The blood is warmer than the concrete.

That's the thought I keep circling back to while I wedge myself deeper behind the stack of crates. The floor of Sal Ferraro's warehouse is February-cold, the kind of cold that lives in poured cement and never leaves, and my blood is the only heat left in the place. It's pooling under my shirt, soaking into the waistband of my jeans, and I can feel the exact shape of the wound because the heat has a border. Three inches below the left armpit. The gap between the ribs where the knife found room.

I don't remember the guy's face. That's the part that stings worse than the hole in my side. Some scrawny tweaker in a hoodie who shouldn't have been able to get close enough to breathe on me, let alone open me up, and I can't even picture him. He came out of the dark between the crate stacks like he'd been waiting there since the lights went off, and by the time I registered the movement the blade was already in and out. Fast work. Clean. Someone taught him.

My backup was supposed to be watching the east entrance. Danny. Donny. Something with a D. I'd worked with him twice before. He talked too much, flinched at shadows, and Sal insisted he was solid. When I hit the floor and rolled, the east entrance was empty.

So either he ran… or he was never meant to stay.

I press my palm harder against the wound and let my head fall back against the crate. The wood is splintering at the corner, rough against my skull. The industrial lights overhead hum at a frequency that makes my back teeth ache, and somewhere deeper in the warehouse a pipe knocks twice and goes quiet. The loading dock is thirty feet to my left, a massive roll-up door that's been locked since we secured the floor at eleven. The air tastes like diesel and old cardboard.

I know how this ends.

I've been on enough jobs to recognize the shape of a cleanup. An Omega bleeds out on a warehouse floor, and the crew doesn't want questions, and Sal sends someone to make sure the body doesn't turn up somewhere inconvenient. The cleaner will walk in, see me behind the crates, and finish what the tweaker started.

Efficient.

Professional.

Nothing personal.

I've known the math since I was sixteen. Omegas are useful until they aren't. As long as we're earning someone money, we're worth protecting. The second we're not, we're an expense.

Tonight my expiration date is spreading across the concrete beneath me.

I catalog my vitals the way I was taught, back when someone still bothered to teach me things. Pulse: too fast. Breathing: shallow, and catching on the inhale. I've got maybe twenty minutes before the edges of my vision start going gray. The knife missed the lung. I'm almost sure it missed the lung. If it had hit the lung I'd be drowning by now, and I'm not drowning, I'm just leaking.

I think about Sal's contract. The one he had me sign in the back of a bar in Astoria, five years ago, when I was still running jobs for whoever would hire an Omega who didn't smell like submission. The contract said I'd be paid for muscle work and compensated for injuries sustained on the job. It didn't say anything about what happens when the injury is the job. It didn't say anything about backup who vanish and knives that find the one gap in your ribs where the vest doesn't cover.

Sal's not coming. If Sal wanted me alive, Danny-or-Donny would still be at the east entrance. The tweaker wouldn't have known exactly where to stand.

The pipe knocks again. Somewhere in the dark, a rat scrabbles across the concrete.

I've bled on warehouse floors in every borough of this city, but I've never waited for the cleaner.

Fighting is easy. Your body takes over before your brain can interfere.

Waiting is your body telling you it's dying while your mind counts all the reasons it was always going to end this way.

I shift my weight and the wound pulls, a bright hot spike that makes my breath stop for a full second. When it comes back, it comes back shallow.

I hear the loading dock door open.

The sound is unmistakable. The grind of metal on metal, the rattle of the chain, the sudden rush of February air that cuts through the diesel smell and brings the cold in with it. Someone's come in from the outside.

Someone who had a key, or knew how to get through a locked loading dock, because that door had been locked at eleven and I'd watched it happen.

I don't call out. If it's the cleaner, calling out just makes his job easier. If it's someone else, I don't want to be the thing that draws their attention.

The footsteps are slow. Measured. Not the scuttle of a tweaker in a hoodie, not the nervous shuffle of Danny-or-Donny coming back to check if I'm still breathing. These are the footsteps of someone who knows exactly where he is and exactly how long he has. They move from the loading dock into the main floor, pausing at intervals, and I can track his progress by the way the sound changes when he passes from open concrete to the spaces between the crate stacks.

