Page 8 of The Girl Beneath the Sea

Warm vanilla and sweet strawberry, shot through with terror, and the blockers they soaked him in don’t matter at all. Every instinct I own comes up at once and roars mine. I grab the doorframe and hold on.

I’m hard in two heartbeats, from a scent, through a bucket and bilge water and a wall of blockers.

Thirty-four years old, and my body picks now, picks this, picks him.

The lantern light finds him in the corner.

He’s on the floor against the far wall, knees up, hands cuffed in front of him. He’s wearing half a suit — dress shirt torn at the shoulder, no tie, no shoes, one sock. There’s pale blond hair stuck down with sweat. He has pressed himself as far into the corner as the steel will let him. His face is turned to the wall so I can’t see it.

There’s a bruise coming up on his collarbone and a raw ring where the cuffs have been working at his wrists.

Whoever packed him didn’t do it gently, and the sight of that puts a slow heat in the back of my skull that has no business being there.

Then the air from the open door reaches him, and he flinches.

He turns toward me and I see him.

I know the face.

It’s been on every TV over every bar for weeks, smiling on cue in front of a map with mountains on it.

The fucking hothouse prince of Monteverra.

Oh shit.

His nostrils flare as he looks at me. His eyes go wider, and confusion gets in with the fear. He’s scenting me too. Whatever is happening to me is happening to him, and he understands it even less than I do.

I crouch, slow, and set the blankets inside the door. The water. The granola bar. He watches my hands the whole time. I back out of the doorway without turning around.

I am in so much trouble.

3. Aurelio

The bolt goes home. Then the padlocks. I hear his boots cross the steel outside. A hatch bangs. After that there is nothing but water sounds and me.

I am shaking. That part is expected. It’s cold and shock. It’s the rest of it that doesn’t make sense.

I am hard. I am flushed to the chest, my mouth is wet, and it feels as if every nerve in my body is directed out the door and to the alpha who just left. I press my cuffed hands against my sternum and wait for my body to settle.

It refuses.

I have spent my entire life managing my emotions, making sure that whatever might be raging behind my skin does not show on my face.

Now one enormous man in a wool mask has my heart going hard enough that it feels it is going to jump out of my chest.

I want him. Now. Here. Even with me cuffed and torn sitting on a plywood floor in a steel box.

It’s obscene. I can’t make the thoughts stop.

So I do the only thing I have ever been any good at. I turn my brain to analyzing it.

First thought: perhaps this is what an unbonded alpha does to an omega at close range. I wouldn’t know. I have never been within five feet of one.

If that’s the answer, then the walls they keep me behind make a new and ugly kind of sense.

Second possibility: the drugs. When the car finally stopped, I was pulled out by block-scented alphas in masks. I struggled, of course I did. That’s when my suit ripped. Even so, they were so strong. Two held me down while the third slipped a needle into my arm and the world went dark.

Whatever was in the needle is still in my blood. Chemicals do strange things. Possibly they do this.