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I’m cuffed behind my back. Walsh already searched me. Pruitt knows that. He pats me down anyway, slow, real hard over the ribs, smiling the whole fucking time. Walsh looks at the ceiling.

Pruitt’s never done anything big. He’s not stupid enough for big. He does small. Tight cuffs. Lost mail. A shove on the stairs. Every day for years. Somebody’s paying him to do it, and one of these days I’m going to get curious about who.

“Clear,” he says.

“You sure? You missed a spot.”

His smirk slips. We keep walking.

Halfway down the next hall, there’s an old lifer working a mop. He doesn’t look up. Walsh steps wide around the wet floor. I don’t.

“Rian says it’s the bookkeeper,” the old man tells his mop. “Two years. Off the docks.”

I don’t slow down.

The mop keeps moving. By lights-out tonight, that’ll be all the way across the city. By tomorrow morning, a man who’s been stealing from my family for two years is going to be an example to everybody else who’s thinking about it.

Locked up. Not gone.

* * *

The visitation room is a concrete box. Steel table bolted to the floor, three chairs, a camera up in the corner. Walsh sits me down and cuffs my right wrist to the ring on the table. My wolf shoves at me hard. I breathe through it.

“Your counsel’ll be right in,” Walsh says, and he locks the door behind him.

Cillian Quinn’s been my family’s lawyer for fifteen years. He’s a slick prick in a four-thousand-dollar suit who’s never raised his voice in his life, because he’s spent twenty years learning how to fuck people without wrinkling his tie. He’s also an Alpha, and a wolf, and the only man alive with the balls to tell me to my face when I’m being a cunt. That’s probably why I’ve never fired him.

We’ve been doing the same dance for four years. Appeals. Motions. Evidence. Him telling me that if I’d just give him one fucking inch, one name, he could turn it into a mile. Me telling him to go find it somewhere else.

I killed Patrick Doyle. I’m not going to lie about that. He put his hands on something that was mine, he knew what the price would be, and he got it. I’ve never lost a single second of sleep over it.

But the problem is, the state was never supposed to be able to prove it.

I hear footsteps out in the hall. Two sets. Weird. Cillian always comes alone.

My wolf stops pacing.

I sit up.

Then a scent comes in under the door, and everything in me just fucking… stops.

My heart. My lungs. My whole fucking brain. For a second, I don’t even know what I’m smelling. It’s warm. It’s sweet. Vanilla, brown sugar, clean skin, and woman. Omega.

No.

Not an omega.

MINE.

The wolf hits me so hard my chair screeches back across the floor. I grab the edge of the table. There’s claws coming out of my fingers. I didn’t tell them to do that.

What the fuck? What the FUCK?!

I’m forty-five years old. I’ve smelled a thousand omegas. I’ve never in my life… It’s getting stronger. She’s getting closer. My mouth’s watering. My dick’s hard as a rock, in a prison jumpsuit, chained to a table, off a fucking smell.

The lock turns. Cillian comes in.

I don’t even see him. There’s somebody behind him. Somebody small enough that his shoulders are blocking her.