Then the scent hits me.

Alpha.

It rolls through the warehouse like a weather front, thick and unmistakable, and every Omega instinct I've spent thirteen years burying lights up at once. My spine wants to curve. My throat wants to bare. The animal part of my brain that I've trained into silence starts screaming at me to make myself small, to show submission, to do whatever it takes to survive. I clamp down on it so hard my jaw aches. I've never submitted to an Alpha in my life, and I'm not going to start now, not even with a hole in my side and my blood turning cold on the floor.

The footsteps stop.

I look up.

He's standing at the edge of my crate stack, maybe ten feet away, and he's bigger than I expected. Broad through the shoulders, shaved head, a beard that's more gray than black. A pale scar vanished beneath the gray of his beard, as if someone had once tried to cut his throat and failed. He's wearing a jacket that's too thin for February and boots that have seen hard use, and he's holding himself the way someone holds themselves when they've been in enough fights to stop counting. Still. Patient. The stillness of a man who doesn't need to move fast because he's already decided how the next thirty seconds are going to go.

His eyes find me in the dark without hesitation. He doesn't look surprised.

"You're still alive," he says.

His voice is low, rough at the edges, and it doesn't give me anything to work with. Not relief, not disappointment. Just a statement of fact.

"Give me a minute," I say.

Something moves at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. Something smaller.

He crosses the distance between us in three strides and drops into a crouch. Up close, his scent is overwhelming. Pine and something sharper underneath, something that makes my pulse jump in my throat. He doesn't touch me. He looks at the blood, at the way I'm holding my hand against my side, at the angle of my shoulders against the crate.

"You're Joe Moretti," he says.

"Depends who's asking."

"Cory Vasquez." He says it like the name should mean something to me. It doesn't. "I was sent to clean up."

There it is. The confirmation I've been waiting for. My hand presses harder against the wound, and the spike of pain clears my head a little.

"Then get it over with," I say. "I'm not going to make it interesting for you."

He doesn't move.

Something changes. Not in his face. In the way he looks at me. Like he'd reached a decision before I knew there was one to make.

"You're an Omega," he says.

I try to shrug. Pain stops it halfway. "Hard to hide."

He reaches out. I tense, every muscle locking, but he doesn't go for my throat. His hand closes around my forearm, the one with the Crown Heights scar, and he pulls my hand away from the wound. The pressure releases and the blood surges, hot and fresh, and I make a sound I don't mean to make.

"You'll bleed out in fifteen minutes if I leave you here," he says. His thumb is on the inside of my wrist, pressed against my pulse. "You didn't call for help."

"Wasn't any help to call for."

"You didn't run."

"Can't run with a hole in your side."

He looks at me for a long moment. Then he lets go of my wrist, and before I can process what's happening, he's got one arm under my shoulders and the other under my knees, and he's lifting me off the concrete like I weigh nothing. The movement jostles the wound and I bite down on a noise that wants to be a shout, and then I'm against his chest, and his scent is everywhere, and my body is screaming at me to fight or submit or do something, but all I can do is grab a handful of his jacket and hold on.

"What are you doing," I manage.

"Changing the math."

He carries me toward the loading dock. The cold air hits my face before we reach the door, and it's the sharpest thing I've felt in an hour, sharper than the knife and sharper than the concrete. My blood is soaking into his jacket now. He doesn't seem to notice.

"Sal sent you to clean up," I say. My voice comes out thinner than I want it to. "You're supposed to finish me."

"I know what I'm supposed to do."

We cross the threshold of the loading dock, and the night opens up around us. The sky is the color of old snow, and the air smells like the East River, and somewhere in the distance a truck is grinding through its gears. Cory Vasquez's grip on me doesn't loosen. If anything, it tightens, his forearm a bar of pressure across my back, his other hand hooked under my knees like he's been carrying me for years instead of thirty seconds.

"Why," I say.

He doesn't answer. He walks me toward a dark sedan parked at the edge of the dock, and the cold keeps coming, and I keep bleeding, and the Alpha sent to kill me carries me into the night like he never intended to let me die.