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Real cold.

Blessed, deliberate, tender cold, laid against my burning skull like a benediction.

My first thought, surfacing toward it, is that this is Death’s own hand at last—come to lay its cool palm on my brow and finish the deed the flames started years ago—and that thought, absurdly, is what makes me react. Because I have never once in my life let anyone finish me.

So I move before I’m awake, the way I do everything, on instinct sharpened past the need for permission.

Noise crashes in around the edges of me.

Curses.

The clatter of something knocked aside, boots, a low chorus of alarm. When I crack my eyes open, the world arrives muffled and dull, my emotions packed in cotton, every feeling arriving at a distance—and through that half-lidded, underwater haze I glare at the author of the chilled tenderness on my brow, and my glare lands on a pair of eyes that crinkle with appreciation the very instant they realize what they’re looking at.

Which is me.

Sitting astride a body.

With a knife at its throat.

He chuckles—low, rough, entirely delighted for a man currently one twitch of my wrist from a second smile—and the sound makes me sincerely wonder which of us is the certified lunatic in this arrangement.

I blink.

The fog thins by a degree.

My vision tightens its focus, and it confirms what the muffled part of me had already filed:I am very much about to stab an Alpha.

The sexy jumpsuit Alpha.

Who is, I note as the picture sharpens, not in a jumpsuit at all.

I have to trail my eyes down the length of him to confirm he isn’t entirely naked—he isn’t, there’s the low waistband of something merciful—but the confirmation comes at a price, because the journey down lays out a whole indulgent trajectory of muscle and ink, a sculpted, scarred, brutal expanse of him that taunts the part of me that does not, as a rule, go looking for attraction in any of its layers.

That part wakes up anyway.

Slowly, against orders, it stirs and stretches and takes a long appreciative inventory of the artwork written across his skin, the dark tangled designs climbing his ribs, banding his arms, inked over his heart.

I find myself genuinely curious, even here, even now, what each one means.

What a man like this chooses to wear permanently.

What he’s decided is worth keeping on the outside.

A low rumble threads the air, a sound that thrums in a throat—and it isn’t coming from the man beneath me.

It’s coming from me.

A purr. Low and taunting and humiliatingly involuntary, rolling up out of my chest at the sight of him, and it makes his smirk deepen into something insufferably pleased before he speaks, his voice a gravel murmur pitched just for the two of us.

“Welcome back to the land of the living, Violet.”

Violet.

Once again, this maddening creature has dived clean through the camouflage and put his hand on the real thing underneath, the name I keep buried beneath all the brighter, safer ones—and I do not like it.

I don’t like how easily he does it, don’t like that he’s collected my truest name and uses it like he has the right. I pout in puredismay and draw the knife back from the bleeding little nick I’ve left at his throat, settling my weight more comfortably astride his hips—which is how I discover he’s hard.

Insistently, unrepentantly hard, beneath me, in a medical bay, with a blade still loose in my hand.