Hunted By Alphas, Claimed By The Alpha King

The hand that grabs me comes out of nowhere.

One second I am moving through the parking garage beneath the Creston Hotel, cutting through it the way I always cut through spaces like this, fast and low and invisible, and the next second a hand closes around my arm and yanks me sideways into the shadow between two parked cars and the wall and something cold and metallic presses against my ribs.

Not a gun.

Something worse.

A syringe.

"Don't," the man says. Low. Professional. The voice of someone who does this often enough that the novelty wore off years ago.

I don't move.

My heart is somewhere in my throat and my wolf has gone electric and sharp and completely silent in the way he goes silent when survival requires everything and panic requires nothing, and I look at the man holding the syringe and I do the only thing I know how to do in the dark with something cold against my ribs.

I think fast.

He is bigger than me. Broader. Alpha, I can feel that immediately, his dominance pressing against my skin like a hand flat against a door, and there are two of them, I registered the second one a half second after the first, positioned at the mouth of the gap between the cars, blocking the exit.

Professional positioning.

This was not random.

This was planned.

"Mr. Nyther," the first one says.

My real name.

My actual name in a parking garage at ten pm from a man with a syringe and I think about eight years of running and I think about Vienna and I think about the specific flavour of being found and I think that if I let that syringe connect I am not waking up somewhere good.

"You have the wrong person," I reply.

"We don't," he says.

"My name is Cole," I reply.

"It was," he says. "Walk with us."

I look at the syringe.

I look at the exit.

I look at the second man.

And then I do the thing that has kept me breathing for eight years which is I stop calculating and I move.

I drop my weight fast and hard, straight down, and his grip on my arm goes from controlling to grasping and there is a half second difference between those two things that is enough, and I come back up with my elbow into his jaw and the syringe goes wide and I am already moving before he has finished reacting, through the gap, past the second man who reaches for me and gets my jacket instead and I leave the jacket in his hands and I run.

Across the parking garage.

Up the ramp.

Out into the street.

I do not look back because looking back costs time and time is the only currency that matters right now and I have a limited supply of it and I run the way I have always run, fast and low and through the spaces between people and lights and I take three turns in quick succession because turns break line of sight and line of sight is how they track you.

I lose them after the second block.

Or I think I do.

The problem with professionals is that losing them is sometimes what they want you to think.

I duck into a doorway and press against the wall and breathe and my wolf is still electric and sharp and I press my hand against my ribs where the syringe touched and think about what was in it and what would have happened and I think that tonight was too close.

Tonight was the closest it has ever been.

My phone has a message.

It came in twenty minutes ago while I was in the parking garage before everything went sideways and I read it now with my back against the doorway and my heart still doing something loud and irregular.

Dex.

Party is at the Halcyon building. Forty second floor. Come through, drinks on me, I'll have your three hundred I owe you.

I look at the message.

I look at the street.

I think about my apartment three blocks away and the bag that is already half packed because I have not fully unpacked it since I arrived in this city and I think about the syringe and my real name and I think that whatever tonight was, it is not finished yet and going back to the apartment means going somewhere they already know to look.

The Halcyon building is a block in the other direction.

Crowds are cover.

I go.

The lobby is busy, a Friday evening busy with people moving through it in both directions, and I take the elevator with four other people and press forty two for the rooftop terrace where Dex said the party was and I watch the numbers climb and I breathe and I let my wolf settle from electric to alert and I think about three hundred dollars Dex owed me and a new identity and leaving this city tonight.

The elevator stops.

Forty three.

Not forty two.

The doors open.

I look at the floor number above the door and I look at the empty corridor beyond it and I should press forty two and go down one floor and I don't because something in the air hits me the moment the doors open and my wolf, my sharp alert careful wolf, stops being any of those things.

He goes still.

Completely and totally still.

And then the doors start to close and my hand comes out and stops them without my permission, my body making a decision my brain has not caught up to yet, and I step out into the corridor and the doors close behind me and I follow the sound of noise and people to the end of the corridor and through a set of open doors into a room full of expensive suits and the kind of quiet that lives in spaces where money has been present long enough to become atmosphere.

The wrong floor.

The wrong room.

My wolf knows differently.

He turns toward the window before I do and what he does when he turns, what he does in the space of one breath with no warning and no explanation, is bow.

Fully.

Completely.

With a totality that steals every coherent thought I have ever had and replaces it with one single devastating certainty that I am not ready for and cannot explain and cannot take back.

I grab a glass from a passing tray.

I look at the window.

At the man standing there with his back to the room.

And I think that I just outran two professionals with a syringe in a parking garage and survived and my wolf didn't react like this, not once, not even close, and now he is down for a stranger at a window and I am standing in the wrong room on the wrong floor with stolen champagne in my hand and no jacket and the most important question of the last eight years of my life has apparently just been answered without my consent.

My wolf knows who he is.

My wolf has always known.

I just never stopped running long enough to find him.