The air left Riot’s lungs in an explosive grunt. He staggered back, and Ken pressed the advantage with a flurry of quick strikes—throat, jaw, groin, all the targets that would end a fight fast.
He’s not trying to kill me. He’s trying to put me down.
Riot blocked the throat strike, took the jaw strike on his forearm instead of his face, and let the groin shot land because it gave him the opening he needed. Pain exploded through his pelvis, but he was already moving, grabbing Ken’s extended arm and using it as a lever to slam him face-first into the mahogany desk.
The impact cracked something—wood or bone, Riot didn’t care which.
Ken tried to spin out of the pin, but Riot had his weight on him now, one hand grinding Ken’s face into the desk while the other wrenched his arm up behind his back at an angle that threatened to dislocate the shoulder.
“You want to try that again?” Riot snapped. “Wearing his scent? You want to fucking try that again?”
Ken laughed, blood dripping from his nose onto the polished wood. “Just—demonstrating a point—about how compromised you are.” He wheezed as Riot wrenched his arm higher. “You never would have—reacted like this before. You’re losing control, Riot—”
Riot slammed his head into the desk again, cutting off the words. “Before is over.” Another slam. “I’m not that person anymore.” Another, harder. “And it stops being business—” He wrenched the arm until he felt something pop and Ken screamed. “—when you involve people I care about.”
He dropped Ken and stepped back, breathing hard. Ken slumped against the desk, cradling his dislocated shoulder with his good hand. But he was still smiling, blood on his teeth.
“There he is,” he said softly. “There’s the monster Gensyn made. I was wondering if he was still in there.”
Walk away. Get the suppressants and walk away before you kill him.
Riot headed for the storage room.
The pharmaceutical supplies could have outfitted a small military unit. Suppressants in every grade and formulation, from the weak over-the-counter stuff that barely took the edge off to the military-spec doses that could flatline a Berserker episode in seconds. Combat stimulants. Painkillers. Things that didn’t have labels, stored in black cases with biometric locks.
Riot found his delayed order on a shelf near the back—three months of Berserker-specific suppressants, enough for him and Stave and Prepper. The vials clinked against each other as heshoved them into his jacket pockets, his hands still shaking with unspent adrenaline.
One dose would bring his hormones back into balance, smooth out the ragged edges of his control, and make it easier to think about something other than Cass’s heat-scent and Cass’s skin and Cass’s soft sounds of pleasure.
Take it. Take the edge off. Be safer.
But something twisted in his gut at the thought. Brother Matthias was in that hotel room right now, doing something that made Cass lie. Something that made him afraid.
Riot didn’t want to be dulled for whatever came next.
He pocketed the vial without uncapping it.
Twenty-six minutes.
The hotel’s alley smelled like garbage and old piss, but Riot barely noticed. He positioned himself beneath Cass’s bathroom window, back pressed against brick, and focused on the sounds drifting down from above.
“—necessary to reopen some of the previous points, Brother Cassiopeia.” Brother Matthias’s voice was calm, clinical, with that particular cadence Riot recognized from his post-modification days. Handlers who thought they’d unlocked the secret to controllable Berserkers. People who spoke gently while they did terrible things. “The negative energy has been building.”
Floorboards creaked overhead. Movement. Someone crossing the room.
“I understand,” Cass said, and Riot’s chest clenched at the resignation in his voice. He sounded sad. And scared. “How many points?”
“The standard ones first. Then two new locations to address the earthly attachments that seem to be interfering with your spiritual development.”
The first sound made his whole body go rigid—a sharp, pained whimper that cut through the air like a blade. Then another. Then soft sobbing that Cass was clearly trying to muffle.
No. No no no—
The scent of blood drifted down from the open window. Fresh copper, bright and wrong. And underneath it, something that made Riot’s stomach heave—
Alpha pheromones. Heavy. Unmistakable. Aroused.
He’s getting off on this. The sick fuck is hurting him and getting off on it.
