Chapter 1
Chapter One
Zero
The first rule of surviving the apocalypse is simple:
Don’t get attached to anyone who smells like an Alpha. Unfortunately, I broke that rule about five minutes after escaping a collapsing biotech lab. In my defense, the city was on fire.
Day four, and my suppressants are gone, and I am fine.
I'm completely fine. I'm so fine that I've only mentioned the suppressant situation to myself eleven times this morning, which is practically stoic by my standards.
The fact that Colt's scent has been dismantling my higher cognitive functions since approximately six AM is simply a physiological event that I'm monitoring with clinical detachment and zero emotional investment.
Zero emotional investment.
Get it?
Cause I'm Zero.
I think it's pretty on brand for me.
We're moving northeast through what used to be a commercial district and is now a cathedral of broken glass and structural regret. I’m just thankful I have boots now. A shudder racks up my spine at the thought of more debris slicing up the soles of my feet.
I'm doing what I always do when things are bad, which is narrate. I can’t help myself when my anxiety is at a whole new level. I try to keep it internally, mostly. Sometimes externally.
Colt has opinions about the external narration. He expresses these opinions through silences of varying weight, which I've learned to read like a second language over the past four days of close proximity.
Four days since the facility exploded, and I ran out of a burning building barefoot and directly into the most inconvenient Alpha in the known wasteland.
Four days of surviving together in a series of increasingly close quarters, which would be merely uncomfortable if my biology wasn't currently staging what can only be described as a full-scale revolt.
My body has been screaming for something for the past twenty-four hours.
The suppressants maintained by the lab kept my omega instincts on a tight leash. The leash is gone now, though, and the instincts are feral. I feel hot and needy.
"You're narrating," Colt says, not looking at me.
"I'm thinking."
"Out loud."
"It's adaptive," I mutter.
He doesn't respond. This is the medium-weight silence, which means I've assessed this conversation and elected not to continue it. I've classified seventeen distinct Colt silences. This is number thirteen.
We move through the debris field in the loose coordination that's developed between us without either of us deciding it should.
He checks the rooflines, and I read the ground-level information flowing between us in the gaps between words.
I have complicated feelings about how embarrassingly functional it is.
I have complicated feelings about a lot of things this morning. Primary among them: my entire body has been warm since yesterday. Not surface-warm. The deep interior warmth that the lab's documentation referred to, in its characteristically dry way, as pre-heat thermal onset.
My nipples are oversensitive. Any touch has me shuddering uncontrollably. My sense of smell has sharpened beyond its normal range. I can now officially smell Colt from fifteen feet away and identify every individual component of his scent with a genuinely embarrassing accuracy.
Leather. Gun oil. Something underneath that my body keeps refusing to put into coherent words.
The need is starting to get to me. I feel as though I have been in a perpetual state of arousal for far too long.
The word home comes to mind, and I'm not using that word.
I'm not, that word does not appear in my internal documentation.
"Creature sign," Colt says, "north."
"Yesterday, twelve hours. Territory marker, not active presence. A pack of three moved through heading west." I pause, "their primary is injured. The scent pattern is uneven. One source is weaker than the others."
He looks at me for a moment, but it's the assessing look, the one that means he's updating a file somewhere behind his eyes.
"Good," he says, giving me a nod. The word lands differently than it should, and another thrill rolls down my spine, causing my cock to twitch against the fabric of my pants.
My omega instincts have been sitting in the back of my brain, making increasingly unsubtle suggestions for thirty-six hours.
I think if the creature doesn’t get me, then I’m going to die from sexual frustration at this point.
Especially when my mind takes good and does something with it that I refuse to examine. I need to think about something else.
"The distribution center," I say, shifting from one foot to the other, "you've been planning on it."
"Since day two."
"You've been planning a lot of things since day two."
"Yes."
I look at him sideways. He's watching the rooflines, rifle resting across his body, moving with the specific, unhurried efficiency of someone who has done this so many times it's become the baseline rather than the exception. I know almost nothing about his life before the facility.
I know he has a scar on his left eyebrow that he's never mentioned, and I've been wanting to ask about it for four days. I know he held my hand for six blocks after I bit him, and his only response was focus. I have replayed that moment more times than I'm ever going to admit to.
The biting was a stress response, at least that’s what I’m notching it up to. The replaying is also fine.
I'm fine.
"Your scent changed," he says.
"I know."
"Since yesterday morning."
"I know."
"The suppressants-"
"Are gone, yes, I have a very good nose, and I don't need the update, I know." I hear myself and dial back slightly, "I know. I'm tracking it."
"How long?"
"Two to four days from functional threshold." I keep my voice even. Clinical. Lab-voice does a lot of heavy lifting when the thing you're describing is your own body staging a coup.
"I hit functional threshold yesterday morning. So… one to three days, now."
"We need to find suppressants," he says.
"The pharmacy locations you've been planning since day two," I ask.
"Yes."
"And if they've been raided."
He doesn't answer immediately, and that's the answer.
We both know it's the answer. If the pharmacies are empty, the suppressants aren't happening.
What comes next is the thing the lab documented in its characteristically dry way as a heat cycle, unsuppressed, estimated duration seventy-two to ninety-six hours, requires-
Requires.
I'm not finishing that sentence. I can’t right now, not with how my body is already responding, and I’m not even in a heat cycle yet.
We turn south around a debris collapse, and the path narrows, both walls pressing close.
Colt is right there, and his scent is immediate and concentrated in the tight space.
