Chapter 3: She Is Mine

Cain looked down at her.

He lowered himself into a crouch, stopping halfway, leaving a gap between his knee and the ground. His face hovered close to Vivian's. The muscles of his back pulled taut under his uniform, carving out several harsh lines from his shoulder blades down to his lumbar spine, the curve sharp as the spine of a blade. His palm had withdrawn from my neck, but the residual heat of it was still there, and my gland was still throbbing in place, like a heart carved out and left pulsing outside my body.

"The engagement." His voice was very quiet now. "Was a lie your father spread himself. I never agreed to it. Not once."

He extended his right index finger and touched the back of it to Vivian's chin, tilting her face up. That finger was still caked with dried blood.

"You stepped on her hand today. You ruined my coat. You tried to frame her with that cheap piece of rock. And you told her to crawl between your legs."

He withdrew his finger. Vivian's chin dropped like a severed marionette string.

"Your family has three mines in the southern territory. Two forest farms." Cain straightened up. The fabric of his uniform pulled tight as he rose, and the blade wound across his chest tore open a little more. A bead of blood traced the groove of his abdominal muscles as it rolled downward. He paid it no attention. "By tomorrow morning, they are forfeit to the pack."

Vivian let out a scream. It didn't come from her throat. It was squeezed from her lungs, thin and long, like a violin string snapping.

"Your father's administrative authority. Revoked."

"You can't—" Vivian collapsed flat onto her stomach, her fingers scrabbling forward, clawing at the toe of Cain's boot. "You can't do this to me. My father. He bled for you. You can't—"

"I can." Cain pulled his boot free of her grip. The motion was small, but it dragged Vivian forward across the concrete, scraping a raw red patch across her chest and stomach.

He turned around. And bent down.

One arm slid under my knees. The other braced against my back. The moment my body left the ground, my stomach flew upward first, then my heart, like someone had shoved it up from inside my chest.

Then I crashed into him.

A real collision. Not being picked up. Being wedged into a cage made of searing-hot flesh and an iron will. His arms locked tight, the muscles in his forearms flexing from his shoulders down to his wrists, hard as steel bars. My soaked burlap dress, under that single tightening motion, was plastered tightly to his combat uniform across the entire plane of my back. Ice water and scorching body heat collided, blasting a thick layer of white steam that billowed out from every fiber of my dress.

Cold. Heat. Two extremes of temperature detonated simultaneously against both sides of my body.

The back of my dress was pasted to his chest, the humid heat trapped between us, the temperature rising rapidly. But the front of my dress was still dripping, ice water running down the crease of my thighs, flash-freezing into a thin crust of frost when the wind hit it. My chest was cold to the point of pain. My back was scalding to the point of dizziness. My body was trapped between these two temperatures and began shaking uncontrollably. Not from cold. Not from heat. My nerves had simply short-circuited between the two extremes.

His chest was too hard. Not thick with fat. Muscles in a state of extreme engorgement, that unyielding, uncompromising hardness. My breasts were crushed against his chest, the soft flesh flattened through the soaked burlap. The friction of wet burlap dragging across my nipples with every step he took sent tiny, unwanted jolts of sensation straight down to the pit of my stomach. His heartbeat pounded through the layer of his combat uniform. Not a normal heartbeat. A war drum. Blow after blow slamming into my sternum, tangling with my own heartbeat until they beat at the same frantic frequency.

Our clothes, both drenched, melted into a single clinging membrane. His blood, my sweat, the freezing water from the basin—all of it mixed in the narrow space between our bodies until I couldn't tell whose heat was whose, whose pulse was hammering harder. The metal buckle of his tactical belt pressed into the soft hollow at the top of my inner thigh, and with each stride, the cold metal warmed against my skin, blurring the boundary between his uniform and my dress, his gear and my flesh.

My left ear was pressed against his collarbone. The hollow of it held a mixture of sweat and blood, the sharp, briny smell punching straight into my sinuses. The half-dried clots on his uniform snagged the fine hairs at my temple, tugging painfully at my scalp. The wound on his neck was still seeping fresh blood, scorching drops rolling down the curve of his clavicle, dripping into my hair, rolling onto my cheekbone, carrying the heat of his body.

I began to melt in his arms.

Not figuratively. Melting. Limbs that had soaked in ice water for hours were now baked by the omnidirectional furnace of his chest, his abs, his arms, his palms. The heat invaded inch by inch starting from my fingertips. First, my fingers. The numb, frozen tips began to regain sensation. After the needle-prick agony passed, warmth crawled up the blood vessels toward my wrists. Then my calves. The crooks of my knees, hooked over the steel of his forearm, went soft under his body heat. The frozen muscles loosened inch by inch, like a block of ice dropped into boiling water, the edges dissolving at terrifying speed.

