Riot studied him. The same confident stance, the same calculated charm, the same assumption that everyone had a price. Ken had built a career on being useful to dangerous people, and he’d survived this long by knowing exactly how much pressure to apply before things got messy.
He’d also spent years manipulating modified Berserkers into doing his dirty work, using artificial pheromones and carefully manufactured intimacy to keep them compliant. Riot had been young enough and desperate enough to mistake that for something real, once. He wasn’t anymore.
“We’re done,” Riot said. “Permanently. Find new specialists.”
“Just like that?” Ken’s eyebrows rose. “After everything we built together?”
“What we built was you making money off people too desperate to know better. I’m not desperate anymore.”
Something flickered in Ken’s expression like a blemish in the smooth facade that showed the calculation underneath. His pheromones shifted again, the Alpha musk fading into something sweeter, more seductive. An artificial heat, the kind designed to trigger protective and possessive responses in Alphas.
Two years ago, it might have worked. Now it just made Riot’s skin crawl. It was a cheap imitation of something real, nothing like the warm golden scent that had been haunting him since yesterday.
“Don’t,” he said quietly.
“Don’t what?” Ken stepped closer, his scent thickening. “Don’t remind you how good it used to be? You weren’t complaining back then, when you needed someone to take the edge off after a job. I seem to remember you being very—”
Riot moved.
He didn’t make a conscious decision to close the distance—his body just acted, all of his combat training translating thought into motion before his brain caught up. His hand closed around Ken’s throat, lifting the smaller man onto his toes and slamming him back against the shipping container hard enough to dent the metal.
Ken’s eyes went wide, his artificial pheromones sputtering into something that smelled like genuine fear. Good. Fear was honest. Fear didn’t try to manipulate him into bad decisions by pretending to be something it wasn’t.
“I said we’re done.” Riot’s voice came out low and rough. “That means we’re done. No contracts, no reunions, no walks down memory lane. You don’t contact us, you don’t look for us, you don’t mention our names to anyone asking questions.”
“Us,” Ken wheezed, his hands scrabbling uselessly at Riot’s grip. “So the whole team’s still together. Good to know.”
Riot squeezed harder, watching Ken’s face turn interesting colors. “That’s not information you want to have.”
“People will come looking eventually. The Syndicate doesn’t just let assets walk away—”
“Then the Syndicate can learn what happens when they push.” Riot leaned in close, letting Ken see exactly how thin his control was right now. “I’m not the same scared kid you recruited out of Gensyn’s reject pile. Neither are they. Send someone after us and you’ll be explaining to your bosses why their retrieval team came back in pieces.”
He held Ken there for another few seconds, letting the message sink in, then released him. Ken crumpled against the container, gasping and clutching his throat.
“You fucking psycho,” Ken rasped. “You know what your problem is? You actually believe you’re better than the rest of us. Like being too good for the Syndicate makes you some kind of hero instead of just another broken experiment with delusions of—”
Riot hit him once, precisely, in the temple. Ken’s eyes rolled back and he slid down the container to land in an undignified heap.
I should have done that two years ago, Riot thought, shaking out his hand. The knuckles the kid had bandaged were bleeding again, which felt like some kind of cosmic joke.I should have done a lot of things differently.
He left Ken unconscious in the industrial district and headed for the pharmacy. The encounter had burned off some of his restless energy, but it hadn’t done anything to quiet the part of his brain still fixated on caramel and cinnamon and wide hazel eyes.
Get the suppressants, get your chemistry under control, forget the princess exists.
It was a simple plan. He’d executed harder missions.
The pharmacy’s bulletin board held nothing but bad news.
“Supply chain delay,” the clerk explained with the casual indifference of someone who’d delivered this speech a hundred times. “Berserker-grade suppressants aren’t priority shipping. Two days minimum, maybe three.”
Two days. Riot could feel his control fraying already, worn thin by weeks of split doses and one very inconvenient encounter with an Omega who smelled like everything he’d ever wanted.
“I’ve got basic Alpha suppressants in stock,” the clerk offered. “It might take the edge off.”
“Those don’t work for modified.”For people whose biology got rewritten by corporate scientists playing god. “Just the order I placed.”
“Two days, then. You want me to hold it?”
