And we're here to find her before she finds us.
Kill her.
Eliminate the threat.
Move on with our lives like we didn't just snuff out the last remnants of a family our pack helped destroy.
The guilt sits heavy in my chest—a weight I've learned to carry without letting it show. Because what choice do I have? Kai saved my life. Gave me the way out of the underground performance troupe that treated me like property, like a thing to be displayed and discarded.
Without him, I'd still be there—chained to stages and water tanks and the endless cycle of escape acts that were slowly drowning me in ways that had nothing to do with water.
I owe him.
We all do.
Jett, with his silent kills and blood-soaked hands.
Blaze, with his knives and charm and the trauma he hides behind showmanship.
Me, with my locks, chains, and the scars on my wrists that mark me as someone who's spent too long being restrained.
We're bound to Kai by debt and loyalty and something that might be love if we were the kind of people capable of admitting it.
So when he says we go to Ruthless Academy?—
We go.
Even if it means walking into a viper's nest.
No matter if it means hunting down a girl whose only crime was surviving something we helped orchestrate.
The post office looms ahead, its ugly concrete facade somehow unwelcoming even by Ruthless standards. The building squats at the edge of the administrative district, all institutional grey walls and flickering lights that make everything look like it's dying.
I pause at the bottom of the steps.
Not because I'm hesitating—I can't afford to—but because something has caught my attention.
A scent.
It hits me before I can process it, slipping through the morning air like a whisper, like a secret, like something meant only for me.
Sweet.
God, it's sweet.
Frosted sugar and cherry blossom, layered over clean linen with something metallic underneath. But the dominant note—the one that makes my lungs seize and my heart stutter—is unmistakable.
Cotton candy.
Pure, concentrated sweetness that reminds me of circus tents and stolen moments and the only happy memories I have from a childhood that tried to kill me.
I know immediately it's an Omega.
No other designation carries scent like this—that volatile, intoxicating quality that bypasses the brain entirely and goes straight to somewhere more primal. But this isn't like any Omega scent I've encountered before. This is... different.
Dangerous.
The word surfaces unbidden, and I don't push it away.
