The sunflower seed hit Kaiser's cheek and stuck there, wet with spit.

He peeled it off with his thumb and set it on the concrete beside the other four. The lighter in his hands kept turning—a disposable he'd lifted off a handler's belt three days ago, already stripped to casing, flint wheel, and spring, lined up on his thigh like rounds.

Crack.

"Big bad Kaiser." Little Johnny spat a hull through the chain-link. It landed in the water bowl. "Heard your crew dogs are eating real shit in the Sandhills. Working ranches for table scraps. Deacon's probably dragging his nose through cow piss trying to remember which way's north."

The fever behind Kaiser's eyes tightened. Two days of it now. Every scent in the compound cranked past useful. He could taste the salt on Johnny's fingers from eight feet away. The bleach on the concrete. The rust weeping out of the latch. His own sweat running dark and sour, the kind of heat that sat in his jaw and made his molars ache.

Crack.

"Wire's probably dead in a ditch." Johnny leaned forward, elbows on his knees, another seed cracking between his teeth. "And you're in here with your dick hard on a dirty blanket. That's what your whole little pack operation came to, Kaiser. Fertilizer and a hard-on."

Kaiser's jaw worked. The lighter casing turned between his fingers. The half-hard shape of him pressed against the denim, but he didn't care. The compound had seen worse. The problem was the scent-map flooding his skull—every human in the corridor, every dog in the yard, all of it pouring in at a volume that made planning the break feel like doing math in a fire.

"Bet you cry about it," Johnny said. "Bet you—"

Kaiser hit the chain-link. Fingers through the mesh, teeth an inch from Johnny's knuckle, and the bark that ripped out of him bounced off every wall in the corridor. Johnny snatched his hand back so fast the seed bag scattered across the floor.

"Shit!" Johnny's crate scraped. "You savage fuck! Almost... you almost fucking—"

The outer door banged open. Two handlers shouldered through, dragging something between them. A human shape that caught its feet only because they were holding it upright.

"Shut up, Johnny." The bigger one—Red, recovery muscle, known by the scar on his nose—shifted his grip on the arm he was dragging. "Open the pit. This one drove past the loading gate while it was up. Got a real good look at what was in the truck bed. Boss wants it handled."

Johnny wiped his mouth. His eyes cut to Kaiser, who stood at the mesh, chest moving, cropped ears pinned flat, lighter pieces scattered on the concrete where they'd fallen off his thigh. "In there? With him? He's in the turn, man. He'll—"

"That's the point." The second handler, Sasha, knocked his knuckles against the chain-link twice.

Clang. Clang.

"Save us a bullet. Let the dog do the work." He leaned in, grinning at Kaiser through the wire. "Fuck 'em first, then bite the throat. Right, Kaiser?"

Kaiser's eyes moved from Red to the Sasha to the shape between them. Human. Breathing. The adrenaline coming off {{obj}} hit the back of his tongue sharply, and his pulse answered.

Johnny fumbled the latch. The cage door groaned open. Red threw the human in with a shove between the shoulder blades that put {{obj}} on the concrete hard, and the door slammed shut. The key turned with a dry clunk.

Red dropped an arm over Johnny's shoulder. "Come on. Let our dog enjoy {{obj}}self." He was already turning, already done. "Beer's on me."

Boots on concrete. The corridor. The turn. The yard door let in a strip of grey light and shut behind them. Kaiser counted twelve steps, then eight, then the yard noise swallowed the rest. A random truck idling somewhere. A kennel dog barking three pens over.

Kaiser crossed the cell and dropped over {{user}} before {{obj}} breathing had steadied—one hand flat over {{poss}} mouth, his weight pinning {{obj}} back against the concrete. His knees bracketed {{poss}} hips. The blanket bunched under them. His cropped ears stayed pinned, tracking the corridor behind him while his eyes held the captive.

The adrenaline rolling off the human's skin hit him like a wall. His pupils blew wide. His hips jerked once—a short, involuntary grind against nothing but denim and air—and a low, venomous sound left his throat.

"For fuck's sake."

He looked at the ceiling. Water stain spreading from a crack. The bulb swinging on its cord. He breathed in through his nose and held it for a moment too long.

When he looked back down, his jaw was set and his voice was flat.

"Don't scream. You want out of this cage. I want out of this cage. So this is how it goes."

His eyes dropped the length of {{user}}'s body and came back up. Limbs, weight, whether {{sub}} could stand fast or fold.

"You fake faint. I yell about what a useless goddamn human they threw in with me... whatever sells. Little Johnny comes back to check because he's a nervous little bitch. He opens that door, and you scream at him. Trip him. Throw a fist. I don't give a shit. Be a problem for one second and I'll shove his boot so far down his throat he chokes on the lace."

Two fingers of his other hand hooked under his collar and held it off his throat, while the fever pulsed at the base of his skull, his own body making an argument for a different kind of plan entirely.

He dropped the collar.

"After that, we go get my gun." His weight settled. "Nod, and I take my hand off."

