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A wing of two hundred men and one spark and a grievance old enough to have grown teeth, and somewhere in the middle of it, me—uncuffed for once, unguarded for a handful of minutes that turned out to be all the time the worst version of me has ever needed.

I don’t reach for the memory often.

It doesn’t come back as guilt, which is its own kind of damning; it comes back as quiet. A red and ringing quiet, the strange peace of a man who has stopped pretending to be anything other than the instrument he was built into.

They lost count of the bodies.

They didn’t lose count of mine, because mine kept standing, and that—more than the blood—is what earned me the transport rig and the asylum and the word exceptional on my paperwork.

So no.

Nobody crosses an empty room to steal my drink. The whole world has learned to give me the wide berth my reputation buys, and I’d gotten comfortable inside that moat of fear, mistaking it for solitude, mistaking solitude for peace.

And then a woman in a pink jumpsuit looked at the moat, decided it was a puddle, and skipped straight across it humming.

The cut on my neck still stings.

The chilled water keeps finding it, working into the thin seam her glass opened under my jaw, a small bright line of heat in all this cold. She did that. Pressed the broken bottle to my throat with a hand that didn’t shake and a voice scraped flat of all its sugar and drew my blood with a smile.

And God help me, it made me hard.

Hard and mean and stupidly, cynically delighted, in a way I haven’t felt in more years than I’ve kept track of. It took everything in me—every scrap of the control they don’t believe I own—not to come up off that wall, peel her off her own clever little reversal, haul her into that corner she’d so generously diagrammed for me, and give her precisely the good time she’d threatened.

Right there.

Against the wall, under the camera she’d angled for an audience, with forty terrified spectators learning what the goddess sounds like when she finally comes down off her plinth.

I didn’t.

Restraint. Look at me…being civilized.

But next time they unlock that playpen and let me into the same air as her, I’m not wasting a single second on the pleasantries.

I need to know what she feels like.

Need to bury this ache to the root in the wet pulsing heat of her and find out if the piercing she bragged about drags the way I’ve been imagining it dragging for hours.

Pierced…

Dangerous little thing told me her cunt was pierced, leaning up on her toes against my mouth like the information was a party favor, and I’ve been paying for that sentence ever since.

Here’s what eats at me, kneeling in the cold like a sinner who’s lost the thread of his prayer.

I don’t obsess.

I haven’t obsessed over an Omega in all my cynical years—not since before, not since I was a man people still called normal, back when wanting someone was a simple appetite you fed and forgot, one warm body interchangeable with the next. I’ve had lust. Plenty. Lust is cheap and quick and means nothing.

This is not lust.

This is a hook set deep in something that doesn’t usually have a soft enough part left to hook into.

Because she had it all—the agility, the grace, the sheer brass-balled nerve to put glass to the throat of the most dangerous man in a building full of dangerous men and call it foreplay. And the best of it, the detail I keep circling back to like a tongue to a broken tooth:she didn’t know who I was.

Didn’t know, didn’t care, didn’t do the arithmetic everyone else does the moment they smell the blood under my cologne. Every other coward in that room had fled to the far wall to avoid breathing my air. She crossed the whole empty quarter just to steal my drink.

Laughable. Magnificent.

I don’t have the vocabulary for what it is, and I’ve never needed vocabulary before.