Chapter 1: Task One

Heat woke him.

Then the spinning came up through him, slow and thorough, and he lay still with his eyes shut and waited for the room to come back. The room kept moving. Light pressed against his eyelids, bright and even, aimed down from above, and when he couldn’t stand any more of it he turned his face into the pillow—too warm already, damp against his cheek—and opened his eyes.

White ceiling. Three recessed lights in a row, each with a soft halo around it. A sprinkler head. A smoke detector with a small green light on it, blinking.

He had not gotten out of the fire.

That was the trouble with waking up. The same facts came back in the same order: the corridor, the smoke, the sound the ceiling made before it came down, the weight of it pressing the air out of his chest. He remembered the sprinklers going off in a part of the building that wasn’t burning. He did not remember the door at the end of the corridor, or the stairs, or the parking lot. Almost certain, he thought, and did not like how much room that left in the middle of the sentence.

But he was in a hotel. He could see that much without sitting up, so he sat up.

Bed with a skirt on it. Nightstand: a phone face-up on a charging pad, a glass of water he had not drunk from, a key card lying loose beside it with no name printed on it. A chair in the corner with a jacket over the back of it, gray, good wool. The curtains didn’t meet all the way; through the gap, city lights sat in rows, and above them the sky was black or getting there. Air conditioning running too hard for the season. Somewhere behind the wall an ice machine hummed.

His body was wrong.

It found him as soon as he stopped looking outward. Heat lay along his skin like a hand he couldn’t get out from under, and his face was wet, and under his arms, behind his knees, along the small of his back where the sheet had been, everything was slick and too hot for the air in the room. His pulse ran too fast, and his throat was so dry that when he tried to swallow, nothing happened.

He got up. The floor tilted; he put a hand on the nightstand and stayed there, head down, breathing through his mouth, until it stopped. He went into the bathroom and hit the light switch with the flat of his hand.

The face in the mirror was his.

For about two seconds that was the only thing there was. The same brow. The same line of the jaw. His hair standing up on the side he’d slept on. He leaned in over the sink. Under his lower lip, a little off center, the mole he had been looking at his whole life.

It was the mole that made him look at his hands.

Both wrists, the inside skin, where the veins come up. Cuts. Three on the left wrist, two on the right, thin and white, healed a long time ago and settled flat into the skin.

He turned one arm over in the light and turned it back.

He had scars. He had one on his knee from the summer he turned eleven, and one across his thumb whose origin he had stopped bothering to remember. He had never once in his life done anything like this to himself.

His wrist looked like somebody else had been living on it.

Then the memory came.

It arrived all at once, no easing, no lead-in: another life opened in front of him and stayed open. A lobby with a bar in it. A weekend that other people were paying for, because that was how this crowd handled a weekend. Room 302, the corner suite on the third floor, and his own room on the fourth. And underneath all of it, laid out flat and practical, the shape of a plan that belonged to someone who was not him: get Julian Prescott drunk at the bar, put the rest of it into a glass, take one himself, and go up to 302, so that by morning there would be no version of the story in which Julian got to act like it hadn’t happened.

The jacket on the chair was his. The water on the nightstand was his. The key card was his.

He looked at the glass again. He knew—his body already knew, in the hot heavy way it was moving under his skin—what he had put into himself an hour or two ago, in front of this same mirror, with his own hand.

Fine. He could put that down and take it up later. Dry his face, put clothes on, get—

A second door opened. This one was cleaner. This one was his.

There was a book. He had read it. Once, straight through, in one night.

It was called Bonded to the Alpha. It had a lead—Julian Prescott, rich and cold, made of exactly the kind of decisions that keep people turning pages—and it had a villain: the jealous, grasping one whose whole function in the plot was to throw the lead and his omega together by being the mess they could both be disgusted by, and who got one scene near the end, two lines long, and then he was dead, so that the lead could be seen choosing the omega instead.

The villain’s name was Elliot Vance.

The name in his mouth. The mole under his lip. The plan in his own head that was not his own. The key card on the nightstand, the jacket on the chair. They lined up, one after another, and he stood with both hands flat on the cold porcelain and looked at himself in the mirror while they did.

The heat came up again, harder than before.

He watched it happen in the mirror. Color climbing his throat. Sweat breaking at his temple. His pupils blown so wide that the light sitting in them looked wrong. His hands would not stay still; he put one on the edge of the sink, watched the fingers shake, pressed them flat until they stopped. The heat stayed exactly where it was.

He had to think. Julian Prescott was on the third floor with his name on a gold plate beside his door and maybe a fifth of a bottle of scotch in him by now, and there was something running under Elliot’s skin that wanted to go there, and it did not feel like wanting. It felt like being aimed.

The voice arrived the way a card slides under a door: flat, from underneath, nothing around it.

