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What’s new—what has me genuinely, professionally rattled—is the part where dream-me considered, for one humid heartbeat, abandoning the entire reason I burned my way into this place, just to stay a little longer in the taste of him.

That.

That is the problem.

Intelligence should not be a bar set this high.

I am an acrobat; I can reach almost anything I decide to reach, and I have never once decided to reach for a man’s mind.Bodies, yes.Uses, certainly. But a brain that keeps pace with mine, that reads me back as fast as I read it, that ends a session before I’m ready because it understands that the surest way to unsettle me is to deny me an exit I planned for?—

It turns me on.

Dangerously.

In the specific, ruinous way that fire turns on the people who shouldn’t be allowed near it.

Which is precisely why I am in such a magnificent mood.

I skip the length of the temporary corridor to pass the time, light on the balls of my feet, humming something with no tune, and I count the new eyes in the ceiling as I go—three I recognize, one I don’t, freshly seated in the smoke detector by the supply closet. I blow it a kiss. I do so love a growing audience. I spend a pleasant minute wondering whether the rest of the morning’s adjustments are booby traps or merely more lenses, more careful little glass pupils installed to drink in the spectacle of me.

Either way, I intend to perform.

A goddess does not waste a full house.

The wall speaker crackles to life with the announcement I should have predicted from the disrupted routine, and didn’t, which annoys me more than the scrub did.

Co-mingling.

Today.

Nesting, the staff call it, in the coy voice people use for things they’d rather not look at directly.

Once a week, by protocol, they unlock the wall between the wings and let the violent Omegas and the violent Alphas occupy the same supervised air, because designations crammed too long in solitude don’t calm—they fester. Suppressants only hold the line so far.

Without the weekly release valve, the heats turn feral and the ruts turn lethal and the whole institute risks going up like a struck match, and Blackthorn has quite enough trouble with matches where I’m concerned.

So they herd us together for an hour and call it medicine.

It plays out the same every week, a grim little ballet I could choreograph in my sleep. The couples who’ve sorted themselves over months peel off to the designated corners and take their sanctioned, supervised relief against the padded walls, watched by orderlies who have perfected the art of seeing nothing.

Others simply pair off to stare, two predators deciding the effort of conversation isn’t worth the calories. A few prowl. Most perform a careful, scent-drunk circling, the air going thick and complicated with a dozen designations bleeding into one another—citrus, gunmetal, bruised peony, ozone, something three rooms over that smells like wet pennies and regret.

And me?

I mind my own business, and the room minds me from a respectful distance.

Because no one tests their chances with me.

Not anymore.

The first month, a brave fool or two came sniffing, drawn by a perfume that promises strawberries and birthday cake and the warm open welcome of an Omega in want. They learned. They always learn. It turns out that burning your faithless Alpha alive in a custom suit and walking out of the blaze humming sends ripples of horror outward through even a psychotic institution, and the ripples reached the Alpha wing long before I did.

To them I am not a woman.

I am a cautionary tale with very good legs.

A goddess on a plinth, beautiful and venerated and absolutely not to be touched, lest the touching be the last thing the hand ever does.

Look all you like, gentlemen. The exhibit does not come down for anyone.