My pre-heat instincts do something that makes my stride stumble.
He notices. He notices everything. It's deeply inconvenient.
"Zero."
"I'm fine."
"You stopped," he accuses.
"I didn't stop, I recalibrated," I huff out, "the scent concentration in enclosed spaces is… my sensitivity is elevated and the… I'm fine. Moving. See. Moving right now."
He's watching me move with that complete, unhurried attention.
"The bond chemistry," he says. Not a question. A statement. He says it the way he says everything. Flat, accurate, and with the specific weight of someone who's already incorporated the information and is simply confirming out loud.
"I'm not going to discuss the bond chemistry while we're in a four-foot-wide alley," I grumble.
"It's relevant."
"It's extremely relevant, and that's exactly why we're not discussing it in a four-foot-wide alley where I can't-" I stop. "Where the scent situation is already-" I stop again.
"The discussion will be more productive with more space between us."
"There isn't more space."
"I'm aware."
He takes one step closer. My mouth goes dry, and I swallow hard. I feel my hole start to leak, and my cheeks start to burn with embarrassment.
"That was the wrong direction," I rasp out. My voice is impressively steady.
"The path narrows further ahead," he says, looking past me, "we need to stay close."
"The path-" I look. He's right. The path narrows further ahead.
This is a real tactical reality, not at all something he's doing on purpose, except that Colt does nothing without a reason, and I have a theory about the reason.
My pre-heat instincts have fully endorsed the theory, and I'm ignoring them all.
"Stay close," he says. Four days ago, close would have meant arm's reach, and now close means I can feel the heat coming off his body through the air between us. I am monitoring this with clinical detachment, and my omega instincts are conducting what can only be described as a standing ovation.
We come out the other end of the narrow passage into a wider street, and the creatures are gone, moved on, the territory clear ahead.
The distribution center is three hundred meters.
I can see the edge of it. The massive concrete walls, intact, and the elevated position, are exactly what Colt described.
Then the wind shifts. His scent hits me full-on. Unfiltered. The complete Alpha signature of a compatible pair's primary. Which is a clinical way of saying: everything in me that has been building for thirty-six hours arrives all at once.
I stumble on my next step and stop walking.
A low whine falls from my lips that I have no control over.
He stops a beat later and turns back, and I'm just standing there, in the middle of the ruined street, with my hands at my sides.
My heart rate is doing something that would be embarrassing in a clinical readout, and his eyes find me and hold.
"Zero," he growls.
"I'm having a moment," I whimper, "give me a second."
"What kind of moment?"
"The kind where my body is making very strong suggestions, and my brain is trying to file a rebuttal, and the rebuttal is losing.
" I press the back of my hand against my mouth.
Take a breath. The breath is a mistake because it's full of his scent, and the scent makes the moment significantly worse in the direction of more.
"The pre-heat sensitization is… It's accelerating. I thought I had another day before it got this bad. I was wrong." He's watching me. Still, not moving toward me, not moving away.
"You did the math," I say, "on day two. You've been planning for this."
"Yes."
"What were you planning?"
He doesn’t say anything right away.
"To give you options," he says quietly, "find suppressants. Or not."
"Or not," I repeat.
"Yes."
"If not," I say, carefully, "what were you planning to do?"
He looks at me. The silence isn't one of the seventeen I've sorted through. It's something else. Simpler. The silence of someone who has a very clear answer and is deciding whether the moment is the right moment.
"I was planning," he says, "to be whatever you needed." My omega instincts stop making suggestions. I cross the three feet between us in two steps, and I kiss him. Not carefully. Not tentatively.
I've been careful and tentative for three years under conditions that required it, and this street is not one of them.
The four days of his hands and his boots and his arm and the six blocks and focus and all of it.
All of it arrives here, lands here, and my hands are in his jacket, and his scent is everywhere.
I am kissing an Alpha in a ruined street in the apocalypse, and it is the most coherent decision I've made in four days.
For one second, he doesn't move. One specific suspended second that I feel in my entire nervous system. Then his hands are on my jaw. Warm and deliberate and careful in the way he's careful with things that matter. He kisses me back, and my brain goes completely, blissfully quiet.
The kiss is thorough. His thumbs trace my jaw, and I feel it everywhere, because my sensitivity is elevated and everywhere means everywhere.
I feel the touch down my throat, across my collarbones, along my arms, pooling low and warm and insistent.
When we finally break apart, I'm short of breath in a way that has nothing to do with running.
He's not short of breath. This is offensive. His hands are still on my face. His pulse, where my hand has ended up against his throat, is elevated. I focus on that.
"Right," I rasp.
"Yes," he growls.
"That happened."
"Yes."
"The suppressants-"
"Are gone," he says, "I know."
"And the pharmacies might be-"
"Empty," he says. "I know."
"And I'm going to need-"
"I know," he says, quietly, and his thumb moves against my jaw.
I stare at him.
"You're very calm about this," I mutter.
"One of us should be."
I laugh. An actual laugh, surprised out of me, the kind that bypasses the part of my brain that would have managed it.
His expression does the almost-smile thing.
"Come on," he says. He takes my hand.
We walk the three hundred meters to the distribution center, and neither of us lets go.
Want More Chaos?
If you enjoyed Zero and Colt’s escape, their story is just beginning.
The apocalypse is spreading.The experiments are evolving.And the bond between Alpha and Omega is getting harder to ignore.
Their story continues in Omega Protocol Book One of the Omega Protocol series.