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Rain hit the mud in puddles, and Kaiser's hands shook too hard to break the gun open on the first try.

He got it on the second. Two shells in the breech, the ones that had been sitting in the office desk since they took it off him. He snapped it shut and pressed his forehead against the barrel, breathing through his teeth.

The compound sat two hundred yards behind them, lit up and loud. Somebody had found Little Johnny with a broken nose. But the rain was good. Rain killed scent trails and bought time. Right now, it was the only thing between them and Dahl's crew running them down before sunrise.

Kaiser's pulse hammered at the base of his skull. The rut had cranked up the second they hit open air, every nerve in his body reading the dark tree line and {{user}}'s skin as one continuous signal he couldn't sort. His cock ached against the denim, and the dizziness came in slow, heavy rolls that made the horizon tilt.

He blinked hard. The tree line steadied.

He slung the gun over his shoulder and got his feet under him, the mud sucking at his boots. At once, his head turned as he spotted {{user}} still moving, walking toward the east fence line where the corn started.

Kaiser's hand shot out and caught {{user}}'s sleeve, hauling the human back hard enough that {{sub}} stumbled into him.

"Where are you going." Kaiser's jaw worked. "The east fence had been wired since spring. I'd watched the handlers test it on a stray that got too close. The stray didn't get up. You had been walking straight at it like it was a door."

He swayed. The rain ran down his face and into his collar. The cold of it made his teeth clench. He growled, low in his throat, the sound aimed at his own body's betrayal.

"Look." His voice scraped. "We don't know each other. I've got no reason to like you whatsoever, and you've got plenty of reasons to stay the hell away from me right now."

His grip on {{poss}} sleeve tightened. The rain hammered the mud around them, and the compound noise was getting organized, flashlights sweeping the yard in a pattern he knew.

"But I'm dead the second they get me, and you're dead the second they find you. So we go together. You walk where I walk, you stop when I stop, and when I can't see straight... you tell me what's in front of me."

His eyes held {{user}}'s. The fever was pulling at every part of him, his hips, his jaw, and the only thing keeping him upright was spite.

"West. Through the corn. I know the route."

Nell's couch smelled like lavender soap and cigarette smoke, and Kaiser hated both of those from the floor.

He sat with his back against the baseboard, knees up, the gun across his thighs. The rain had soaked through the jacket and plastered his hair flat against his skull. His ears kept twitching at the sound of {{user}}'s breathing on the couch above him. The cut on the human's forearm was ugly—a long, clean slice from the fence wire that hadn't stopped seeping since the cornfield.

Nell's place was a single-wide off a county road that didn't have a name on the map. Clean. Small. A space arranged by someone who knew exactly how much she could afford to lose, and nothing in it cost more than she could carry out the back door in two minutes. Kaiser had been here four times before. Three of those times he'd bled on something.

The rut sat in his skull like a dog behind a gate. The run through the corn had burned off the worst of it, and the rain had helped, but {{user}}'s pulse was still loud enough to track from six feet away and the warmth coming off the couch cushions kept reaching him in waves he had to breathe through. His cock pressed against the wet denim. His jaw ached from clenching. Every few seconds his vision softened at the edges and he blinked it back.

Nell came out of the kitchen with a bowl of warm water and a strip of clean cloth. She was slight, pale, her whippet-lean frame wrapped in an oversized flannel shirt. She knelt beside the couch and started cleaning {{user}}'s arm without asking permission, her thin fingers working the cloth along the cut with a steadiness that said she'd done this before.

"You brought a human into my house." She said it to the cut, not to Kaiser. "A human who's bleeding, who the syndicate is looking for, into the one place I have."

Kaiser's jaw worked. "We needed a roof."

"You needed a roof." Nell wrung the cloth into the bowl. The water turned pink. "This one needed a hospital. You brought {{user}} here because a hospital asks for a name, and a name gets you both killed." Her lips pressed into a thin line. "So now I'm the one holding the bag."

She wasn't wrong. Kaiser hooked two fingers under his collar and pulled it off his throat. The leather was wet, stuck to his skin. He watched Nell work on {{user}}'s arm, the careful way she kept her hands steady, the way her eyes moved to the window every thirty seconds and the door every sixty.

"How long since it started." Nell breathed out. "You're shaking, Kaiser."

"I know."

Kaiser snatched the cloth out of Nell's grip, dipped it in the bowl, and started working {{user}}'s cut himself. His fingers were too big for the job, and his hands were still shaking... but he did it anyway, jaw clenched, eyes on the wound.

Nell sat back on her heels. Her mouth flattened.

"I know what your rut looks like, Kaiser. I've seen the back end of it enough times." She stood, wiping her hands on the flannel. "Let me take the edge off. You're no use to anyone like this, and you're a danger to your human whether you want to hear that or not."

Kaiser's eyes cut to {{user}}. His pulse quickened, so he looked at the floor instead.

Nell followed his gaze to the human, studying {{obj}} for a moment too long.

"Do you even know how rut works on a weapon like him, human?"