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I catch it, even upside down and falling, because catching things is what I do:the smallest betrayal in his stance.

A half-shift of his weight onto the front foot. A fractional uncrossing of one arm. The aborted beginning of a lunge, a bodymoving to catch me before its owner gave it permission—and then the visible, deliberate effort it costs him to clock himself, to lock it down, to remember that he is a composed man in an expensive suit and not whatever creature just tried to fling itself across a room to keep me off the floor.

I tuck and arrest the fall at the last possible instant, a hairsbreadth above the concrete, catching the steel and bleeding the last of my momentum into a slow controlled glide—a cheap, theatrical little trick I learned as a clumsy novice and have used to stop hearts ever since. My bare feet meet the cold floor without a sound.

Then I let go of the pole and stand there a moment, swaying, the blood relocating, the room still finishing its last few turns inside my skull. I breathe. Recalibrate. And the entire time, my gaze drifts back to the woman.

She’s a redhead. Deep, arterial red, scraped back from a face built on hard clean angles, the kind of beauty that looks like it would file a report about you. A lanyard at her collar I clock and read in a single pass— S. HALE, and beneath it the letters of an agency that doesn’t answer to this institute.

And here’s the predicament that prickles the hairs at my nape: I can’t scent her.

Nothing.

Not Alpha, not Omega, not Beta, not the faintest thread of a designation—just a clean, deliberate, manufactured nothing where a person’s scent ought to be.

Blockers.

The good kind, professional, the type a person wears on purpose when she walks into a room full of designations and refuses to give any of them a single thing to read.

In a building where scent is the oldest currency, she’s arrived carrying none, and that makes her either very smart or very frightened, and I’d bet my pole it’s the first.

She holds my stare.

Doesn’t blink, soften, or do the nervous flick-away the guards do.

In nine cases out of ten a look like that is a threat, a challenge, a thrown gauntlet. I don’t feel threatened. I feel the slow delicious uncoiling of interest, because if there is one flavor this dull institution has starved me of, it’s a worthy opponent.

I do so love competition.

“Does she simply stare for shits and giggles?” the redhead asks, to no one in particular, her voice as flat and unscented as the rest of her.

One of the guards mutters, “You’re probably a threat.”

“She doesn’t see you as a threat.” Doc says it lightly, certainly, the way another man might announce the time. “She sees competition.”

Every head in the room turns to him.Mine included.And across the small charged distance, his pale steel eyes find my mismatched ones and hold them, and we share a look that has the texture of a private joke and the weight of something else entirely.

“She thrives off that,” he adds, softer, just for me, though the whole room hears it. “Don’t you?”

My grin spreads slow and haunting across my face.

He’s read me again.

He keeps doing that, the infuriating, intoxicating man, peeling me open in front of witnesses like it’s nothing, and I cannot decide whether I want to bite him or keep him.

“Whatever did I do to deserve the company, Doc?” I drag his nickname out sweet and slow, and I tip him a wink that makes the nearest guard shift his weight. “What great honor does a girl have, to be graced by you in person?” I hum the question, sauntering backward the two steps to my new pole, and lean against it like it’s an old friend, crossing my arms beneath mybreasts in a way I know exactly the effect of. “And thank you,” I add, honeyed, deliberate, watching his face, “for the gift.”

There. The smallest thing.

A muscle at the corner of his jaw, the ghost of an eyeroll caught and strangled before it can finish being born—the visible labor of a man refusing to react to me.

Which means I made him want to.

Which means I’m getting in.

Excellent.

“Charming,” Hale observes, dry as the blockers must have made her. “The file warned me you’d be charming. It’s the first line, actually. Before the arson, before the diagnoses. Subject is disarmingly charming.” She steps a fraction closer, and the guards tense, and she ignores them entirely, which earns a flicker of my genuine respect. “I find charm is usually a wall. People build the prettiest ones around the ugliest rooms.”