Page 95

The man wipes a palm on his coveralls and gives us a once-over that’s shrewder than his easy manner lets on.

“Good to meet some new faces,” he says. “Though something tells me y’all won’t be sticking around here long.”

Doc tilts his head a precise degree, and I glance between the two men, and Riot just chuckles low in his chest.

“He’s a good in-source,” Riot tells us, by way of translation. “Seems a few folks in this town already know where we came from. And a few of them have got their eyes peeled for the one who’d very much like our darling planted six feet under.”

Doc nods, slow and grave, his hand never once loosening around mine.

Here is the thing I keep noticing, the thing that should unsettle me far more than it does:I stay calm.

Through the casual mention of a man who wants me dead, through the open acknowledgment that the hunt has followers and watchers in this very town, I remain oddly, impossibly settled—and it isn’t bravery, or numbness, or the manic detachment I usually run on. It’s his hand. Doc’s hand aroundmine, warm and certain, and the steady library-and-amber scent of him threading through the garage fumes.

Since he took my hand outside the diner, the noise in my head has… quieted.

My mind, which ordinarily juggles fifteen billion contingencies at once, a permanent storm of calculation I’ve simply learned to live inside, has gone unfamiliarly still. Single-threaded. Present. I’ve read about it—the way a pack bond can regulate a fractured Omega’s nervous system, settle the static, drop the noise floor—but reading a thing and feeling your own ceaseless mind go quiet for the first time in years are two entirely different countries.

I don’t fully trust it.

But I don’t let go of his hand either.

It frightens me, if I’m honest in the privacy of my own skull.

The quiet. Because the storm has been my whole survival—the fifteen billion threads are what keep me three moves ahead of every man who’s ever tried to end me, and a woman who lets her vigilance go soft is a woman who wakes up owned, or dead, or both.

I built the noise on purpose. I taught myself never to set it down. Now this calm, unhurried man has wrapped his hand around mine and switched the storm to a murmur without so much as asking, and the terrifying part is not that he can do it.

The terrifying part is how badly some exhausted, buried piece of me wants to let him keep doing it.

Wants to set the vigilance down, just once, and trust that someone else is finally watching the door.

The owner lowers his voice, and the easy mechanic falls away to reveal something sharper underneath.

“Let me give you all the only advice worth a damn,” he says. “This place? It’s a stepping stone. For every soul they send here. Don’t you swallow a word of whatever pretty story the CEO fedyou on your way in.” He shakes his head, slow and disgusted. “In the end, that man needs his business running more than he needs anybody breathing. He’d sooner keep his wards full of living dummies, warm and counted and profitable, than spend one red cent saving a single Omega—especially an Omega worth this much to some other Alpha. One willing to butcher his way through a building to get back what he figures he’s owed.”

It lands like a key turning in a lock I’d already half-picked myself.

That’s the part the CEO’s pretty clemency story always skated past, the rot underneath the polished marble:I was never the patient they were trying to protect.

I was the liability they were trying to relocate. A body that kept turning up adjacent to other bodies, a public-relations grenade with the pin half out, an asset valuable enough that some unnamed Alpha would torch an entire institution’s reputation to reclaim it.

They didn’t move me to Arch Hollow to save my life. They moved me to make me someone else’s problem, somewhere the cameras wouldn’t catch the splatter.

This old man in his oil-stained coveralls just said aloud the thing every credentialed liar at Blackthorn took great pains not to. I could kiss his walnut face for the honesty of it.

We share a look between the four of us, that silent pack arithmetic I’m still learning the language of, and the owner reads it and nods like we’ve confirmed something he already suspected.

“So play house,” he says. “Enjoy the quiet while it lasts. But watch the signs.” He levels a calloused finger. “Every artist starts making mistakes the moment he feels his grip on his diamond finally slipping. Gets sloppy. Gets loud. Lets the mask crack just enough to show his hand. When a man like that realizes the thing he’s sure he owns is walking around free and happy andsomebody else’s—he won’t stay patient. He’ll come. And when he does, he’ll come making errors.”

It’s good advice.

Better than good—it’s precisely the read I’d arrived at myself, which means this old mechanic with the walnut face is sharper than nine-tenths of the investigators who’ve ever had a crack at me.

The artist. The diamond.

His hold slipping. He’s described my husband in three sentences without ever hearing the man’s name.

Then the owner smiles at me, warm and a little wicked.