform him, without any heat at all.

“Wildly,” he agrees, unrepentant, thumbing to the next shot. “Got a whole gallery of evidence that you’re secretly a soft, happy little thing under all the knives. Blackmail material. I’ll auction it to the highest-bidding monster.”

“The only monsters bidding would be you, Doc, and Silas, and you’d just spend all the money on me anyway,” I point out. “It’s a closed economy. Terrible business model.”

“See, this is why I keep you,” he says, delighted. “Ruthless market analysis. You’d run a cartel beautifully.”

“I ran an asylum from inside a straitjacket. A cartel would bore me.”

“God, you’re hot when you’re smug.” He says it so plainly, so matter-of-fact, that it knocks the next quip clean out of my head and leaves me flushing in the wildflowers like an idiot, and his answering grin tells me he did it precisely to watchthe mastermind short-circuit. “Delete those immediately,” I manage, recovering.

“Over my dead body, Pretty,” he says, and tucks the phone away with a grin, and does not delete a single one.

There’s a tenderness in it that the gruffness can’t quite hide, and I’m mastermind enough to read what it means.

Riot doesn’t photograph things. He’s not sentimental in any way the world would recognize—he’s a creature of the immediate, of engines and violence and the next mile of road. He’s not the type to fill a phone with anything.