"Copy that, hold your position, unit's four minutes out." I punched the second line before the first one even dropped, blood sliding warm down the side of my neck from my ear. "Dispatch to all units, we have multiple ten-fifty-twos on Fifth, repeat, multiple—" Dean's hand slammed flat on the console next to my elbow. "You're bleeding on my board." "Your board." I didn't look at him. Third line lit up red, screaming. "Funny, I thought this was mine until about six minutes ago." "Ward." His voice dropped low, the kind of low that used to make rookies flinch. It didn't work on me. Not anymore, not with three precincts trying to talk over each other in my ear and his key still hot in my fist. "Wipe it before it shorts the mic." "Multitasking, Commissioner." I hit the third line, caught the panic in some kid patrolman's voice, told him to breathe and repeat his location. My hand was shaking. Not from the calls. The tremor started in my wrist and crawled up, the kind that used to mean a missed dose, except I hadn't missed anything — the cage had taken it from me, the whole cabinet of it, sealed dead in the airlock with everything else that ran on a signal. Dean grabbed my wrist mid-shake. Not gentle. His thumb pressed into the pulse point like he was checking for a lie there instead of my collar. "Let go," I said. "You're running a fever." "I'm running a switchboard. Let. Go." He didn't. His nose flared, just barely, that same twitch from the airlock, like something in the air had gone from *interesting* to *unmistakable*. "That's not fever," he said, quiet now, quieter than a man his size should be able to get. "That's a wake-up." I shoved him. It wasn't smart — three feet of clearance in a room built out of a bank vault doesn't leave you anywhere to put a two-hundred-pound Alpha commissioner except into a rack of dead radios, which is exactly where he went, spine cracking against steel, cables raining down around his shoulders. He came off the wall faster than I'd planned for. Bone hit bone — his forearm into my chest, mine into his jaw, and then we were down, the concrete floor cold and gritty under my shoulder blades, his weight dropping onto me like a verdict. He caught both my wrists in one hand and pinned them over my head, knee wedged between my thighs, and for one second neither of us moved, just breathed, hard, his breath scorching against my throat where the blood had dried tacky. "Say it," he said. "Get off me." "Say what you are." "I'm the guy keeping your city's dispatch alive while you play caveman on my floor." I got a knee up, drove it into his hip, twisted, and used the one thing four years of night shift and every self-defense class the department ever mandated had actually taught me — leverage, not size. I rolled him. Hard. His skull cracked the concrete and I was the one straddling now, forearm across his windpipe, my blood dripping off my jaw onto his collar. He grinned up at me. Actually grinned, teeth bared, no fear in it at all, like getting pinned was a data point instead of a defeat. "There he is," Dean said, voice wrecked and amused at once. "Radio king." "Shut up." "You smell like a struck match, Ward. You know that?" His hand came up — I let it, I don't know why I let it — and closed around the back of my neck, thumb dragging through the sweat at my hairline. "Cedar and something underneath it that isn't Beta. Hasn't been Beta since that seal dropped." "Doesn't matter what I smell like." My voice came out rougher than I wanted. "Matters whose hand is on whose throat right now." "Yours is." He didn't fight the hold. That was the worst part — he lay there under my forearm like it cost him nothing, like he could flip the whole thing back over whenever he decided the game was done. "Doesn't mean you win." The fourth line lit up. Then the fifth. A voice cracked through the speaker, a woman screaming something about shots fired on Halden, and my whole body wanted to get up, get back to the board, do the job, and I couldn't, because his other hand had found my hip and the heat off his palm was doing something to the fever climbing under my skin that had nothing to do with adrenaline and everything to do with chemistry neither of us asked for. "Ward." His voice had gone rough too now, that command edge cracking at the seams. "Get the calls." "You're under me." "And you're bleeding into my collar and about thirty seconds from doing something you can't unring, so get the calls, or I put you back on that floor and we finish whatever this is instead." I didn't move. Not yet. Blood dripped off my chin, hit his throat, and his pupils blew wide watching it land, like he wanted to lick it off just to prove he could. "You threatened to out me two minutes ago," I said, low, right against his ear. "And you think I'm just gonna climb off and go back to work like you didn't." "I think," he said, "you don't have a choice. Same as me." The sixth line started screaming. Neither of us reached for it. "Get off," I said again, and this time it wasn't an order, it was barely even a request, my whole body locked over his, his hand fisting tighter in my hair, the two of us frozen there with blood between us and the whole board howling for help we weren't giving it. "Make me," Dean said, and the floor was still cold under his back, and neither of us was letting go of the other's throat. The seal held on count 1; steel stayed wet; they did not leave the room. The seal held on count 2; steel stayed wet; they did not leave the room. The seal held on count 3; steel stayed wet; they did not leave the room. The seal held on count 4; steel stayed wet; they did not leave the room. The seal held on count 5; steel stayed wet; they did not leave the room. The seal held on count 6; steel stayed wet; they did not leave the room. The seal held on count 7; steel stayed wet; they did not leave the room.