HOST.

GREETINGS. A TASK IS NOW BEING ISSUED TO YOU.

PLEASE PROCEED TO ROOM 302. FIND JULIAN PRESCOTT, THE LEADING MAN OF THIS STORY, AND SEDUCE HIM.

He stood at the sink with both hands on the porcelain and did not move.

“I refuse,” he said. Out loud. To a hotel bathroom.

THE TASK IS MANDATORY. THE HOST IS NOT PERMITTED TO REFUSE. REFUSAL WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE DEATH AND REPATRIATION TO THE ORIGINAL WORLD.

Repatriation. He stood over the sink with both hands flat on the porcelain. The corridor. The ceiling coming down. The smoke, and the piece after the smoke that had never once come back to him. Send him back there, then. That was the threat.

“Who are you?”

Nothing. No echo, no hum, no click. The ice machine kept working behind the wall, and the air conditioning kept working, and no other sound came.

“What happens if—“

THE TASK IS MANDATORY.

The same sentence again, the same length, the same even weight, and this time the door of the bathroom opened.

He watched his own arm reach out and turn the handle.

His hand was his hand. He recognized it. He could see the knuckles and the scar across the thumb and the wet shine of the sink water on the fingers, and none of that mattered, because the arm went up and the wrist turned and the door swung in and his legs took him through it, one after another, smooth and unhurried.

He said stop. His mouth was his; he said it twice, out loud, and heard it. His eyes were his: he could see the hallway, the long red-gray carpet with its pattern of diamonds, the ice machine at the far end, the little brass numbers on the doors counting down as he came to them—418, 416, 414. He could see all of it. He just couldn’t do anything about any of it.

Down at the corner, the elevator had a bell and a lit button. He walked toward it. His body had already chosen the left-hand hallway without consulting him, and he knew what was at the end of it: the elevator, then three, then 302, then a gold plate and a door and his own hands doing whatever they were told to do next.

Sweat ran down the side of his face. His breath came harder; every third breath wanted to be a word. His chest hurt from the inside, and the heat in him had gone from something lying on his skin to something with a shape, pushing outward, and the closer his feet got to the elevator the more that pushing had a direction.

He watched his hand rise toward the call button, and he swung his arm into the wall instead.

It came from somewhere under the fear, fast and clumsy, no plan in it—his right arm leaving the button and driving the heel of his hand and then his knuckles into the plaster. The pain went up to his elbow and down into his teeth. Something cracked, plaster or bone, and blood smeared the wall where the skin of his knuckles had opened.

And his legs stopped.

Not stopped clean. Slowed. The push cut back maybe halfway, and whatever part of him had been walking toward the elevator was no longer sure it wanted to, and in that half-second of wobble Elliot took the rest.

Stairs. He turned toward the stairwell door—gray metal with a bar across it—and hit the bar with his shoulder, because his bad hand didn’t want to do it. The door banged open onto concrete and cold air and the smell of a stairwell, and he went down, hand skidding on the rail the first two steps, taking them two at a time. One flight, and then a door with a three painted beside it in yellow. Three. He could feel his legs wanting it, turning for it, and he put his hand back on the rail and kept going down.

Second floor. Door, hinges complaining. Carpet again, more of the same red-gray, darker at the corners, and he went along it with his hand on the wall. His legs had begun to want the stairs again, and he could feel them deciding.

A door ahead of him was not shut.

It stood open three inches, no light in the gap, just the black line of it and, below, a strip of the room’s carpet going back into the dark. A do-not-disturb sign hung from the handle and swung a little in the draft from the vents. He pushed the door with two fingers and it gave, and he went in, because the stairs were behind him and the push had already begun to turn his feet back the way they had come.

Two steps in, he stopped.

The room was not empty.

He couldn’t see anyone. There was no light on past the bathroom door, which stood at the far end and was closed, and the curtains here were pulled all the way, and there was no lamp on and nothing coming off the phone. The bed was made. But there was a weight in the room, and every hair on Elliot’s arms and neck went up at once.

Then he heard someone breathe, and it was not close, and the pressure that had been pushing him toward the third floor went suddenly quiet, like a radio being switched off in another room.

“Beta?”

A man’s voice. Low, unhurried, cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature—the cold of somebody who has already decided he doesn’t have to raise it. The weight in the room eased off by a fraction, exactly enough to let him breathe.

He had no answer that could be said out loud.

Three seconds went by. His heart was so loud in his ears that he could hear it over the vent.

“Get out.”

The two words came out at the same pitch as the first ones, unhurried, and every part of Elliot’s body that was still under his own control told him to take them.

He went forward instead.

