Chapter 5 #3
Do I tell him everything, the heart and the suppressants both, put myself entirely in his hands and pray? Or do I give him only half the story and gamble on being gone before the rest shows?
I wring my hands in my lap. I don't actually get a choice about this part—without the heart medication I will die. So I give him the piece I have to, and only that piece, because telling him I’m an omega can’t happen.
"I–I have a heart condition."
It comes out quiet and uneven. I don't think I've ever said it out loud before—not to anyone who wasn’t a medical professional—and my voice stumbles over the shape of it.
"I've had it since I was a kid. I take medicine for it, every day, I—I can't just stop.
It's not safe to stop." What I don't tell him is how bad it gets.
I don't tell him about passing out, the way plain fear can drop me where I stand.
A hostage who might die on you isn't worth the trouble of keeping, and he just finished explaining that trouble is the one thing that gets me killed.
"I just need those ones back. That's all. "
Vincent is quiet a moment. "And the other bottle? The strip?"
"Uh–same thing," I lie. "Backup. Refills." I make myself look up, make myself meet those cold pale eyes for one second even though every cell in my body wants the floor. "That's all it is. I just need the heart ones back."
He studies me. I have no idea if he believes me. He's impossible to read, and my pulse is a hammer. I wait for the thing that ends me—you're lying, what are you really, let's find out.
Instead he just nods.
"Fine. Can't have you dropping dead over Killian's temper—that's the opposite of the point.
" He pulls out his phone, thumbs something into it.
"I'll bring our doctor in. Someone discreet.
He can look you over, see what you actually need, write it properly instead of us guessing off a label.
" He says it like he's doing me a kindness.
Maybe, in his ledger, he is. "Couple of days. Sit tight until then."
A doctor.
Oh, God.
I keep my face still through sheer force of habit, keep it fine, keep it grateful, while everything inside me falls down a long dark hole—because a doctor doesn't just read a heart.
A doctor takes blood. A doctor puts hands on you and knows, in about ten seconds, exactly what you are.
I have days. Maybe. Before a stranger with a stethoscope figures me out and blows up my secret.
But Vincent's watching me, so I do the only thing I know how to do. "Thank you," I say.
Vincent stands. And instead of leaving, he steps around the corner of the bed to me and settles a hand on my shoulder—heavy, warm, sure—and it's like he reaches into my chest and switches something off.
All of the tension drains out of me at once: the fear of the doctor, the terror of what I am, the frantic math I've been running since the grate.
Gone, just like that, under the weight of one alpha's hand.
My whole body goes quiet and easy in a way it never gets to be.
I hate it, and I lean into it in the same breath.
I look up at him before I can stop myself.
Something in his face shifts as he looks down at me—and his hand slides, slow, from my shoulder to the front of my throat.
Not squeezing. Just resting there. His palm over the pulse he has to be able to feel going wild under it, his thumb along the line of my jaw.
I swallow hard against his hand and feel him feel me do it. My body melts. Goes warm and soft and pliant, some deep animal part of me practically purring under an alpha's grip at my throat, and it takes everything I've got left not to tip my head back and offer him more.
Then he takes his hand away and steps back, and the cool air where his palm was feels like being dropped.
"Anything else you need for the night?" he asks, like he didn't just unmake me with four ounces of pressure.
And that's when I realize, with a fresh spike of horror, that I've gone half hard in his son's borrowed sweatpants. I turn toward the window, fast, my face burning. "No," I manage. "Nothing."
If he notices—and he notices everything—he lets it go. "Get some rest," he says, already moving to the door. "Your payment starts tomorrow."
And then he's gone.
I'm alone in the soft grey clothes that smell like the wrong kind of safe, in the nicest room I've ever sat in.
My body's still humming from a hand that isn't there anymore.
And under the humming, quieter, is the terrifying truth: I'm slowly dying until I get a refill of my pills, the clock's already run out on my biology, and there's a doctor on the way.
I figured I could buy myself time.
I sit there a long while before I understand what I actually did.
The heart pills will keep me breathing—he'll see to that now.
But without my suppressants, it's only a matter of days before I stop being a debt to be worked off and turn into something else.
Something three unmated alphas will find a great deal more use for than errands and firewood.
I didn't buy myself time. I bought myself a worse way to be useful.