Chapter 4 #2
My heart migrates south. The silence that follows has a texture to it. Very slowly, with the reduced movement that belongs to something that has never in its life needed to rush, he turns his head toward the doorway. Toward me.
His eyes find mine in the dark with a directness that makes it clear the dark was never actually a factor.
Oh.
Oh, fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
He's-
The word beautiful surfaces, and I immediately resent it for being accurate.
Jaw cut sharply, causing my fingers to twitch with the need to reach out and see if I’d actually get cut.
Eyes dark, steady, the specific quality of calm that isn't peace.
It's the opposite of peace, actually. It's everything compressed very tightly behind a face that has learned not to show the actual emotions.
A scar bisecting his left eyebrow, old and clean, the kind that healed well because whoever stitched it knew what they were doing.
He looks like someone who has made a lot of difficult decisions and made them without flinching and has been carrying them ever since.
He looks at me the way I look at the ceiling cracks, like he's mapping something.
He takes one step toward the doorway. My brain finalizes its threat assessment and arrives at an answer that my hands apparently received before my conscious mind because the pistol is already up, pointed at the center of his chest, safety off.
"Okay!" I say, with the brightness of someone who has decided that confidence is necessary for this situation, "let's just pause for a moment. Take a breath. Evaluate where we all are emotionally before anyone commits to anything irreversible."
He moves. Fast is an inadequate word for it.
Fast implies I could track it with my eyes if I were paying better attention.
This is something else. One moment defined the space between us, and then it didn't, his hand slamming the pistol sideways into the wall with a controlled precision that sends it skittering across the floor.
His other arm comes up to brace against the wall beside my head.
He doesn’t grab me. He’s not throwing me. Just… positioning. Blocking every exit that was once available to me. Pain radiates up my wrist where the gun was removed from it. I note it and set it aside.
I look up at him. He looks down at me. We are very close, and he is very large, and his scent at this proximity is-
I will not finish that sentence.
Both of us are breathing harder than we should be for people who are otherwise maintaining composure. The emergency lighting strobes once from somewhere deeper in the facility and go dark again. For a moment, the only light is the faint glow from a cracked panel above the door.
"You always talk to yourself," he asks.
His voice is deep. Rough at the edges in the way of someone who hasn't slept or hasn't stopped moving or both.
And calm in that particular alpha way that isn't the absence of danger but its compression.
My stomach flutters at the sound of it, and I want to hate it on principle.
It takes me a slow moment to realize… I know that voice. He was one of the guards in the room.
I grin at him.
"Only when I'm processing something that requires external narration," I explain.
"Are you processing something right now?"
"About seven things simultaneously, yes."
His expression doesn't move, but his eyes do. A fractional scan, taking inventory. My wrist, my posture, the door behind him, and my face. The gun on the floor. Back to my face.
"You're not running," he observes.
"There's nowhere to run that you couldn't reach faster," I mutter, tilting my head, "I'm not scared of things I can't outrun. I save the fear for things I might actually be able to influence."
"You should be scared."
"Noted. I'm working on it." I pause.
"Also, and I want to be transparent about this because I think honesty is important in new relationships… I'm mildly turned on, which is inconvenient, and I'm not endorsing it. I'm simply reporting it."
A long silence. The kind of silence that could go several directions. He says, slowly, like he's reading a document in a language he didn't expect to encounter, "you're an omega."
"Gold star. Full marks."
His gaze sharpens. Something behind it recalibrates. "You're supposed to be contained."
"I was contained. Things changed. It was a whole thing." I gesture vaguely at the corridor behind him, the darkness, the distant sounds of a facility undergoing rapid unscheduled restructuring.
"You're one of the subjects. You were the one who was talking to the ceiling," he grunts out. Well, I guess I could be remembered for worse, I suppose.
"See, when you say it like that, it sounds reductive. I prefer an involuntary research participant." I watch his face. "Or you could use my name. I have one. Allegedly."
He studies me with the focused attention of a man trying to reconcile two different versions of a situation he walked into. Like he'd built a model of what this facility contained, and I'm not matching any of the data points.
"You're not afraid of me," he says.
"I'm afraid of the thing that made those claw marks in the wall back there. You're significantly preferable by comparison."
"That's a low bar."
"It's the bar available." I hold his gaze.
"You had time to make a different choice, and you didn't. That tells me something."
Something moves behind his eyes. Fast and gone.
"Don't make assumptions," he says quietly, "about what that means."
"I'm not assuming. I'm observing." I pause.
"There's a difference. I've had a lot of time to learn the difference."
The silence between us settles differently than it did a moment ago.
