Primus Reclamation

The salt and rot hit me first. That particular North Blue harbor smell I’d spent ten years trying to scrub from my memory. It clung to the stone piers, the fishing nets, the coats of the men who loaded crates onto a ship with a flag so gaudy it hurt to look at. Pink feathers. A smile painted in blood. I knew that flag.

I knew the man under it.

My hands stayed steady as I pulled the hood lower over my face. The omega inside me, the part I had starved and caged for a decade, stirred and sniffed the air like a dog catching scent of a bone. I told it to shut up. It never listened.

The island was called Spider Miles. A nothing place. A refueling stop for pirates too stupid to go anywhere interesting. I had come for information, for a lead on a man I’d been tracking for six months. Instead I got a ghost.

He stood on the dock with his back to me. Tall. Lanky. A coat that swallowed his frame and a hat that shadowed everything but the curl of a cigarette’s smoke. He laughed at something a crewman said, and the sound was wrong. Too light. Too careful. Like a bell that had been cracked and tried to ring anyway.

Rosinante.

I knew him before I saw his face. Knew the slope of his shoulders, the way he tilted his head when he was pretending to be fine. He was better at pretending than I was. He always had been.

Ten years since I last saw him. Ten years since I watched him walk away from the estate, from me, from everything we had survived together. He was supposed to be dead. Everyone said he was dead. The Donquixote family had a habit of swallowing its children whole, and Rosinante had been the softest one, the one who smiled at servants and cried when the dogs were kicked. I had mourned him. I had burned a photograph of his face and whispered a prayer to gods I didn’t believe in.

And here he was. Alive. Smoking a cigarette on a dock in a nowhere town, laughing at a joke I couldn’t hear.

The omega inside me howled.

I pressed my palm flat against my stomach and breathed through my teeth. The Primus instinct was a curse dressed up like a gift. It made me feel everything. Every emotion in a room, every lie behind a smile, every thread of want or fear or hunger that passed between people. It had nearly killed me as a child. It had made me useful to Doflamingo, and that usefulness had been a chain around my throat.

I had cut that chain. I had bled for that freedom.

Now Rosinante was here, and the bond I thought had died with him pulled taut in my chest like a fishing line hooked through my ribs.

I should have turned around. Should have walked back into the fog and found another ship, another lead, another life. The smart thing. The safe thing. I had spent ten years learning to do the smart thing.

But I was already moving.

My boots hit the wood of the dock and Rosinante’s head snapped up. He didn’t see me at first. He was looking past me, scanning the crowd with a practiced ease that didn’t match the clumsy boy I remembered. He had learned to watch. Good. So had I.

I stopped ten feet from him. Close enough to see the scar on his jaw, the one he got from a broken bottle when we were fourteen. Close enough to see his eyes go wide.

He dropped the cigarette.

“You’re dead,” he said.

“So are you.”

The crewman beside him glanced between us, confused. Rosinante waved him off without looking. His hand shook. I watched it shake and felt something crack open in my chest, something I had sealed with concrete and spite.

“You need to leave,” he said. Voice low. Urgent. The same voice he used when we were kids, when he was trying to warn me about something dangerous. “Right now. Before he knows you’re here.”

I knew who he meant. The name sat between us like a bomb.

“I’m not here for him.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Rosinante stepped closer. He smelled like smoke and salt and something underneath, something warm and familiar that made my knees weak. “If he finds out you’re alive, if he finds out you’re an omega, a Primus, he will never let you go. You know that.”

I knew that. I had always known that. Doflamingo collected rare things the way other men collected coins. And I was the rarest thing he had ever found. An omega Primus, fertile in every season, capable of carrying the heir he had been trying to manufacture for years. I had been his pet, his project, his future breeding stock.

I had run. I had survived.

“I’m not running anymore,” I said.

Rosinante’s face crumpled. Grief and fear and something else, something I couldn’t name, something that made the bond between us pulse like a second heartbeat.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m not who I was. I’m not what you remember.”

“Neither am I.”

He laughed. That cracked bell sound. “You think that matters? You think any of it matters? He’s on this island. He’s three blocks away, buying information from a broker. If he catches your scent, if he even suspects, he will tear this town apart to find you.”

The omega inside me went still. Not afraid. Waiting.

I had dreamed of this moment. Of standing in front of Doflamingo with a blade in my hand and ten years of rage in my chest. I had planned it and rehearsed it and bled for it.

But I hadn’t planned for Rosinante.

“Then let him come,” I said.

Rosinante grabbed my wrist. His fingers were cold. His grip was desperate.

“Please,” he said. And that one word broke something in both of us. “Please, just go. I can’t lose you again. I can’t watch him take you again. I can’t.”

The bond pulled tight. I felt his fear like it was my own. Felt the years of loneliness he had carried, the guilt, the hope he had buried so deep he had forgotten it existed.

I should have pulled away. Should have run.

Instead I held his gaze and said, “Then come with me.”

The silence stretched. The harbor sounds faded. For one impossible second, I saw something flicker in his eyes. Want. Hope. The ghost of the boy he used to be.

Then a voice cut through the fog like a blade.

“Now that’s a reunion I wouldn’t miss for the world.”

I turned.

Doflamingo stood at the end of the dock, grinning like he had already won. His coat billowed in the wind. His glasses hid his eyes, but I felt his gaze on me anyway. Hot. Hungry. Familiar.

He had always known where to find me.

He had just been waiting for me to come back.