Chapter Five
ISAAC
The scent hit me before I processed what it was.
One second I was crossing the fundraiser floor, doing the polite obligatory circuit of a room full of people I needed to not alienate professionally, and then a wave of pear and amber and warm sugar went straight through every layer of scent-filtering I'd built in the last fifteen years of careful biological management and hit me somewhere below the sternum like a closed fist.
I stopped walking.
A few people noticed and pretended not to.
There was a biological fact that everyone in this world understood and that alphas spent considerable resources minimizing: scent-matching was involuntary, instantaneous, and completely indifferent to timing, setting, or strategic inconvenience.
The omega-rights advocates threw fundraisers at The Meridian Rooms because of its designation-neutral scent filtering.
The filtering reduced the chance of an accidental match reaction in a public space to something under four percent.
I was in the four percent.
I turned slowly, tracking the scent without moving toward it, because consent architecture was not just a policy concept to me — it was the reason I'd had an uncomplicated professional life for fifteen years instead of a complicated personal one, and I was not going to lose my self-possession in the middle of an advocacy event because my biology had opinions.
He was across the room.
Young — younger than me by several years — with warm brown skin and dark eyes and the kind of face that people remembered.
He was talking to someone, laughing at something they'd said, and he didn't know I existed yet, and I had approximately thirty seconds to decide how I was going to handle this before my rut response started doing things that would make the choice for me.
I handled it by standing still and breathing evenly and sending Micah a text that said I need five minutes which was our code for something's happened that I can't say in a room full of people.
Micah texted back: Lobby.
I took the lobby route. Slow. Controlled.
"What's happening," Micah said when I got there. Not a question.
"Scent-match."
He went still in the particular way he went still when something surprised him — not physical stillness, which he had naturally, but the absence of whatever interior motion he usually kept running. "Here?"
"Room two." I kept my breathing even. "He's an omega. Public figure — I think he's from the advocacy circuit. I need you to tell me I'm handling this correctly because I can't think about it too directly right now."
"You're handling it correctly." Micah's voice was the thing I'd anchored to in crisis for nine years.
Steady. Certain. The voice that came out of him in emergencies that could convince even a boardroom of skeptics that whatever was happening was manageable.
"You left the space. You're not approaching. "
"I want to go back in."
"I know."
"I'm not going to do that without his knowledge."
"I know."
I leaned my back against the wall and looked at the ceiling and thought about the fact that my life had been well-organized and proceeding on schedule until approximately six minutes ago and I had a feeling it was about to become significantly more complicated.
"What do you want to do?" Micah asked.
"I want to know his name. Ethically."
Micah nodded. He looked at his phone for a moment, scrolling through something. "The event tonight is the Grant Advocacy Center annual fundraiser. There's a board of directors list online." He looked up. "Dean Grant."
"That's him. I'm guessing."
"Based on the name and the fact that he runs the center? Yes. That's probably him."
I exhaled. Dean Grant. I knew the name in the abstract — advocacy work, omega-rights reform, a public figure who was either beloved or exhausting depending on which side of the reform debate you were on.
I had no personal knowledge of him, no prior interaction, nothing that would have predicted this.
"How bad is it?" Micah asked. He meant the match response. How bad on the inside, where I was managing things.
"I'm maintaining," I said. "But I'd rather not test it by standing in a scent-filtered room with him for another two hours."
"Go home."
"I have three more people I need to talk to."
"I'll handle them."
I looked at him. He was already shifting into the mode he had — the one where he took on more than his share of the work and didn't make it look like sacrifice. I'd spent nine years watching him do it and had developed a specific complicated feeling about it that I hadn't given a name.
"Text me when you're home," he said.
"You're not my keeper."
"No." He said it without heat. "But you'd text me anyway."
I would. I did — thirty-eight minutes later, from my car outside my townhouse, while I sat in the dark and breathed through the tail end of a rut response that had been entirely involuntary and was already making me think about rearranging things.
I'd need to approach him. Properly. With consent and full information, the way a scent-match should be handled when one party was already in a public professional situation and hadn't known the other existed an hour ago.
Not tonight.
I texted Micah: Home. Maintaining. Will handle this properly.
He texted back immediately, which meant he'd been waiting: I know you will.
There was a second message, a minute later: For what it's worth. I know how it feels to be caught off guard by someone.
I stared at that for a long time. Then: The beta from last month.
Yes.
He hadn't told me her name. He'd told me she existed, and that she'd left, and that he was dealing with it. Which was more than Micah usually disclosed about his interior life, and which I'd filed as significant.
We were two people who were very good at the perimeter of honesty and very bad at the interior of it, with each other, about each other.
I'd known this for years. I was choosing, right now, with my rut response still warm in my chest and Dean Grant's scent stuck in my awareness, to think about whether we were going to do anything about that.
Not tonight either.
Tonight I was going home.
I got out of my car and went inside and stood in my kitchen and tried to remember that the last six hours had happened to me and I hadn't chosen any of it, and that was a specific kind of thing, and I was allowed to need a few minutes to be thrown before I reorganized.
Dean Grant.
I was going to have to figure out how to do this right.
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