Two steps, three, and the smell reached him before his hands did. Liquor—strong, coming off the man in a cloud, the kind of drink that gets drunk in a quiet room by somebody who isn’t tasting it—and under the liquor and through it something else, cold and clean and mineral, a note he had no name for. It went up the back of his nose and down into his chest, and it did nothing to put out the fire. It made the fire lean toward it.

“Don’t.”

He got his arms around the man’s chest and held on.

The body under his hands was enormous and completely still. Broad through the ribs, hard under the shirt, taller than him by enough that Elliot’s forehead came up against the man’s collarbone; he could feel the breath moving in him, slow, in and out, while Elliot’s own came ragged against the shirt. For a second nothing happened at all, and he stood there hanging on to a stranger in the dark, and the shaking started in his arms hard enough that it went into the man too.

He heard him breathe out once, slow, through the nose. And then nothing happened for long enough that Elliot understood it wasn’t going to. Nobody pulled him off. Nobody opened the door. The body he was holding stayed exactly where it was and let him hold on.

“Who sent you?”

The voice had moved down. It was level with his ear now, still short, still flat, with something behind it that had taken an interest. Elliot opened his mouth. What came out was a breath with no word in it, and then he turned his face in against the man’s shoulder and held on tighter, both hands fisted in the back of the shirt, because the floor was going and this was the only thing in the room that wasn’t moving.

He heard him breathe out again, and the question went unanswered, and the man did not ask it a second time, and he did not put Elliot out of the room.

Then the bed was under him.

He had not walked to it and he had not been carried in a way he could follow; he was simply on his back on a cool spread with the ceiling somewhere above him and the dark pressing on his eyes. Somebody’s weight came down on the mattress beside him and the whole thing leaned. He turned his head. There was no face to see—only the mass of him, a shoulder and the line of a jaw filling the space where a face should be, black on black—and when he was over him there was no part of the bed left that belonged to Elliot.

He got one hand up to push and it was caught before it was halfway. Not hard. Caught the way you catch a glass that’s about to fall, one hand all the way around his wrist, with room to spare. The two thin white scars on the inside of that wrist lay under his thumb. The knuckles Elliot had split open on the wall were bleeding against his fingers.

Then the other hand took his jaw and turned his face up, and his breath was taken out of him before any of the rest of it, and the fire in him stopped being something he was carrying and became something being done.

He had nothing to measure it against. No clock he could find, the phone face-down on the nightstand, the strip of city light through the curtains that did not move the whole time. There was the weight. There was the heat, which did not go down because it was being answered; it just stopped being the only thing in him, and the relief of that was so much like pain that he could not tell which one he was crying about.

He kept his grip on the man’s wrist. He didn’t decide to, and he wasn’t aware he had until much later, when his own crying had gotten loud enough to be embarrassing and the hand he was holding turned in his and closed around his fingers and squeezed back, once, and then rubbed his wrist—two slow strokes with the thumb over the vein, up and back.

He was being used, he thought, clearly, in a way he had never once in his life been able to do to another person. Like a thing left in a room for exactly this, to be handed back after.

Then even that thought came apart in his hands, and he gave up on keeping any of it in a line, and after that the only coordinates he had were the darkness, the enormous weight of him, and the fact that whenever he moved too far the man moved to bring him back.

His eyes were wet through, both cheeks, the pillow soaked along one side of his face, when the pace of everything changed—slowed, eased. He had stopped crying and hadn’t noticed. He lay still with his face in the wet part of the pillow and his hand still held, and he thought, distantly, that it might be over, and he thought about the stairs and the blood on the wall and the voice in the bathroom, and none of it hurt yet.

He was just beginning to sink when the breath came down on the back of his neck.

Hot, and close, and then the mouth closed on the skin there.

It went through him in one stroke—fire and acid and something bright and awful that had nothing to do with the heat from before, so sharp that his whole body pulled against the hand on his wrist, which didn’t let go. He couldn’t get away from it. His back arched, his fingers came open and closed, and the sound that came out of him wasn’t a word either. The pressure on the back of his neck didn’t stop or soften. It kept on, teeth in skin, and the flare of it spread from that one spot into his shoulders and down his spine and up into his eyes, and the tears started again and this time there was nothing behind them but the pain.

Afterward he was aware of his own breathing, wet and ragged, of the pillow swallowing sound, of a large hand still closed around his wrist, of the fact that he was shaking all over and could not stop.

He knew that at some point the room stopped being somewhere and became a weight pressing him down on all sides, and that his last clear thought arrived at an odd angle, from far away, as a fact:

The voice had not come back.

No death. No voice, no sentence, nothing arriving flat from underneath. Whatever the rule was, and whatever he had done to it tonight, he was alive on a hotel bed with a stranger’s toothmarks in the back of his neck and his own blood drying on his knuckles, and nothing had been delivered.

He went down with that, and it did not matter at all, and the last thing he felt was the hand still closed around his wrist, over the scars.