Chapter 7
Dalvin
The heat was winning.
I'd held it off as long as I could, using every technique I'd learned during years of unwanted cycles under Vernon's control.
Breathing exercises. Distraction. The cold stone against my back, a desperate anchor to reality.
But biology didn't care about willpower, and my body had decided that forty-four hours was long enough to wait.
The fog rolled in slowly at first. A softening at the edges of my thoughts, a warmth that spread from my core outward, a hypersensitivity that made every brush of fabric against my skin feel like a brand.
Then faster. Harder. Until I couldn't remember why I was hiding, couldn't remember what I was afraid of, could only feel the aching emptiness between my legs and the desperate need to be filled.
Slick soaked through my ruined pants. My nipples peaked against the torn fabric of my shirt, so sensitive that even the mountain air was a caress. Every nerve ending in my body screamed for touch, for pressure, for the weight of an alpha pinning me down and filling me up.
I pressed my forehead against the cold rock and tried to breathe.
Eli. I needed to think about Eli. My son, my reason, the only thing that mattered more than the fire consuming me from the inside out.
But Eli's face kept slipping away, replaced by hazel eyes and broad shoulders and the scent of cedar and iron that had wrapped around me all night.
Min-ho. Waiting outside. Patient. Present.
Close enough that I could smell him through the gaps in the stone, and every breath I took made the heat burn hotter.
I needed to move. Needed to find another alpha, someone who wasn't Min-ho, someone whose claim wouldn't destroy my custody case. But moving meant leaving this shelter. Moving meant exposing myself to whoever was hunting in these woods.
Moving meant making a choice I wasn't ready to make.
A sound outside the rocks. Not Min-ho's steady presence. Something different. Footsteps, deliberate and quiet, circling my position. The methodical pattern of a predator assessing its prey. A scent on the wind that made my stomach clench with fear even through the haze of heat.
Iron and gun oil. Cold purpose. Nothing human underneath.
Mercer had found me.
I heard him complete one circuit around the rocks. Then another, slower, testing the angles, looking for weaknesses. The tracker in my arm pulsed with each pass, the red light blinking faster as he drew closer.
"I know you're in there." His voice carried through the gaps in the stone, flat and patient. "Your alpha friend is gone. Chasing a false trail my associates laid for him. It's just you and me now."
My heart slammed against my ribs. Min-ho wasn't here. I was alone with Vernon's proxy, heat-drunk and barely functional, trapped in a crevice that had become a cage.
"Come out quietly, and this can be painless. The senator just wants you home. He's willing to forgive the past year if you cooperate."
Forgive. The word sent ice through my veins, cutting through the heat fog with the precision of a blade.
Vernon didn't forgive. Vernon punished. Vernon had spent eight years teaching me exactly what happened to omegas who defied him, and running away on the night of his bonding renewal ceremony was the ultimate defiance.
If Mercer took me back, Vernon wouldn't just hurt me. He would break me. Would make sure I never had the strength to run again.
And then he would find Eli.
I scrambled deeper into the crevice, looking for another way out, but the rocks were solid on all sides. No exit. No escape. Just cold stone and the sound of Mercer's footsteps getting closer.
"Last chance," he said. "Come out, or I come in after you."
I didn't answer. Couldn't answer. My throat had closed around the terror building in my chest.
A hand reached into the crevice and closed around my ankle.
He dragged me out of the rocks with brutal efficiency.
My fingers scraped against stone, nails tearing, leaving bloody trails on the gray surface.
I kicked and thrashed, but the heat had stolen my coordination, turned my muscles to water, left me weak and desperate and utterly unprepared for violence.
The world blurred at the edges, reality fragmenting into sensations without context.
Cold air. Hard ground. The iron grip on my ankle dragging me toward ruin.
Mercer pulled me into the open and flipped me onto my back.
His face loomed above me, ice-blond hair disheveled, cold blue eyes assessing me with clinical detachment.
Blood crusted along his hairline from some earlier wound, but his movements were precise, controlled, unimpaired.
His scent wrapped around me, wrong and invasive, nothing my body wanted.
"Should have come quietly," he said.
His hands found the collar of my shirt and tore.
