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Iwake up on a concrete floor with a headache that feels like someone parked a car on my skull.

The first thing I register is cold. Bone-deep, industrial cold, the kind that comes from concrete and metal and no insulation. The second thing I register is dark. Not complete dark. A yellowish light filters from somewhere above me, weak and buzzing, a bare fluorescent bulb in a high ceiling. The third thing I register is the zip tie around my wrists.

I lie still. I keep my eyes half-closed. See everything. Be afraid of nothing. The words come to me with a clarity that cuts through the pain in my head, my father’s voice in my memory, steady and calm, a man who lived among predators for fifteen years and survived by paying attention.

I pay attention.

The room is large and mostly empty. A warehouse or a storage facility, industrial shelving along the walls, a rolling door at the far end that’s closed and bolted. The floor beneath me is poured concrete, stained with oil and cracked in places, cold enough that I can feel it through my clothes. There are three men in the room. Two are by the rolling door, sitting in folding chairs, talking in low voices. The third is closer, maybe fifteen feet from me, leaning against a support column with his phone in his hand.

I remember. Walking out of my apartment building. The cold air on my face. Reaching for my phone to call a cab. Then hands, fast and rough, grabbing me from behind. A cloth over my mouth, sweet and chemical, the world tilting sideways. A car door slamming. After that, nothing.

They drugged me. Something on the cloth, enough to knock me out but not enough to kill me. Which means they want me alive. Which means this is leverage, not an execution.

I test the zip tie. It’s tight around my wrists, which are bound behind my back, and the plastic digs into my skin when I twist. My ankles aren’t bound. My mouth isn’t gagged. My phone is gone, I can feel its absence from my pocket, and my bag is nowhere in sight.

The bond is strange. I reach for it the way I’ve learned to reach for it over the past weeks, searching for the doubled heartbeat, the warm presence in my chest that tells me Dominic is there. What I find is muffled. Distant. Like hearing music through a wall. The drugs or the distance is dampening it, or both. I can feel him, but faintly, a thread of connection where a cable used to be.

He’s alive. He’s not calm. Even through the muffled bond, the emotion I’m getting from him is fear. Terror. The raw, primal terror of a wolf whose mate has been taken.

He’s coming. I know this with the same certainty that I know my own name. Whatever else Dominic Voronov is, whatever lies he’s told and choices he’s stolen, he is a wolf whose mate is in danger, and nothing on earth will stop him from reaching me. Not distance. Not men with guns. Not the three guys in this warehouse who have no idea what they’ve taken or what’s coming for them.

For one brief second, I almost feel sorry for them.

The man by the column notices I’m conscious. He pushes off the wall and walks toward me and crouches down and his face comes into the yellowish light. Mid-forties, heavy build, with a jaw that’s been broken at least once and eyes that are flat in a way that reads as practiced rather than natural. He’s performing indifference. Underneath it, he’s nervous. His left knee bounces when he crouches, and the hand holding his phone never stops moving.

“She’s awake,” he calls to the others.

One of the men by the door stands and walks over. He’s shorter, wiry, with a scar on his neck and a gun visible in his waistband. He looks down at me with an expression that I categorize immediately: contempt tinged with caution. He knows who I belong to. He’s not sure this was a good idea.

Good. It wasn’t.

“Ms. Marchelli.” The first man, the one who was by the column. “You’re going to be fine. Nobody wants to hurt you. We just need to have a conversation with your boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

The man raises an eyebrow. “Husband?”

“I didn’t say that either.”

“Whatever he is, he’s going to want you back. And when he comes to get you, we’re going to have a discussion about territorial boundaries and compensation for damages. Your boyfriend killed one of our guys. Choked him to death in our own warehouse. That kind of thing requires a response.”

I look at this man, this human man with his broken jaw and his bouncing knee and his gun-carrying friend, and I think about what he just said. A response. This man has no idea what he’s dealing with. He thinks Dominic is a crime boss, a businessman with a violent streak. Someone still bound by human limits.

He doesn’t know that the man whose mate he just kidnapped can track a scent from a mile away and can move faster than a human eye can follow and doesn’t need the gun that his friend is carrying because his hands and his teeth are more dangerous than anything in this building.

They are going to die. All three of them. I know this for certain. The bond is telling me, even through its muffled distance, that what’s coming toward this warehouse is not a negotiation.

“You should leave,” I say.

The man with the broken jaw laughs. “Cute.”

“I’m not being cute. I’m giving you advice. Whatever you think is going to happen when he gets here, you’re wrong. You should untie me and walk out of this building and drive as far from Chicago as your car will take you, and you should do it now, because you are running out of time.”

“Lady, we’ve got guns, we’ve got numbers, and we’ve got you. We’re not running out of anything.”

“You’ve got guns,” I say. “He doesn’t need one. You’ve got numbers. He has a family of people like him. And you’ve got me, which means you’ve taken the one thing in the world that will make him stop being careful. You haven’t created leverage. You’ve removed the only thing that was keeping you alive.”

The man looks at me. For the first time, something flickers behind the flat eyes. Not understanding, not yet. But the beginning of doubt, the seed of the possibility that the woman on his floor knows something he doesn’t.