The Price of Being Expendable

Two medics held me down before I could ask what was happening. The needle went in, and fire spread through my veins.

I bucked on the table hard enough that the leather restraints creaked, and a strangled sound tore out of my throat that wasn't a word. One medic, a beta woman with flat grey eyes and hair scraped back so tight it pulled at her temples, pressed my shoulder into the cold metal.

"Hold still," she said, like I was a twitching animal.

"What is that?" My voice came out a croak. "What did you put in me?"

The second medic didn't even look at my face. He was already setting down the empty syringe and reaching for a small glass vial with a rubber stopper. His mouth was a thin line. "Heat induction. Concentrated. It'll peak within the hour."

I felt it already. My skin went tight and hot, then hotter, a flush crawling from the injection site in my arm up to my neck and down my belly. My scent glands burned, and a wave of cloying sweetness filled the tent, so thick I gagged on my own smell.

"This is wrong." I tried to sit up, but the restraints held, and the female medic shoved me flat again. "I was told to report here for a mission."

"This is the mission," she said.

My heart slammed against my ribs. Sweat broke across my forehead, and my body started producing slick, that humiliating wetness between my legs that meant my omega biology was overriding everything else. My cheeks flamed, but my limbs went weak and trembling at the same time. I couldn't control it. I couldn't stop it.

"Please." The word slipped out before I could swallow it. "Just tell me what's happening."

The tent flap pushed open, and cold air rushed in, sharp with pine and frost. The medics stepped back, and their hands fell away from me. I turned my head on the table, and Kellan Draven stood there in a dark wool coat, his silver-blond hair perfect even in the grey pre-dawn light. His glacial blue eyes swept over my shaking body, and his expression didn't change.

"Leave us," he said to the medics.

They left. The flap fell shut, and I was alone with Kellan and the fire crawling through my blood.

"Untie me." My voice broke. I pulled at the restraints. "Kellan. Untie me."

"No." He walked to the side table and picked up a small fabric patch sealed in clear wrapping. He held it up to the lantern light. "This is a sedative patch. High dose. When it comes into contact with a rogue alpha's scent receptors, it'll drop him unconscious in less than a minute."

I stared at the patch. My brain felt slow, wrapped in cotton, but the pieces were falling into place like stones dropping into a deep well. "You're going to use me to carry that."

"We're going to use your heat to carry it," Kellan said, and he set the patch down with a small click. "Bastian Crowne can smell an enforcer from a mile away. He avoids every trap we lay. But a lone omega in full heat—drenched in a scent so strong it masks everything else—he won't be able to resist. You'll walk into his territory, find his cabin, and get close enough for the patch to activate. Once he's down, our enforcers move in and execute him."

The fire in my veins turned to ice. "You want me to be bait."

"I want you to be a tool. The only kind you're fit to be." Kellan's voice was a clean, precise cut. "You can't fight. You can't hunt. Your wolf is a joke. But your body—right now—that's something useful."

I pulled against the leather until my wrists burned. "And if I refuse?"

"Then you're exiled. You walk out of Silver Hollow with nothing, and you take your chances in the rogue lands without pack protection. Or you're executed for insubordination before you reach the tree line." He tilted his head, and the lantern light caught the sharp angle of his jaw. "Either way, you die. At least this way, there's a slim chance you survive long enough for our enforcers to pull you out."

I lay there, shaking on the table, slick soaking through my thin pants, my scent so thick I could taste it. And I understood, finally, what I had been from the moment they summoned me to the council hall. Not a wolf. Not a pack member. A body to spend. The most expendable omega in the territory.

"Untie me," I said again, but this time my voice was flat. Dead.

Kellan nodded once and sliced the restraints with a short blade. I sat up, and the room tilted. He caught my elbow, and his grip was cold and impersonal, like a handler steadying cargo.

---

They marched me to the northern border as the sun started bleeding out behind the mountains. Maren Holt walked at my side, her scarred eyebrow pulled low, her hand firm on my arm in a way that felt more like a leash than support. The heat was peaking now, pulsing under my skin in waves that made my knees buckle every few steps. My thoughts were fog. My body was a stranger wearing my face.

At the tree line, Maren stopped and turned me to face her. Her dark eyes held mine without blinking.

"Listen to me, Mercer." Her voice was gravel and command. "You walk north until you smell woodsmoke. The rogue's cabin won't be far from there. The sedative patch activates on its own when it senses an alpha's proximity. You don't have to do anything but get close. We'll follow at a distance, out of scent range. When he drops, we move in."

She pressed a small knife into my palm. The handle was cold, the blade dull from use.

"If he catches you before the patch kicks in," she said, "that won't save you. But it might make you feel less helpless."

I closed my fingers around the knife. My hand was trembling. "And if the patch doesn't work?"

Maren didn't answer. She let go of my arm and stepped back. The enforcers behind her were shadows in the trees, rifles gleaming with frost, and none of them met my eyes.

"Move," Maren said.

I turned and walked into the frozen pines. The snow crunched under my boots, and the heat pulled me forward like a hook behind my navel, my body desperate for something I didn't want to name. Behind me, Silver Hollow disappeared into the dark. Ahead, only snow and shadow and the growing ache between my legs.

I thought of Archer's hands, steady on my skin. I thought of the white wolf hair dissolving into light. Soon.

The wind shifted.

A scent hit me that stopped my heart. Pine. Smoke. And something wild. Something that made the omega in me whimper and the man in me want to run.

But I kept walking.