The fabric ripped down the center, exposing my chest to the cold mountain air. I gasped, tried to curl away, but he pinned my wrists above my head with one hand while the other worked at the waist of my pants.
"The senator wants you back," Mercer said, his voice conversational, almost bored. "Didn't specify what condition. Just alive and bonded."
No. No, no, no.
I bucked beneath him, trying to throw him off, but he was too heavy, too strong, too trained. His knee pressed between my thighs, forcing them apart, and I felt his hand slide beneath the waistband of my pants, fingers cold and impersonal against my heated skin.
"Stop fighting. It'll be over soon. One quick claim, and then we're on our way back to Virginia. The senator will handle the rest."
A sob tore from my throat. This couldn't be happening. After everything I'd survived, everything I'd sacrificed, I couldn't end up back in Vernon's hands because I was too heat-stupid to fight off a single alpha.
Mercer's hand moved lower. I squeezed my eyes shut and wished for unconsciousness, for death, for anything that would spare me from what was about to happen.
Then the weight vanished.
My eyes flew open. Mercer was gone, ripped away from me with such force that he flew several feet before crashing into a tree trunk. And standing over me, chest heaving, eyes blazing with fury, was Min-ho.
"Get away from him."
The words came out as a growl, barely human, vibrating with alpha command that made my omega instincts snap to attention.
Min-ho looked like something out of a nightmare.
Blood on his face from a cut above his eye.
Dirt and leaves tangled in his dark hair.
His lips peeled back from his teeth in a snarl that promised violence.
Mercer pushed himself to his feet, wiping blood from his mouth. "You should have stayed on the false trail."
"I know what a diversion smells like."
"Then you should know when you're outmatched." Mercer's hand moved to the knife at his thigh. "Walk away. Last chance."
Min-ho's answer was a fist to Mercer's face.
The fight was nothing like the coordinated combat I'd seen in movies. It was brutal, ugly, primal. Two alphas tearing at each other with fists and elbows and knees, crashing through underbrush, slamming into trees, painting the forest floor with blood.
I should have run. Should have used the distraction to disappear into the woods, to find another alpha, to escape while both of them were focused on each other.
I didn't run.
I couldn't look away.
Min-ho fought with the raw power of a man who had spent twelve years shaping iron with his bare hands.
Each blow landed with devastating force, driving Mercer back step by step.
The proxy was skilled, trained, dangerous, but Min-ho was relentless.
Every time Mercer landed a hit, Min-ho absorbed it and kept coming.
Every time Mercer tried to create distance, Min-ho closed it.
They crashed through a stand of young pines, snapping saplings, sending birds screaming into the sky.
Mercer caught Min-ho with an uppercut that snapped his head back.
Blood sprayed from Min-ho's nose. He didn't slow down.
Just spat red and drove forward, tackling Mercer into a boulder with enough force to crack stone.
The knife came out. Mercer slashed at Min-ho's chest, opening a line of red across his ribs. Min-ho didn't even flinch. He caught Mercer's wrist on the backswing and twisted.
The crack of breaking bone echoed through the forest.
Mercer screamed. The knife fell from his useless hand. Min-ho didn't stop. He drove his elbow into Mercer's face, snapping his head back, then followed with a knee to the ribs that I heard crack from twenty feet away. One rib. Two. The sounds wet and final.
The proxy crumpled, but Min-ho wasn't finished.
He grabbed Mercer by the collar and slammed his fist into the man's face again.
And again. And again. Until Mercer's features were a mask of blood, until his body went limp, until the only sounds were Min-ho's ragged breathing and the drip of blood from his knuckles onto the forest floor.
Min-ho stood over him, chest heaving, blood dripping from his wounds onto Mercer's prone form.
For a long moment, he just stared down at the man who had tried to take me.
Then he drew his foot back and kicked Mercer in the ribs one more time, a final punctuation mark that sent the unconscious body rolling several feet across the leaves.
He turned to face me.
The rage drained from his expression, replaced by concern, by tenderness, by a desperate hope that made something crack open in my chest. Blood ran down his face from the cut above his eye.
His shirt was torn where the knife had caught him, the wound still seeping red.
His knuckles were split and swollen, his breathing ragged, trembling with the aftermath of violence.
He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.