Chapter 5 Olympian Blood
Olympian Blood
Cora
The Omega Suite had become my own personal hell.
After Damon left, the heat hit me with an intensity that almost made our earlier confrontation feel like a distant dream. The room spun around me, the colors too bright and lights too harsh.
A fever raged through me, a fire with no fuel that consumed me from the inside out. Every inch of my skin burned with agonizing sensitivity.
“This isn’t possible,” I gasped, clawing at the silk nightgown that had transformed from luxury to torture. “The formula shouldn’t fail this completely.”
Every brush of silk sent shocks of pain and pleasure racing through me, an agonizing feedback loop I couldn’t escape. My body wasn’t my own anymore. It belonged to the heat, to biology, to everything I’d spent years fighting.
The air temperature seemed to fluctuate wildly. One moment, it was suffocatingly hot, the next freezing cold. I took a breath, and my teeth chattered in my skull. I took another and gasped, my lungs burning as if I’d inhaled steam.
Curling onto my side on the floor, I pressed my face against the cool, unyielding marble.
My scent invaded my nostrils. It had changed, twisted into something sweeter, headier, almost cloying.
Pouring from my pores, it marked me as prey for the Alpha who’d already told me exactly what he planned to do.
My fingers trembled as I struggled to push myself up. A sharp cramp started low in my belly, twisting my insides into knots. My body knew what it wanted, no matter how much my mind screamed in protest. It demanded an Alpha, and not just any Alpha.
My very cells, the building blocks of my being, were crying out for him. I tried to resist the primal need coiling in my gut, but my every frantic heartbeat seemed to whisper his name. Damon.
Some primitive instinct, stronger and older than rational thought, drove me to move. I crawled across the stone toward the scattered bedding, my elbows and knees scraping raw against the cold surface.
An ancient, humiliating compulsion pushed me to gather the pillows and blankets, to arrange them in a circle. To build a nest. “Stop it,” I hissed at myself, my voice cracking. My hands felt like they belonged to someone else as they reached for a silken pillow. “This isn’t you.”
Morning light streamed through the false windows. The artificial glow mimicked natural sunshine, but the brightness reflected off the white surfaces like needles. I squinted against the glare, tears forming at the corners from both pain and humiliation.
My hands shook violently as I positioned the first pillow.
A deep biological need demanded I create a safe space for what Damon had promised would happen.
The silk sheets slipped through my fevered fingers like water, escaping my grasp no matter how hard I strained.
Scraps of my destroyed nightgown littered the ground, evidence of my complete loss of control.
“No, no, no. This can’t be happening,” I sobbed. “I’m Dr. Cora Ellis. I have three degrees. I published in Nature. I’m not... this.”
But my body disagreed with every rational thought I attempted to cling to as defense.
I managed to drag one pillow into position, then pain doubled me over without warning. The smell in the room had grown even stronger, more cloying. It filled the entire space now, claiming it as mine, advertising my availability to the Alpha who’d already declared his intentions.
I felt like I’d been thrown back into the horror I’d experienced when I was younger, except a million times worse.
If this was the infamous Demeter legacy at work, it was no wonder their Omegas were so rare.
Maybe the bloodline Damon called divine would simply kill me.
A small, desperate part of me hoped it would.
Then, at least, I’d be free. Of him. Of this nightmare.
Unfortunately, my luck had run out the moment my path had crossed Damon Blackwood’s. The room suddenly grew chillier, the change so abrupt my breath fogged in the air. The shadows in the corners came to life. Damon manifested from the gloom, filling the space with his imposing, terrifying presence.
I tried to scramble backward, away from him. My legs refused to obey any commands. My muscles spasmed uselessly, weak and uncoordinated from the fever burning through me. “No,” I choked out, shaking my head. “Stay away from me.”
Damon’s obsidian eyes swept over me, taking in my destroyed clothing and fevered state. His nostrils flared, and his pupils dilated until only thin black rings remained. He was no longer just a man. He was the predator my body had been calling for.
“Your heat is finally hitting you,” he said, his voice deeper and rougher with Alpha instinct. “Just like I told you would happen. I was right, wasn’t I?“
I wanted to spit, to snap back at him, to turn him away. But his scent hit me like a wave, settling in my lungs, suffocating every protest as it formed. The cramping in my abdomen intensified into a blinding, white-hot agony.
This was it, the same cruel paradox he’d warned me about. His presence made the pain worse while promising the only possible relief.
“I don’t... need you,” I gasped, each word a battle against my body’s demands. The cold stone pressed against my feverish flesh, the only anchor to reality as everything dissolved.
Shadows danced around Damon’s feet in frantic, dizzying patterns. They always seemed alive around him, but now, they were… hungry. Or perhaps that hunger lived in his eyes as he studied my collapse.
“Your formula was impressive work,” he said, taking a measured step closer that made me flinch. “But you can’t fight evolution forever, Cora. Especially not with your bloodline awakening.”
I had to get away from him. Had to move. I tried to push myself backward across the floor, my arms shaking with the effort, barely supporting my weight. I managed to slide myself a few inches before my strength gave out.
“Stay back,” I repeated, a final plea that had become my last line of defense.
He ignored it, just like I’d suspected he would. “I know everything about you,” he said, stepping forward once again. “Including what you need right now to make the torment stop.”
His voice was a low, hypnotic rumble. In a panic, I tried to move again, dragging myself backward with arms that trembled violently. My legs wouldn’t cooperate at all anymore. They lay useless beneath me, refusing every command I gave them.
