Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Zero
Running with an alpha is a deeply humiliating experience.
They're faster. They're stronger. Their stride covers ground at a ratio that makes my legs feel like a design flaw, and apparently, hauling an omega through a collapsing murder facility like luggage is considered perfectly acceptable behavior in whatever etiquette tradition Colt was raised in.
"Okay!" I wheeze as he pulls me around another corner at a pace my lungs are lodging formal complaints about.
"Just for the record… legally speaking… this is kidnapping!"
"You're welcome to stay," he says, without inflection, without slowing, without any indication that the option he's just offered is one he considers viable.
Another roar tears through the building from somewhere below us. The floor transmits it as a shudder. Dust and small debris sift down from a crack in the ceiling and distribute themselves across my hair and shoulders.
"Wow," I say, between breaths, "look at that. Sudden and complete conversion to pro-kidnapping. I contain multitudes."
He doesn't respond. Of course, he doesn't. Alphas in motion are a particular phenomenon. They don't recalibrate. They don't doubt the path mid-path.
They move through the world with the forward momentum of something that decided on a direction and renegotiated everything else around that decision. Walls, obstacles, structural complications, chatty omegas. All of it becomes peripheral detail to be navigated rather than engaged with.
My bare feet slap against the cold floor as we round another corner, emergency lighting strobing red at intervals that are starting to feel personal.
The facility in crisis looks different than the facility in operation.
Same bones, same layout I've memorized through years of forced residency, but stripped of the clinical order that usually makes it feel like something built by people in control of what they're doing.
Right now, it just looks like what it is. A place that hurt people and is now getting hurt itself. I note that I feel almost nothing about that except a faint, cold satisfaction I don't examine too closely.
The air has changed with every corridor we've covered. Under the chemical smoke and the iron smell of things that have gone wrong, his scent runs like a current through everything. It’s smoky, sharp, and supported by something warm that has no business being warm in a building actively in the process of structural failure.
Every time I pull in a breath, my chest does something physiologically suspicious.
"Okay," I mutter, low, to the part of my brain that keeps lighting up like an instrument panel, "we are not imprinting on the first alpha we encounter during a crisis. That's a known cognitive bias. We have standards. We have dignity."
Colt glances down at me mid-stride.
"Talking to yourself again."
"It's a coping mechanism. Mind your own business," I mutter.
"How's it working out," he asks, eyeing me out of the corner of his eye.
"Mixed results," I manage to wheeze out.
We push through a security door that hangs off one hinge, frame bent outward, the lock mechanism on the floor in three pieces.
Beyond it, the hallway is worse than anything we've passed through yet.
A corridor that took the brunt of something and shows it in every surface.
I don't look at the shapes on the floor long enough to inventory them. I look at the walls instead.
The claw marks are back. Deeper here. More of them.
My Omega instincts shudder, and I may or may not have pressed closer to Colt.
If asked, I will be pleading the fifth. The claw marks are running parallel in sets of four across the composite surface at a height that requires me to recalibrate my threat assessment upward in ways I find profoundly unwelcome.
Colt slows. Not stopping. Just shifting down from sprint to something deliberate, his posture changes in a way I feel before I can articulate it. Every line of his tenses and changes, from moving fast to moving carefully, which are meaningfully different states.
The alpha presence that's been a pressure at the edge of my awareness steps fully into the foreground. Not aggressive. Just… present. The particular quality of attention that says everything in the environment has been folded into a single processing operation, and he is the processing operation.
My omega instincts, which have been staging a gradual coup since this man walked into my containment doorway, complete their takeover in a single breath.
My pulse spikes. Heat uncurls in my lower abdomen like something waking up from a very long and medically induced sleep.
My cock is twitching, and my hole is leaking so suddenly that the sensation almost has my knees buckling underneath me.
I stop walking. This is not the most convenient time for this to be happening.
Colt notices that I've stood still for a full second.
His grip shifts on my wrist, not tighter, just different.
His attention is redirected from the corridor to me with the fast efficiency of someone who monitors more than one variable at a time.
