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Frightened of him.

And then his scent reaches me on the recycled air, finally crossing the gap, and it explains a great deal.

Where the Doc smells like a private library, this one smells like the building burning down around it.

Woodsmoke and worn leather, a low feral base of gun-oil and crushed black pepper, whiskey gone warm in the glass, andunderneath it all the unmistakable bright-metal note of blood that has learned to think of itself as cologne.

It is not a pleasant scent.

It is a warning printed in a language older than words, and my own designation—the traitor—reads it and shivers and leans toward it anyway, the way a moth has opinions about candles.

Takes me an embarrassing extra moment, lost in the dark architecture of how he smells, to notice the last detail. He’s still cuffed. Even here, even alone in an evacuated quarter with every weapon in the room trained loosely his way, they did not dare uncuff him to drink his sanctioned hour’s beer.

And the cuffs are black.

Not institutional steel. Matte black, fitted, set—I lean, I squint, I am nothing if not thorough—with a scatter of small black gemstones along the band, catching no light and giving none back. Custom. Decorated. The institute saves its prettiest restraints for its ugliest residents, and someone has dressed this man’s wrists like a craftsman who got distracted halfway through and wandered off.

An incomplete craft project.

That, I think, is the precise thing that ticks over in my brain, the small fatal click of a lock deciding to open. Because I cannot abide an unfinished piece. And this one is sitting across an empty room, staring at me like I’m the finest thing he’s ever been allowed to see, wearing half-finished jewelry on the wrists they’re too scared to free.

Well.

It would be rude not to introduce myself.

I skip.

Straight across the forbidden quarter, light and quick and grinning like the lunatic the file insists I am—and, fine, perhaps the file has a point, perhaps I am, on certain Tuesdays—and I land in a neat crouch directly in front of him, close enough thathis scent stops being a warning and becomes a room I’ve walked into. Behind me the hall makes a collective sound, a single indrawn breath shared between forty terrified throats.

His eyes lift to mine.

Slow. Cynical.

A pale, near-colorless grey, the grey of a knife held up to a window, ringed in something darker—beautiful in the way certain weapons are beautiful, designed with no thought for beauty and arriving at it anyway. Up close his stare doesn’t soften. It sharpens.

He looks at me like he’s already decided something about me and is simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up to his conclusion.

I dismantle his scent in my head, sorting it into its parts the way I sort everything—the leather, the smoke, the iron, the warm dark animal heart of it—and I file the whole profile away in the drawer where I keep things I intend to use later.

Then I take his beer.

I don’t ask.

Asking is for people who expect to be told no, and I have never once in my life expected to be told no. I simply lift the bottle out of his cuffed grip, and the room gasps again, louder, a chorus of horror as though I’ve spat on an altar, as though the goddess has just done something even the goddess isn’t allowed to do.

I take a swig.

I regret it immediately.

“Ugh.” I pull the bottle back and frown at it with frank betrayal, tongue working against the bitter wash of cheap warm lager. I pout. I shrug. “At least that ain’t piss. That’s only fun during sexy times.”

I slide the bottle back into his hand, and—here is the interesting part, the part I tuck away with the scent profile—he takes it.

He lets me put it back. He doesn’t snatch, doesn’t snarl, doesn’t do any of the dozen feral things a man who turned a prison riot into a slaughter with his bare hands ought to do when a strange Omega drinks from his bottle. He just watches me, and his fingers close around the glass where mine just were, and something about that—the warm overlap of where I touched and where he holds—sends a wholly unauthorized spark skating down my spine.

“Name,” I say.

Nothing.