I killed alpha hunter doctor's brother so he devoured my omega

The Crimson Hollow smelled like it always did on a Thursday: cheap gin, cheaper cigars, and the particular metallic tang of alphas trying too hard to smell dangerous. Wren Ashby stood behind the velvet curtain in the wings, watching the crowd through the gap, and cataloged every knife in the room out of habit before she'd even finished catching her breath from the last set. Two Voss hunters at the east booth, badges tucked but not tucked well enough. One low-level Calloway courier pretending to nurse a drink he hadn't touched in twenty minutes. A pack of Ashfall's own dock hands drinking too loud in the corner, celebrating something they had no business celebrating in public, the idiots. And, three tables back, alone, a man she didn't recognize, who sat so still he might as well have been carved out of the dark. She filed him under watch and rolled her shoulders back until the ache from last night's work loosened enough to pass for a dancer's stretch instead of a killer's recovery. "You're on in two, Scarlet," Sable said, appearing at her elbow the way she always did, soundless despite six-inch heels. Sable owned the Hollow the way spiders owned webs invisibly, until you were caught in it. "And you look like you didn't sleep." "I slept fine." "You look like someone who spent last night doing something that wasn't sleeping." Wren didn't answer. Sable's dark eyes flicked over her once, assessing, and whatever she saw — or didn't see. she let go, the way she always did. That was the arrangement between them. Sable didn't ask about the nights Wren limped in with bruises under her stage makeup. Wren didn't ask why half of Ashkerne's underworld treated the Hollow like sacred, blood-neutral ground. The truth, if Sable knew it, was worse than either of them had ever said aloud. Twelve hours earlier, in an alley three blocks from the Calloway Medical Tower, Wren Ashby had put a blade between Dr. Elias Calloway Voss's ribs with the same precision she used to gut fish as a girl on the Ashfall docks, quick, clean, no wasted motion and she had felt nothing while she did it. That was the part she hadn't told anyone. Not even Mira. She'd felt nothing, and then, walking home with his blood cooling on her sleeve, she had felt everything at once, all the way down to the marrow. He'd smiled at her before he understood what was happening. That was the part she couldn't put down. He was going to take Ashfall, she reminded herself now, backstage, watching the stranger at table nine not watch her. He had the decree. He had the Calloway seal. In three days he'd have walked into Ashfall's docks with hunter escort and a piece of paper that made my home his tribute, and everyone I've ever protected would have become leverage for a man who'd never bled a day in his soft, perfect life. It didn't feel like enough. It never did. But it was true, and true was the only currency Wren dealt in when she was alone with herself. "Two minutes, Scarlet," Sable said again, softer. Wren rolled her neck, checked the strap of the blade sheathed against her inner thigh beneath the skirt — a habit, not a plan, she told herself and stepped through the curtain into the light. She danced like she killed: economically, beautifully, giving away nothing that wasn't already spent. The crowd didn't know the difference between performance and control; that was rather the point. Scarlet moved like a woman who had never had to fight for anything in her life, and every alpha in the room believed it, because omegas weren't supposed to be dangerous, and Wren had built an entire second self out of that single, useful lie. She was three moves into her set, working the room with her eyes rather than looking at any one man too long, when she found the stranger at table nine again and this time he was looking directly at her, not with the hungry, slack-jawed interest of the rest of the room, but with something colder. Assessing. The way she assessed a mark before she took a job. Wren's pulse didn't spike. Wren's pulse never spiked. But some old, animal part of her filed him under a new heading entirely: not safe. He was alpha. she could smell it even over the gin and the smoke, a low, banked-coal scent that made the fine hair at the back of her neck lift and he was dressed like money that didn't need to show itself, dark and unornamented, no house crest visible, which in Ashkerne meant either he had nothing to prove or everything to hide. His jaw was carved from the same cold marble as his stillness. His eyes, when the stage lights caught them, were a grey so pale they looked lit from within. He did not smile at her. He did not tip. He watched her the way a man watches a door he intends to walk through eventually, on his own time, whether it's locked or not. Wren finished the set without breaking rhythm and did not look at table nine again, which was, in itself, an admission she refused to make even to herself. Backstage, toweling the sweat and stage paint from her collarbone, she caught Mira's voice in her ear — not literally; Mira was miles away at the Ashfall infirmary but in memory, the old woman's habitual warning worn smooth from repetition: The day you stop being afraid of a room, Wren, is the day that room kills you. She was afraid of table nine. She filed that fact away too, unexamined, the way she filed away everything that felt like weakness. "Man wants to buy you a drink," Sable said, reappearing with the particular blankness she wore when she already knew Wren would say no. "Table nine." "Tell him Scarlet doesn't do drinks with strangers." "He didn't give a name. Paid in Voss coin, though. The old kind minted before the current Alpha's father even took the seat. That's not pocket change, Wren. That's a man who wants to be recognized by someone specific." Wren's hands went very still over the tin of stage paint. Voss coin. Not a low-level hunter slumming for entertainment. Not one of Dorian's leash-dogs looking for gossip. Old coin, deliberately shown, meant I know who I am and I want you to know it too, without me having to lower myself to say my name in a cabaret. There was exactly one man in Ashkerne arrogant enough to announce himself that way and exactly one reason he'd be sitting in the Hollow the night after his brother's body was found in an alley three blocks from Calloway Tower. Wren's stomach did not drop. Wren's stomach never dropped. It dropped. "Tell him," she said, keeping her voice as bored as she could make it, "that Scarlet's finished for the night." Sable's brows rose a fraction the closest thing to alarm Wren had ever seen on that carefully composed face. "Wren. That's Kieran Voss." "I know who it is." "Then you know that telling the Alpha Hunter of Ashkerne no, the same week his brother's turned up gutted in an alley, isn't the safest choice you've ever made." You have no idea, Wren thought, and reached for her coat. She went out the back, the way she always did, through the narrow service alley that stank of rain and old fish crates, moving fast and low and unremarkable, a woman in a plain coat instead of a dancer in silk, one identity folded away into the next the way she'd been doing since she was nineteen years old and had first understood that surviving in Ashkerne meant never being only one thing.