Our gazes lock.
His eyes are dark gold—shot through with flecks of amber that catch the fading light like captured flames. They're beautiful eyes. Devastating eyes. The eyes of someone who's seen terrible things and decided to become terrible himself.
There's a scar along his jaw.
Faint, barely visible, the kind you get from close combat.
And his scent?—
Oh.
Spiced leather.
Smoke.
Dark rum.
It crashes into me like a wave, so different from Sage's vanilla sweetness but equally compelling. This is adangerousscent. Apredatoryscent. The kind that makes prey animals freeze and smart animals run.
I don't do either.
I just press the blade a little harder against his chin.
"Let me guess," I say, and my voice comes out low, controlled, completely at odds with the chaos screaming through my blood.
Movement behind me.
I don't turn—don't take my eyes off the man in front of me—but my other blade is already extended backward, the tip hovering exactly where I know his heart will be.
Of course, the backup the trench coat man was counting on finally showed up.
Thirty-seven seconds late, I calculate automatically.Odd number. Odd numbers are bad.
"I should assume this is Blaze," I continue, tracking the presence behind me through sound and scent and the particular displacement of air that tells me he's tall, lean, and holding weapons of his own. "Though I have no clue whoyouare—" I press harder on the trench coat man's chin, drawing a bead of blood, "—when you're clearly more mentally insane than me to think he was going to save you."
Neither of them moves.
Smart.
The man behind me—Blaze, apparently—smells like a completely different kind of danger.
Ember smoke.
Citrus peel.
Cinnamon.
Heat and fire and something volatile, the scent of someone who plays with flames and enjoys watching things burn. It's intoxicating in a way that makes my survival instincts scream warnings my body is too stupid to heed.
"Thirty-seven seconds late," I add, because my brain won't stop counting, won't stop cataloguing, won't stopneedingthe numbers to make sense. "Which is an odd number. Odd numbers are bad, and I guess that could mean you're bad too."
Silence.
The tension stretches—elastic, dangerous, ready to snap in any direction.
I can feel both of them calculating. Planning. Trying to figure out what to do with the crazy Omega who just killed six of their enemies and is now holding them at blade-point.
I should feel threatened.