"Move," he grunts out.
"Working on it," I rasp, with genuine effort, "my nervous system is having an independent meeting and didn't invite my rational brain."
He looks at my face. Then, at my posture. Something in his jaw tightens almost imperceptibly, a fractional clench, gone fast.
"You're going into heat."
"No."
Silence. I feel my face doing something complicated.
"...Probably not." I can’t hold back the whimper that escapes on the last word. His expression does something I haven't seen it do yet, which is shift toward something that isn't entirely neutral.
"Probably."
"In my defense," I say quickly, before he can build too much momentum on that syllable, "I was raised in a controlled laboratory environment.
The omega development literature was not part of the curriculum.
They gave us injections and observation windows, not biology classes.
I'm working with incomplete information about my own-"
The roar that comes up through the floor cuts the sentence in half. Close. Closer than before. Close enough that the sound doesn't just hit my ears but moves through the walls and into my sternum and stays there.
Colt's free hand moves to his rifle. Then he does something I don't anticipate. He pulls me in. Not roughly. Not slowly. One motion, deliberate, his arm coming around and drawing me against his chest like this is a solution he's already done the math on.
My brain stops producing language for approximately two seconds.
"Oh, fuck me," I breathe out.
He's-
Solid. Warm in a way that has nothing to do with temperature regulation and everything to do with the specific heat of a body that is built to be large.
I can feel his heartbeat under my hands where they've landed against his chest, and his heartbeat is faster than his face suggests, which is the most interesting data point I've collected all morning.
His scent hits me at close range with the subtlety of a structural collapse.
Smoke and steel and something underneath both of those things that my hindbrain is categorizing as shelter and safe and several other words I am refusing to process right now.
I said I wouldn't finish that sentence. I'm not finishing it.
I don’t know what comes over me, but before I know what’s happening, I lunge forward, and my teeth sink into his neck. He lets out a grunt, and my hands curl into his jacket. My cock throbs with need, and my jaw locks down. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing anymore, but it feels… right.
“Fucking hell,” he grunts out, but instead of pushing me away, he pulls me closer. I let out a whimper that I’ll have to find time to be embarrassed about later.
"You need to regulate," he grits out above my head. I slowly, reluctantly unlatch myself from his neck. His voice is lower than it was a moment ago, which I'm noting purely academically.
"I'm regulated," I say into his tactical vest. He lets out a scoff, letting me know he doesn’t believe a word I just said.
"Your hands are shaking."
"The building is actively falling down around us."
"Your hands were shaking before that."
I don't have a rebuttal for this because it's accurate.
His hand moves. They slide up my arm from wrist to shoulder with a slow, deliberate pressure.
Firm. Steady. The specific kind of contact that bypasses cognition and goes straight to the nervous system with a message about hierarchy and safety, and stop.
Every nerve in my body receives the message and responds with enthusiasm that I find deeply embarrassing.
"Oh my fucking god," I whisper.
"What?" His voice is controlled.
"Your hand."
"What about it?"
"Please remove it. My dignity is on life support, and that's not helping."
A pause. He doesn't remove it. His chin tips down, and I can feel him looking at the top of my head with an expression I can't see but can somehow sense anyway.
"You're reacting to my scent," he says.
"Yes. Thank you for the diagnosis. Very helpful. Very useful," I grit out, but it comes out more breathy than anything.
"Your biology is reading me as-"
"Do not finish that sentence out loud." He finishes it anyway, quieter.
"-as your alpha."
"My biology," I say, with great dignity, "is an idiot."
Something moves in his voice. Not a laugh. The ghost of a sound that could become one if it were somewhere else, in different circumstances, with less structural collapse occurring in the immediate environment.
"Is it," he says.
Low and rough at the edge. The kind of voice that arrives through the chest rather than the ears. My stomach executes a full rotation.
"This is bad," I mutter, to no one, to everyone, to the part of myself that keeps making observations I don't request.
"Focus," he says, sharp, and the sharpness works. It cuts through the fog and lands on something clear.