Callum

Pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose, I stared at the three browser tabs open across my screens, building a profile for the female omega Jonas had emailed me about at four in the morning.

Rachel Doyle was twenty-eight with a six-week-old son. Her boyfriend had been murdered two months ago in a Pittsburgh parking garage, the local paper calling it a botched mugging, Jonas calling it a Genesis Protocol cleanup. He’d been a raven shifter, a secret he’d kept from her for the eight years they were together, right up until the morning he died and made her swear the baby would never land on a registry under either of their names. If anything happened, she would take the boy and run.

That was two weeks ago. She found a Genesis surveillance car idling outside a grocery store and finally understood what the promise had been for. Now she was riding north in one of our secure transports, a terrified mother and an infant, almost certainly a shifter too, heading to my property to collect the papers that would make them both someone else before the border.

I should’ve finished the third draft of the baby’s paperwork by now. Instead, the kettle had gone cold, and the cursor on the birth certificate was still blinking in the same blank field.

Taking a long breath, I leaned back in the chair until the lumbar support creaked under me. Dragging a hand through my hair and down across my beard, I pulled my glasses off to set them on the desk beside the keyboard. The blue glare from the monitors had been working at my eyes since dawn, and the relief once I took them off was immediate but not enough.

Of course, Jonas hadn’t called me back.

The bastard hadn’t returned either of the two calls I’d placed to him after I hung up on him the first time yesterday morning. He’d sent two emails through the secure channel we used for the actual work, one with Rachel Doyle’s case file and another with three lines of cleanup notes about Maren, and he’d gone silent in every other channel since.

That wasn’t Jonas. He’d talk to a wall if there was nobody else in the room. He talked the entire time we cleared houses, the entire time we drove, and the entire time we ate. The only times in twenty-two years that Jonas had ever gone radio silent on me were the times he was in motion on something he knew I would have shut down.

The bear in my chest had been pacing since the sun came up.

I told him to sit, and he responded by calling me an idiot. We were still fighting about it when the property’s quiet broke. A low rumble of an engine drifted up the road.

The road was a mile and a half of packed dirt with a switchback at the halfway mark, and I knew the engine of every vehicle that came up it. Frank drove his diesel delivery truck on Tuesdays and Saturdays, while the propane tank truck arrived the first week of every month. The mail carrier brought her Subaru on the days she felt like driving all the way to the box at the end of the drive instead of leaving the package at the bottom. UPS only showed up once in a great while. None of them were due today, and none of them had the timing rhythm of what was coming up the road now. The sound belonged to an older four-cylinder engine running much too hot, carrying a slight internal knock as it struggled in low gear for a driver who didn’t trust the switchback.

I dragged the mouse over and pulled up the security feed on the laptop.

The camera at the bottom of the drive was clean and high-mounted, pointed down the road toward the county turn-in, and the resolution was good enough for me to read a license plate at fifty yards. What I saw on the feed was a battered gray Hyundai sedan with Georgia plates on the back and paint bleached down from the sun. A single figure sat behind the wheel with the hood of a black jacket pulled up over his head.

His face stayed hidden under the hood, and it didn’t matter.

The dark curls had pushed loose around the edge of the hood, matching the wild curls I’d been turning over in the photograph on my phone since Jonas sent it. The line of his jaw under the hood was the same line that had been laughing in that picture. The exhausted body slumped in the driver’s seat was the same body I’d spent a day and a night telling myself I wouldn’t let in, even if he walked up to my door.

And now Santiago Vega was driving up to my door.

I snapped the laptop shut. Jonas was a dead man. Driving to Montana and skinning him alive in his own kitchen seemed like the only reasonable response, leaving the laptop running so the four monitors he loved more than his own sister recorded the whole thing.

I pushed off the desk, and the chair rolled back into the wall behind me with a loud bounce. The bear had been on his feet since the Hyundai cleared the switchback, and now he threw himself at the cage of me.

My breaths had gotten shorter and none of them came clean. I tried for one and then reached for another before the third stuck between my throat and my sternum.

