Chapter 1

His hand pinned my jaw. Leather on my wrist. Pulse in my throat. Breath and scent and heat. "Move," Dean says, and his forearm hits my throat before the door even finishes hissing shut behind us. My shoulders slam the steel. The bunker light flickers, blue-white, ugly. His whole body's pressed into mine, boots between my boots, and I can feel his belt buckle grinding cold against my hip through two layers of Kevlar. "Get off me, Commissioner." "Not until you tell me why Dispatch flagged a Beta running triage on an Alpha riot line." His mouth is an inch off my ear. Cedar and gun oil and something underneath that, something hot, something that makes my knees want to buckle for no reason I'll admit to. "You smell wrong, Ward." "I smell like the inside of a Faraday cage that's been sealed for six hours. We all do." "No." He drags his knuckles down the side of my jaw, slow, like he's checking a wound. My tie clip — the fake badge I've worn eleven years, ELLIS WARD, BETA, DISPATCH SUPERVISOR — catches the light between us. "You smell like you're about to drop." I shove him. He doesn't move an inch, but I get a hand between us, get my palm flat on his chest, and for one second we're both breathing too hard in a box that's four feet wide. That's the whole problem with a Faraday bunker. No signal in, no signal out, no suppressant patch working once the copper mesh kills the transdermal charge. I found that out nine minutes ago when my patch went dead and my skin went from cool to burning in the time it took to say *oh no*. "There's a riot happening three floors up," I say. "You want to talk pheromones right now?" "I want to talk about why Precinct Four is asking for Supervisor Ward by name and Supervisor Ward's badge says something his glands don't." He reaches for my collar. I catch his wrist — grab it hard, thumb digging into the tendon, and for a second I actually think I've got him, actually think I'm the one holding the room, because that's my job, that's the only thing I've ever been good at, holding the room from behind a desk with a headset on. Then he twists his arm inside my grip like it costs him nothing and has me spun, chest to the wall, my own hand pinned flat between my shoulder blades. "Cute," he says, right against my ear. His free hand slides up my side, over my ribs, and stops at my collarbone where my shirt's already torn open from the stairwell. "Try again." "Dean." "Detective, if you're begging." "I'm not begging, I'm telling you the board upstairs is about to lose containment on six patrol units and I am the only person in this building who knows the frequency rotation." That gets him to loosen up, just slightly, just enough that I drive my elbow back into his sternum and twist free. We square off in the bunker's four square feet of floor space, both of us breathing like we ran here, both of us with our shirts wrecked from the same stairwell fight that put us in this box in the first place. His eyes go down. To my collarbone. To the sweat there that shouldn't smell like sugar and shouldn't be making his pupils blow wide like that. "Say it," he says. "Say what." "That you're not a Beta." "I'm exactly what my file says I am." "Your file's a lie and your body just told me so." He steps in again — close, closer, until the heat coming off him is the only warm thing in a bunker built to feel like a meat locker. "Eleven years running that board. Eleven years standing next to alphas twice your rank, giving orders, not once presenting. You think nobody noticed you never went into heat during a full moon lockdown?" "I noticed you never noticed me at all until the suppressant died." His hand comes up, slow, and this time I don't stop it. His thumb drags along my jaw, tilts my chin, and I hate — hate — how my whole spine goes loose for it. "I need that badge," he says. "You need the board more. You need somebody who can still route six precincts through one radio channel with no towers and no cell backup, and that's me, Dean, that's not the Beta on my file, that's eleven years of me being the only person who doesn't panic when the whole city calls in at once." "So keep the board." His other hand finds my tie clip. One flick and it's off, clattering to the concrete between our boots, ELLIS WARD BETA face-down on the floor. "Lose the lie." "That badge is the only thing standing between me and every alpha precinct captain deciding I need a knot instead of a headset." "I'm not every alpha captain." "You're worse. You're the one who'll use it." His jaw works. For one second — one — something crosses his face that isn't triumph, isn't the room-owning smirk he's worn at every command briefing I've ever sat through. It looks almost like he's mad at himself. "I haven't outed anybody in my life," he says. "You're standing here with your hand on my throat pulling my badge off the floor with your boot." "I'm standing here because in about four minutes this cage reopens and every alpha on that assault team is going to walk past you smelling exactly what I'm smelling right now, and you will not survive that hallway as Beta Ellis Ward." The overhead light stutters. Somewhere behind the steel, a klaxon starts winding up — the seal cycle, the airlock counting down whether we're ready or not. "Then let me out before it locks," I say, and I actually move for the door. He doesn't grab me. He just steps sideways, one shoulder against the frame, blocking it with nothing but the size of him and the fact that I can't make myself shove past that scent a second time. The seal fires. Metal clunks into metal, a sound with real finality to it, the kind you feel in your teeth. Six feet of steel between us and the riot, and no way out until the system cycles again. Dean's hand comes to rest at his own open collar, right where his throat is bare, right where a gland would be if he ever let anyone that close. "Betas don't smell like that," he says, and leans in. The seal held on count 1; steel stayed wet; they did not leave the room. He covered me, mouth on my mouth, and I couldn't move.