Chapter 6
Min-ho
The signal came just after noon.
Three short whistles, then one long. The pattern Garrett and I had agreed on before the hunt began, a sound that could pass for a bird call to anyone who didn't know better. But I knew better. And the message was clear.
Mercer was coming.
I'd held my position through the morning, watching Dalvin's hiding spot from behind the fallen pine, cataloguing every small sound that emerged from the rocks.
He'd stayed inside after our brief exchange at dawn.
Hadn't run. Hadn't emerged. Just sat in there, processing, deciding, doing whatever calculus his traumatized mind needed to do.
I'd given him space. I would give him all the space in the world if that's what it took.
But Mercer wasn't going to give him anything except a one-way trip back to Vernon Ashby.
I rose from my position, muscles protesting after hours of stillness, and oriented toward the source of Garrett's signal. Northwest, maybe half a mile out. Mercer had been tracking through the night, then. Slower than I'd expected, but thorough. The man was a professional.
Professionals made fewer mistakes. They were also more predictable.
I moved through the forest with purpose now, no longer tracking but intercepting.
The terrain here was thick with undergrowth, rhododendron and mountain laurel forming dense walls that channeled movement along natural corridors.
Mercer would be using those corridors. Following the path of least resistance toward the scent trail he'd picked up.
I found that path and positioned myself across it.
The wait wasn't long. Five minutes, maybe seven, and then I heard him coming. Steady footfalls, measured breathing, the quiet rustle of tactical gear moving through brush. He emerged from behind a stand of hemlocks and stopped dead when he saw me.
Drake Mercer looked exactly like what he was.
Military bearing, ice-blond hair cropped close, cold blue eyes that assessed and calculated without a flicker of emotion.
He wore black tactical pants and a fitted compression shirt that showed off a body built for violence.
A scar ran along his jawline, thin and pale, the kind of mark that came from a blade rather than an accident.
No pack. No supplies beyond a canteen at his hip and a knife sheathed at his thigh.
He wasn't here to camp. He was here to collect.
"You're in my way," he said. His voice was flat, accentless, scrubbed clean of any regional identity. The voice of a man who had learned to be no one from nowhere. A voice designed to deliver threats and ultimatums without emotional contamination.
"I know."
"The omega you're guarding belongs to Senator Ashby. I'm here to return him."
"He doesn't belong to Ashby anymore. He entered The Chase. That terminates any prior claim."
"Legally, yes. Practically?" Mercer's lips curved into a thin line that passed for a smile on a man incapable of genuine expression.
"The senator has resources you can't imagine.
Money. Connections. The kind of influence that makes legal problems disappear and inconvenient people vanish.
This is going to end one way. The only question is how much pain happens first."
I held my ground. "The omega is mine."
Mercer's eyes narrowed. He read my posture, my stance, the set of my shoulders. Reading me the way I'd read metal in the forge, looking for weaknesses, stress points, places where pressure would cause fracture. I let him look. Let him see exactly what he was dealing with.
"You haven't claimed him," he said. "I can smell it on you. All that want and no satisfaction. He's been running from you too, hasn't he?"
"That's between me and him."
"It's between you and him and me and the senator and about fifty lawyers who are going to make your life very unpleasant if you interfere with this retrieval.
" He shifted his weight, settling into a stance that suggested readiness without commitment.
"Walk away. Find a different omega. This one's already spoken for. "
"No."
The word hung in the air between us. Final. Absolute.
Mercer studied me for a long moment. I watched him calculate the odds, weigh the variables, run the cost-benefit analysis that men in his profession lived by.
A direct confrontation here would be messy.
Uncertain. I had size on him, and he had no way to assess my training.
Better to wait. Better to find the omega alone, vulnerable, easier to handle.
I could see the decision form behind his eyes.
"Prove it, then," he said. "Claim him before I do. Because I promise you, the next time I find him without you standing in the way, I won't be as patient."
"If you touch him, I'll kill you."
