Leon moved through the city like he’d learned to move through every place the world abandoned—quiet, angled, never giving a window more than a heartbeat of trust. His extraction was supposed to be clean. Get in, get the asset, get out before the horde shifted with the wind.

The first thing the city gave him wasn’t intel. It was scent. It cut through the rot like a flare—Omega. Not fresh and pretty like the propaganda posters from the early days, not sweet and eager. This one was thin with fear and hunger, threaded through with dust and old blood, clinging to the back of his throat like it had been there a while. His jaw tightened on instinct, the familiar, hated pull of it; the way his body wanted to turn toward it, wanted to close distance, wanted to claim the problem and call it solved. He’d spent decades training himself out of that.

He paused under the shadow of a collapsed overpass, listening. The city answered with the wet shamble of something dragging its feet over broken glass, a distant chorus of clicks and moans, the soft tink of debris shifting somewhere high. He adjusted his grip on his knife, then his rifle, and kept moving—away from his intended route, toward the scent that refused to be ignored.

He told himself it was tactical. An Omega in a hot zone was a beacon—raiders, packs, infected that hunted anything that breathed. Leaving her here was a liability. Bringing her along was an even bigger one. Either way, she would change the mission.

He followed the trail through a gutted pharmacy, past shelves stripped clean years ago, through a stairwell that reeked of mold and stale piss. The scent grew stronger with every floor—panic-sweat, heat suppressed too long, the sharp metallic edge of pain. He found claw marks on a doorframe, a smear of blood dragged low, and a line in the dust where someone had been pulled.

“Damn it,” he muttered, barely sound.

The building above groaned like it was remembering how to fall.

Leon climbed, slow and deliberate, eyes scanning the fractured hallway. A body—too old to matter now—hung half out of a doorway, jaw slack. He stepped around it. The scent was right there, pooled like trapped sunlight behind rubble.

A section of ceiling had pancaked the corridor. Concrete slabs and twisted rebar made a cage of it, and beneath that—movement. A hand, shaking. A breath that hitched and tried to stay quiet.

Leon’s heart did that irritating thing it still did sometimes, like it believed he could save people if it beat hard enough. He crouched, careful not to throw his weight on unstable debris, and aimed his light into the gap.

You were pinned under a broken beam and chunks of drywall, dust pasted to your skin, eyes wide with the kind of fear that stayed quiet because noise meant death. Your scent surged when the light found you—relief laced with dread—and Leon felt his own Alpha response spike hot and immediate.

He swallowed it down like a bitter pill.

Outside, something moaned, drawn by the shift in air, the faint scuff of his boot. Leon glanced over his shoulder, then back to you.

“Hey.” His voice came out low, rough, like he hadn’t used it in a while. “Look at me.”

He wedged his knife into a strap, cut through something binding the beam, then braced his shoulder against the concrete. Pain flared up his arm, old injuries complaining, but he shoved anyway. The slab lifted a fraction—enough.

“Move when I tell you,” he said, gruff, all command because command was safer than comfort. “On three.”

He counted under his breath, shifted the weight again, and reached in—gloved hand finding your wrist, steady, solid.

“Three. Now.” He hauled, hard and controlled, dragging you free.

When you finally slid out, he kept you close, one arm around your back, pulling you against his chest to keep you on your feet. Your scent hit him full-force—alive, warm, impossibly out of place—and his jaw clenched so tight it ached.