I walked out of the office and across the living room toward the front door because if I stayed at the desk another moment, the bear was going to put me through the wall.

I opened the inner door and stepped out onto the porch behind the screen. I planted one hand on my waist and brought the other up to pinch the bridge of my nose hard enough to leave a print. Standing there barefoot on the boards in my jeans and an open flannel, I tried to find the bottom of my breath.

The Hyundai came to a halt at the foot of the porch steps.

The engine ran a beat longer than it should have, the four cylinders ticking down through the knock and into silence before the entire property went still. Santiago was sitting behind the wheel with his head bent and his hands still gripping the leather, and the shake in his shoulders was visible from where I stood.

I cracked my fingers away from my nose enough to look through them, and I watched him sit frozen in the car for a long, grueling minute.

Then he reached across the passenger seat for a duffel bag, and his movements told me everything I needed to know before he ever opened the door. Santiago pulled the strap toward him with a hand that trembled the whole way and closed his grip on the canvas with more strength than he had left to give. When he turned back toward the driver’s side, he moved his head before the rest of him followed, and he caught himself against the headrest before his body caught up.

My feet were moving and I’d crossed half the porch before I got them stopped at the top of the steps, one hand clamped on the rail to keep them there.

Santiago pushed the driver’s door open and it stuck on a rusted hinge. He shouldered it the rest of the way with the duffel already clutched across his front, half-falling out of the car onto his feet in the gravel and catching himself on the door frame with his free hand.

The breeze picked up across the porch from his direction.

It came up the steps and across the boards toward me. For a passing breath, it was just the wet scent of decaying leaves mixed with river water and engine exhaust, and then his heat hit me.

A wave of crisp green apple washed over me, snapping cold under my teeth and aching the back of my jaw before giving way to the dry warmth of cinnamon and clove. It brought to mind a kitchen in late October and an apple pie baked entirely without sugar, leaving only the pure essence of the fruit and the bite of the spice completely free of anything sweetened or soft.

The apple went all the way down before I knew I’d breathed in. I couldn’t have stopped it if I’d been holding a silver bane bullet gun to my own head. The bear rose up the length of my spine hard enough that the porch boards moved under me, dropping my canines down inside my mouth before my jaw even clenched while the world flattened into scent and instinct.

My vision went hazy at the edges and narrowed at the center, and what stayed in focus was the omega standing in front of my house.

He had pushed his hood back the rest of the way getting out of the car. His curls were a mess from the hood, the grueling drive, and the night he’d clearly been surviving. His eyes were bloodshot all the way to the iris, bracketed by puffy, swollen skin from hours of crying. His nose was pink at the tip, matching lips that were swollen and split on the bottom where he’d been biting them. His face was the face from the photograph and a stranger at the same time, because the night had scrubbed all the joy out of him.

I clenched my teeth around the canines and the growl came up out of my throat before I had words for it.

“Do not take another step.”

It wasn’t me but the bear using my mouth, rough and far louder than I’d meant it to be. The sound carried across the gravel and struck the omega hard enough that I watched him flinch and rock back on his heels.

Santiago froze with one hand on the door of the Hyundai and the other gripping the strap of the duffel held against his sternum.

“Get back in your car,” I said. “Turn around and get off my property.”

He remained still, gazing at me with his mouth slightly open and his throat working. His head tilted half an inch to the side, exposing the line of his throat to me, while his pupils dilated in a face already glazed with heat.

The bear answered the gesture for me. My cock was already hard against the front of my pants and had been since the wind brought the pheromone up the steps. I was trembling, and my claws sat just under the skin of my fingertips, waiting for me to give them an inch.

Santiago moved his lips before he cleared his throat, and the voice he forced out was wrecked.

“Someone sent me.” He stopped and dragged in a breath that looked like it cost him more than he had left, and he tried again. “Someone sent me here. He said you’d help.”

That fucking Jonas.