The words came out flat. Calm. Not a threat but a statement of fact, delivered with the same certainty I'd use to describe the color of the sky.
Mercer's jaw tightened. For a moment, he tensed to strike. The satisfaction of violence warred visibly with tactical disadvantage.
Then he stepped back.
"We'll see each other again," he said. "Soon. And when we do, you'd better have already made your claim. Because the senator doesn't pay me to fail, and I don't intend to start now."
He turned and melted back into the forest, his footsteps fading into the ambient sounds of wind and birdsong. I stood motionless until I could no longer hear him, until his scent had dispersed on the breeze, until I was certain he was truly gone.
Then I turned and ran back toward Dalvin.
The calculus had changed. I couldn't just wait anymore. Couldn't give Dalvin the luxury of unlimited time to process and decide. Mercer would circle back, would find another approach, would catch Dalvin at a moment when I wasn't there to intercept.
I needed to warn him. Needed to make him understand what was hunting him.
And maybe, if I had any chance at all, I needed to make him understand that I was different from every other alpha who had failed him.
Dalvin was standing outside the rocks when I arrived.
He must have heard me coming. Must have recognized my scent on the wind, because he'd emerged from his hiding spot and now stood at the edge of the boulder field, white linen filthy and torn, bare feet planted on the cold stone. Every line of him vibrated with tension, coiled tight, ready to run.
His scent hit me from twenty feet away. Bergamot and heat, sharper now, more urgent. The approaching wave of his cycle was accelerating, and I could smell the fear underneath it, acrid and bright.
"We need to talk," I said. "There's a proxy alpha in the preserve. Someone Vernon sent. He's going to try to take you back."
Dalvin's face went pale. His hands curled into fists at his sides. "I know. I saw him at the ceremony."
"He found your trail. I intercepted him about half a mile from here, but he'll be back. He's not going to stop."
"So what?" Dalvin's voice cracked on the words. "You think that changes anything? You think I should just let you claim me instead because you're the lesser evil?"
"I think you should know what you're dealing with."
"I know exactly what I'm dealing with." He took a step back, putting more distance between us, his eyes blazing with a fury I hadn't expected.
"I've been dealing with alphas my entire life.
Being traded between them, used by them, owned by them.
You're not special, Min-ho. You're just another one in a long line of people who think they have a right to me. "
The words hit harder than any punch Mercer could have thrown. I absorbed them the way I'd learned to absorb pain at the forge. Let them land. Let them burn. Didn't flinch.
"I'm not trying to own you," I said.
"Then why are you here?"
"Because I've spent over a decade trying to find you. Because I never stopped looking. Because when I saw your name on that registrant list, I dropped everything and came here to make sure Vernon's people didn't drag you back to hell."
Dalvin laughed. The sound was harsh, brittle, completely devoid of humor. "Twelve years. You've been looking for twelve years."
"Yes."
"Then where were you?" The question exploded out of him, all the rage and hurt he'd been containing finally breaking free.
"Where were you when they shipped me off to that finishing school?
Where were you when my father sold me to Vernon like livestock?
Where were you on my wedding night, when I learned exactly what kind of man I'd been bonded to? "
"Dalvin—"
"You moved on!" His voice cracked again, tears streaming down his face now, shaking with rage and grief.
"You graduated and you went to college and you built your precious forge and you lived your life, and I was being broken apart piece by piece by a man who enjoyed it.
Who smiled while he did it. Who made me thank him afterward. "
I couldn't breathe. Couldn't speak. The images his words painted were too vivid, too horrific, too close to the suspicions I'd carried for years without confirmation.
"I looked for you," I said. My voice came out hoarse, stripped raw by the weight of his pain.
"After I turned twenty-one, after I had money of my own, I hired investigators.
I tried to find where they'd sent you. I tracked down the finishing school, but you were already gone.
Already bonded. Vernon had you locked down so tight that I couldn't find a single person who would talk to me about you. "
"So you gave up."