Not gone, but shifted. A different weight.
He's still blocking the exit. I'm still cornered.
Both of those things are true. But the room feels less like a threat assessment and more like intimacy.
My body aches to step closer to him, but I force myself to stay still.
Then-
From deep in the facility. Not close, not yet, but coming closer with the specific momentum of something that doesn't acknowledge obstacles. A roar. Not human. Not even in the neighborhood of human.
The sound of something that has never needed to act like anything, that has no use for the restraint of creatures who need other creatures to cooperate with them.
His head snaps toward the sound. Every line of his body changes in a single breath, from contained to ready, the compression releasing into something alert and directed. His hand drops from the wall.
My stomach drops with it.
"Oh, fuck," I whisper, “this is fucking bad.” The roar reverberates through the corridor and dies. The silence after it is heavier than the one before.
His gaze cuts back to me, and for the first time since he turned his head toward that doorway and found me in the dark, I see something other than assessment in his expression. Something that involves making decisions quickly. He reaches out and grabs my wrist.
Not rough. Not gentle. Purposeful.
"Come with me," he grunts out. I look at his hand. Look at the corridor behind him. Look back at his face, which is doing the thing where it isn't showing anything but is clearly running complex calculations at significant speed.
"Straight to the kidnapping," I say, "bold strategy. Some might say we're skipping steps."
"We're leaving." He's already moving, pulling me into the corridor, his grip not tightening but not negotiable either. "Now."
"Oh, thank fuck," I say sincerely, falling into step beside him because the alternative is being dragged, and I have some remaining dignity I'd like to retain.
"Leaving was very much the plan. I had a whole plan. It needed work, but the intention was there."
He moves fast, keeping us against the wall, his free hand coming up to track the corridor ahead with the practiced efficiency of someone doing tactical work on a timeline.
He knows where he's going, which is immediately useful since my mental map of the facility has several gaps in the sections I never had access to. I pocket that information.
"You know," I say, keeping my voice low to match his energy, "objectively speaking, this is the best morning I've had in approximately three years. The bar was on the floor, but still. I want to acknowledge the upgrade."
He glances down at me without slowing. Something in his expression shifts almost imperceptibly, not warmth exactly, but the recognition of something unexpected.
"You're insane," he says, shaking his head at my nonsense.
"The clinical term is 'adaptive,'" I tell him, "but yes, essentially."
We round a corner. He stops, checks it, and continues. The damage gets worse the further we go. Walls cracked, one section of the ceiling partially collapsed, and the wreckage of equipment that cost more than everything I'll ever own was scattered across the corridor floor.
He navigates it without breaking pace, pulling me around the larger debris with a hand that knows exactly where I am relative to the obstacles. I notice that. I notice a lot of things. It's a habit I developed in a small room with nothing else to do.
Another roar tears through the facility. Closer this time. Directionally confusing, which is the worst kind. The floor transmits a faint tremor immediately after, like whatever made that sound weighs enough to register in the architecture.
He moves faster. I match him.
"Hypothetically," I say, because my mouth operates somewhat independently of my survival instincts and always has, "if whatever that is reaches us before we reach the exit-"
"It won't."
"That's a confident position."
"Yes."
"Based on-"
"Move faster."
I move faster. We're running now, his grip shifted to accommodate the pace, and the corridor opens ahead into a wider junction I recognize from my mental map.
Loading access, rarely staffed, which means it was either locked tight before everything fell apart, or it's the best option currently available.
Given the morning's general trajectory, I'll take the odds.
"Hey," I say, between breaths. He doesn't answer.
"I don't know your name." A beat of silence filled with running footsteps and distant, terrible sounds.
"Colt," he grunts.
I turn it over.
"Zero," I say, "formerly known as Subject O-00. Currently known as your problem." He makes a sound. It might be a laugh. It's compressed very small, and it goes past quickly, and I can't be entirely sure.
We hit the junction. He reads the space in half a second and commits left without hesitating, pulling me through a door that gives under his hand. It’s unlocked, whether by design or the morning's events, I don't know, and I don't care. I just go through it.
The air on the other side is different. Less recycled. Less controlled. The facility is breathing out. I pull in a breath and feel something loosen in my chest that I'd forgotten was tight.
"Colt," I say.
He glances back at me.
"Thank you," I say sincerely. It comes out differently than I expected it to. Quieter. Without the layer of performance, I usually put between myself and sincerity as a matter of structural necessity.
He holds my eyes for a moment. Then turns back to the corridor ahead.
"Don't thank me yet," he says. Another roar behind us. Closer.
I grin.
"Wouldn't dream of it."