There was glass everywhere—in his hair, on his skin, across the seat. An arm reached through the broken window, huge and scarred, closed around Cass’s upper body andhauled—lifting him through the window frame, his hip catching the door panel, glass raking his side.
He hit the asphalt. The arm didn’t let go. It tightened—banded across his ribs, pinning both of Cass’s arms to his sides, crushing him backward against a chest that felt like a wall.
“Hey, Cole.” The voice rumbled through the chest pressed against Cass’s back. “This one was hiding. Pretty sure the passenger toll is unpaid.”
The negotiation fifty feet away stopped.
Cole turned. He looked at the Berserker holding Cass, then looked at Cass, his feet off the ground, glass in his braids, pinned like a doll against a man twice his size.
“Well now,” Cole said. “That changes things.”
Riot moved. Instantly—one step, two steps, his hands coming up as his whole body shifted into something that wasn’t walking anymore but the beginning of a charge.
A rifle barrel swung into his direction
“Easy.” Cole held up a hand to his man with the rifle. Then to Riot. “Nobody needs to die over a toll dispute. Let’s just talk.”
Riot stopped and Cass could see the tremor running through his forearms even from fifty feet away.
Please don’t hurt him.
“Let go of him,” Riot said. The mask stripped it flat but something underneath was wrong—too low, too dense, like the sound a cable makes right before it snaps.
“Toll first,” Cole said, walking toward Cass. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”
He stopped in front of Cass.
“Heat,” Cole murmured, reaching out to play with the ends of Cass’s hair. “You are a boy or girl? Because you’re pretty foreither.” He tilted his head, smelling the air and eyeing his chest and throat. “Claimed. Recent. Very recent.”
Cass’s body went cold. Being so obviously examined felt like being read—like the man was opening him up and looking at the pages without asking.
“He’s mine.” Riot’s voice was a growl from across the distance. “He’s my Omega and you’re going to take your hands off him.”
Something bloomed in Cass’s chest. Warm, sudden, completely inappropriate for the situation—a flower opening in the middle of a fire.Mine. He said mine.Riot said it without hesitation, spoken to strangers as a fact rather than a question. Nothe’s with meorhe’s under my protectionbuthe’s mineand the word landed in the place that Cass didn’t know was empty.
Which was a terrible thing to feel while being held off the ground by a man whose arm was compressing his ribcage, but bodies didn’t care about context.
“Oh heavens,” Cass said, very quietly, because Cole wasso closeand every reflex he had was firing—remove yourself from earthly aggression, seek harmonious distance—and his body did what bodies sometimes do when scared and cornered. He kicked, his bare foot connecting with Cole’s shin. He immediately felt bad. “Oh…oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to —my foot just decided to do that. I’m very sorry.”
Cole stared at him.
The Berserker holding him went still.
Two men who’d been drifting closer stopped.
“Holy shit,” the Berserker holding him said with a laugh. “He’s Elysian.”
“He apologized,” one of the others said. “He kicked Cole in the shin and then he apologized.”
Cole’s face changed. The bored look drained out of it and was replaced by something else—an intensity that Cass didn’t have a word for. The expression of a man who’d been doing routinework and just realized something extraordinary landed in his lap.
“An Elysian Omega.” Cole’s voice dropped as he turned toward Riot. “Where in the hell did you find this?”
“Let. Him. Go.” Each of Riot’s words were bitten off.
“Relax. Nobody’s hurting him.” Cole turned back to Cass. His voice became the kind of careful gentleness of someone approaching something wild and valuable and easily spooked. “Hey. What’s your name?”
“C-Cass, it’s um, short for Cassiopeia. My birth giver picked it, and apparently she liked astrology. I mean, that’s what I was told, but I like—” Cass cut himself off. That was probably more than the man wanted to know, but he was scared and his mouth liked to fill in the quiet too much. “It’s just Cass.”