My body responded to his tone despite my desperate attempts to escape. Slick gathered between my thighs, a fresh wave of humiliation washing over me. I despised him for witnessing this. I despised myself even more for wanting what he offered.
Damon closed the distance between us in two final, predatory strides. I tried to lash out at him, but he caught my wrists easily. I’d been helpless against his strength even before my fever had stolen all my coordination. Now, I couldn’t even put up a proper fight.
“Leave me alone!” I screamed, the words raw and feral. “Let me go!”
“Oh, Dr. Ellis… I wouldn’t be here if that was really what you wanted.”
With those taunting words, Damon lowered me onto my back, pinning my wrists above my head. His weight was an anchor, immobilizing me completely. My chest heaved, each breath dragging more of his scent into my lungs, feeding the fire.
I tried to arch my back, to throw him off. The movement only pressed our bodies closer together, his heat searing through his shirt. The fever inside me spiraled higher, and I hissed in frustration.
Damon shot me a knowing look. “Are you finished?” he asked, as maddeningly calm as I was desperate.
“I’ll never be finished,” I whispered. It was a lie, or, at least, so I thought.
A fresh wave of pain stole what little strength I had left. And then, a sharp, unnatural sound echoed through the room. Pinned beneath Damon’s imposing weight and unable to move, I twisted my head sideways.
The small potted fern in the corner had exploded.
Thick green vines shot across the floor, spreading with a speed that dwarfed what I’d seen hours ago.
Leaves unfurled in a time-lapse blur, a silent, violent eruption of life.
The delicate legs of a nearby table splintered and snapped as a vine wrapped around it, crushing the wood.
Damon released my wrists and rolled to his feet with a fluid grace that seemed impossible for a man his size.
I scrambled upright, my back hitting the wall as the plants surged toward me.
Tendrils of greenery curled around my ankles, not restraining, but providing an oddly comforting warmth. “W-What’s happening?” I stammered.
Small buds formed and bloomed into white flowers that had no business existing here. The floor cracked audibly as roots pushed through hairline fractures, seeking deeper purchase. Life erupted everywhere, primal and unstoppable.
“You already know the answer, Cora,” Damon told me. “Your Olympian blood runs true. Your body recognizes what it is even if your mind still refuses to accept the truth.”
I shook my head violently, unable to form coherent words through the shock. The rich scent of fertile earth filled the air, mixing with my heat to create something new. Something that spoke of growth and abundance and ancient power. I didn’t want to believe it. But I had no choice, did I?
My fingers trembled as I reached toward the nearest vine, drawn by an instinct I couldn’t name. It curled around my wrist like a living bracelet, leaves sprouting where it touched my pulse. As if drawing life from my very heartbeat.
Damon had been right. All his claims, all his impossible assertions, were true. My life’s work wasn’t just a product of my intellect. It was a manifestation of my blood.
Before I could process this further, pain beyond anything I’d experienced tore through me. The agony doubled me over, stealing my breath completely, tearing through me like claws. I clutched my stomach and collapsed, no longer able to find relief anywhere.
Through the wall of green that had turned the sterile suite into a living jungle, Damon approached. As he knelt beside my convulsing form, I couldn’t help but reach for him. “Damon,” I whispered, my pride shattered into a million pieces.
Every principle I’d ever held crumbled under the weight of need I couldn’t fight anymore. Every nerve ending screamed for his touch. My blood pounded with a biological imperative that made a mockery of free will.
“Let me help you,” he said, his voice gentler than I’d ever heard it before.
His fingers brushed my cheek with surprising tenderness, then slid beneath my chin with careful pressure.
He tilted my head to expose my throat. The position made me vulnerable in ways that should have filled me with terror.
Instead, a strange calm settled over me, as if a drug had dulled all my senses.
His breath scorched the sensitive area where my neck met my shoulder. I trembled as his teeth grazed my bonding gland, the spot swollen and hypersensitive.
He didn’t bite down, not fully, but a sharp, clean pain lanced through me. For a split second, I felt a sudden, jarring connection form. A fragile thread of his cool, controlled power poured into the raging fire of my own.
Cora, I heard him whisper in my mind. But it was only for a second, and it drifted away as quickly as it appeared.
In its wake, relief flooded my system. It wasn’t a slow fade, but rather, like a switch being flipped. The worst of the heat receded, and the cramping eased. I could think again.
I tasted copper where I’d bitten my own lip during the worst of the spasm.
A temporary bond. I could feel it now, a thin, artificial thread connecting us, a conduit through which his calm was soothing my chaos.
I sagged against him, the strength that had fueled my rage and my terror completely spent, leaving nothing but a hollowed-out exhaustion.
For a single, unguarded moment, there was no hatred.
There was only the profound, animal relief of the pain ending.
He had been right about everything. He had told me what I was, and my body had proven it.
He had told me what I needed, and he had provided it.
The thought was more humiliating than the heat itself.
“There,” Damon purred. “Doesn’t it feel better? To be mine?”
I didn’t answer. Around us, the plants continued their impossible growth, responding to the emotional resonance of the temporary bond. In the humid sanctuary they’d created, I closed my eyes and allowed myself this brief reprieve. From the war between my mind and my body.
For now, I would accept this. But I would remember this moment of weakness, this surrender he’d forced from me. And somehow, I would make him pay.