“He told you wrong.” My jaw locked so tight the words came out around the canines. “I can’t do anything for you. Get back in the car.”

His face cracked then, and it almost took my legs out from under me. The tears welled up in those bloodshot eyes and went over the lids without him doing a thing to hold them back. Santiago didn’t even try to wipe them away. He stood there in the gravel at the foot of my porch with the duffel clutched in front of him, curls hiding his forehead, and let the tears track down his cheeks without breaking eye contact with me.

“Please.” The word cracked in the middle but he pushed past it. “I drove for so long. Taking power naps in rest stops, I only parked where I was sure it was safe. I don’t know if anyone followed me, I don’t know if they have my plates, I don’t…”

He cut himself off and stuttered the start of another word and lost it. He shook his head once, hard, and gripped the duffel tighter to stay planted where he was.

The heat was on him. Whatever endurance he had was used up. Santiago didn’t seem to see what the wind was doing to me, or what I was holding back from doing to him, or that the only thing between him and a knot he hadn’t asked for was a screen door, a set of porch stairs, and the last fragment of my Bureau training.

I extended my arm across the porch and dropped into the register I hadn’t used on a mate in six years.

“Stop right there.”

The alpha command landed on him before the words finished. His body went stiff, starting from the soles of his sneakers and moving upward. His shoulders went rigid against his will, the duffel pinned in front of him, and his head jerked back half an inch as if the order had taken him by the throat. He stared up at me with his mouth open.

The shock came across his face in a wave. He fought the order with a full-body tremor, straining to break free while his fingers worked uselessly against the canvas strap, but his jaw only shook and his feet stayed rooted exactly where the command had pinned them.

I hadn’t touched him and didn’t need to. The order had reached down into the omega part of him and held it still, and the man in him was now caught against the inside of his own skin trying to claw his way back to his feet.

It was the cruelest thing I’d done to anyone in a long time.

“Go back to your car,” I said, in the same register. “Turn it around and drive back the way you came. Whoever sent you here lied to you. I do not do retrievals, I do not take walk-ins, and there is nothing for you here.”

The new command released the first. His shoulders dropped as the lock came off his body and the order let him move, but the only direction he moved was deeper into the tears. Santiago’s face was wet to the jaw, and he swayed once on his feet, catching himself on the Hyundai’s door with the hand that wasn’t holding the duffel, and even then, he didn’t get back in.

Santiago opened his mouth to argue. I saw the stubborn line of his jaw come up before he found the words.

If he said one more word in that wrecked rasp with his throat tilted at me, the bear was going to come down those steps, and there wasn’t going to be any going back from that for either of us.

I turned around and made it as far as the screen door, my hand on the handle and my shoulder already turning into the house, when something in the corner of my eye registered wrong—a movement that did not match the rest of the picture. Santiago, standing where I had left him, swaying once on his feet and not catching himself this time.

His knees folded, and the duffel slid off his shoulder and hit the gravel. The rest of him went after it, dropping forward and to the side, his head already loose on his neck before the ground came up to meet him.

I was off the porch before my left foot finished leaving the boards. Down the three steps in one drop, across the gravel, and I caught him under the arms and the back of the skull just before his face hit the ground.

His body was lighter than it should have been. The skin at the back of his neck burned under my palm, and the apple and the spice were everywhere now, in my mouth, in my throat, rising off him where his cheek met my shoulder. Santiago was a dead weight against my chest, his head loose against my collarbone, his breath shallow against the side of my throat.

My bear sat down. Quiet, watchful.

I knelt on my gravel with him in my arms and looked down at the curls plastered to his forehead and the pink split lip and the bloodshot eyes shut now, and I knew in the bones of me that I was not going to put him back in the Hyundai.

I adjusted him in my arms until I had his weight balanced across both forearms, his head against my shoulder, and I stood up out of the gravel with the apple and the spice rising off his skin into the cool morning.

I carried him up the porch steps and through the screen door I had thrown closed against him not a minute before, and into the house I had spent six years keeping empty of anyone like him.

My fated mate.