Metal bites into my wrists, the familiar weight of restraint pressing against bone and tendon as I try to move my arms. They're stretched above my head, secured to the headboard with a mechanism that feels...different.
Not my usual cuffs.
Not the kind I can pop open with a twist and a prayer.
I flex experimentally, testing the tension, and frown when nothing gives.
"What the..."
I crane my neck to look up at the restraints, and my frown deepens.
These aren't standard issue.
The mechanism is complex—multiple interlocking components that would require either a specific key or a very particular sequence of movements to disengage. Someone who knows about restraints designed these. Someone who understands escape artists.
Someone who wanted to make sure I couldn't just slip free.
Her.
The thought makes me laugh—a short, breathless sound that echoes in the quiet room.
She actually outplayed me.
The grand escape artist, famous for slipping any lock, defeating any bondage, vanishing from any cage they tried to put me in?—
And a five-foot-three Omega with pink hair and a sadistic streak managed to trap me in handcuffs I can't immediately escape.
I should be annoyed.
Should be planning my exit, calculating the torque needed to break the mechanism, and mapping out the weak points in the metal.
So why am I grinning like an idiot.
The girl who writes letters in blood and dances in violence found a way to cage me. It's exactly the kind of chaotic, brilliant, absolutely deranged move I should have expected from my bonded Omega.
My bonded Omega.
The thought hits different now that I'm awake enough to fully process it.
This isn’t a dream.
The bond isn't something I imagined in the haze of the best sex I've ever had.
It's real.
Permanent.
Forever.
I wait for the panic to come.
The regret.
The cold, creeping realization that I've just done something monumentally stupid—tied myself permanently to a girl I've known face-to-face for less than twenty-four hours, a girl my pack doesn't know exists, a girl who might be exactly the kind of liability that gets us all killed.
But the panic doesn't come.
The regret stays absent.