My mind was screaming at me to pull back, to remember who I was—a laundry room Omega, the lowest of the low, someone who survived by being invisible. But my body had stopped listening to my mind hours ago. My body was pressing closer, greedy for every degree of heat he radiated, my frozen nerves reawakening as if he were the only source of warmth left in the entire dead winter of this territory.

That was when the scent gland at my nape finally detonated.

Not burning. Something beyond burning. His words, "I gave it to her," were still echoing in the air. His pheromones were still wrapped around my entire body like a thick blanket. And the spot where his thumb had pressed down moments ago had transformed into an exposed heart beating outside my body. Every pulse pumped a wave of heat, scorching and hollow at the same time, surging toward my limbs. The gland was thrashing wildly right above my cervical spine. The skin was being pushed outward from beneath into a visible bulge, that thin layer of skin stretched glossy and taut, like an overripe fruit a second from splitting. It was craving. Craving to be bitten through. Craving something more brutal, more absolute, to fill that empty gland tissue.

Please. Sink your teeth in. Claim it. Claim me.

The words weren't mine. They belonged to that caged Omega, and this time I couldn't shove her back down.

My ten fingers clamped onto his shoulders. My nails sank through the fibers of his uniform and bit into the grooves of his deltoids through the fabric. Not just holding on anymore. Clutching. Greedy, desperate, clinging to the only source of heat in a world made of ice. The muscle under my nails jerked hard once, then locked into iron.

He didn't look down at me. But his Adam's apple rolled. A deep, heavy roll, the entire tendon from his throat to the top of his collarbone shifting with it, like he was swallowing a growl that had surged up from the deepest part of his chest. His nostrils flared. The dried blood crust on his cheekbone split a hairline crack from the movement.

His pheromones shifted entirely.

Before, it had been dominance and intimidation. Now, there was another layer, thicker, hotter, something unspoken. The cedarwood deepened, thickening into something like tangible smoke that licked slowly along every exposed inch of my skin. The sharp spice of gunpowder bored into my sinuses and lit a fire at the back of my throat. The coppery sweetness of fresh blood was no longer just the residue of battle. It had transformed into a primal signal, a male displaying his power to his spoils of war while simultaneously testing, in the most covert way imaginable, whether this particular prize was willing to lie down and submit.

That pheromone current circled my nape three times. Then it dropped, sinking downward like a scorching, coarse tongue, dragging from my scent gland all the way down to the very tip of my tailbone.

My spine arched. My lower back curved forward, my hipbone knocking against his tactical belt buckle with a faint, metallic clink. My lips parted. A second whimper tore free from my throat. Wetter than the first. More shattered. More like a sound that should never be made in public.

His stride paused. Just for an instant. Then he kept walking.

He stopped in the doorway and turned his head. One boot came down on the edge of Vivian's cashmere coat, grinding the pristine wool into the filthy water. She was still sprawled on the concrete, her ruined makeup streaking her face, her fingers bleeding into the puddles. The guards stood frozen. The washerwomen had their hands pressed to their mouths. The old man with the coal shovel had gone utterly still.

Cain looked down at Vivian. Then his gaze swept the room—the guards, the washerwomen, Long Chin still crouched on the floor, Narrow Forehead plastered against the wall. He let the silence stretch, let every single person in that laundry room feel the weight of what they had just witnessed. Then he spoke.

"She is mine."

His voice was not loud. It didn't need to be. It sank into the concrete, into the steel walls, into the bones of everyone standing there. The hinges on the doorframe were still swinging, rusted metal dust sifting down. No one moved. No one breathed.

Then he walked. Through the doorframe. Into the biting winter wind. Through the swirling snow that clung to his blood-crusted uniform and my half-frozen dress. His strides were long, relentless, eating up the frozen ground between the laundry room and the black obsidian packhouse—toward his private quarters, where no Omega had ever set foot.

He looked down at me.

His ice-blue irises had sunk all the way into the deepest gunmetal gray, that ring of dark red at the edges now expanded into a full circle, like his pupil had been sliced open from the inside with a bloody line. The way he looked at me wasn't how you looked at a subordinate, or a servant, or even an ordinary woman. It was how you looked at something you had hidden for too long, a possession you could finally, openly, crush in your fist. Absolute restraint. But underneath that restraint, a feral, predatory hunger was pressing against the leash, ready to snap.

His grip tightened until my ribs let out another faint groan. He leaned down, his breath a scorching puff of steam that brushed right against my weeping, exposed scent gland.

"Cry louder next time," he growled, the vibration rattling inside his chest and echoing straight into my core. "Let them all know whose teeth are going to mark you."