Chapter Seven
THANE
Isat with my back against her door and listened to her suffer and didn’t move.
The stone floor was cold through my leathers. I had dressed quickly after she bolted the door—tunic unlaced, boots not quite settled—and the discomfort of it was something to focus on when the alternative was the sound coming through the wood.
Her scent had changed.
What had been moving through the tower all evening—honey and silver blossom, warm and present but still contained—had opened into something rawer.
Deeper. The sweetness was still there, but underneath it now was heat in the literal sense, something biological and urgent that bypassed every rational thought I attempted and landed directly in my alpha instincts with the subtlety of a blade.
I kept my hands flat on my thighs, breathed through my mouth, and stayed where I was.
Malric paced.
He had been pacing since we reached the landing, three steps one direction, pivot, three steps back.
His boots finding the same rhythm against stone that they found on a battlefield when the waiting had gone on too long and action was the only thing his body knew how to offer.
His magic pressed against my awareness in short pulses, tightly contained but restless, searching for something to do with itself.
A soft sound came through the door. Not a word. The kind of sound that comes before words, from somewhere below language.
My hands pressed harder against my thighs.
“She needs us,” Malric said.
“She doesn’t want us.”
“Her body is telling a different story.”
“Her body isn’t making the decision.” I kept my voice level. “She is. And she said no. We honor her request. Always.”
He stopped pacing. I sensed the intensity of his stare without making eye contact. “You’re the one who wanted to go to her earlier.”
“I know.” I had. The impulse had moved through me faster than thought, and I was glad he had stopped me, not that I would tell him that. “I was wrong. She’s terrified and her scent is triggering me to claim her. Going in there would have made all of it worse.”
Another sound from behind the door—sharper this time, a caught breath that turned into something small and pained—and I could feel it inside of me. The thread that had appeared between us earlier, faint and new and impossible to fully account for, carried it.
I sensed the connection between Malric and me growing. I had been conscious of that—the battlefield, the decision, the sensation of something aligning that had not been aligned before. I had a reference point.
This was nothing like that and completely like that simultaneously.
“Can you feel it?” I asked.
Malric’s pacing didn’t resume. “The bond.”
“Yes.”
“Since the stairwell,” he said. “It was faint then.”
“It’s getting stronger.”
He said nothing. That was its own answer.
With the back of my head pressed against the door, I looked at the ceiling and tried to sort through what I was receiving from the other side of the wood.
Pain—not sharp, not injury, but the insistent demand of a body asking for something it had been denied for far too long.
Confusion, tangled through everything else, the disorientation of someone experiencing a physical reality they have no framework for.
Beneath both of those, harder to locate but present: shame.
That one landed hardest.
She was ashamed of what her body was doing. Ashamed of having been seen. Perhaps shame arose from her desire, or from her feelings on the landing and earlier, throughout the evening, since our scents first mingled on the stairwell.
She had been taught that her wanting was dangerous. That her body’s responses were precursors to harm. A century of that didn’t dissolve because two alphas arrived and her biology recognized them.
“She doesn’t know what she is,” I said.
Malric’s voice came from closer than before. He had moved without resuming the pacing. “She knows that she is an omega.”
“Knowing the word is different from knowing what it means.” I turned my head enough to look at him.
He stood against the opposite wall now, arms folded, watching the door with an expression I recognized—the one that meant he was working through something he had already partly resolved and was looking for confirmation of the answer.
“She’s read the histories. She knows the taxonomy. She doesn’t know herself.”
“Because he kept her from knowing.”
“Because he kept her from everything.” I paused. “Including this. She’s never had a heat. Not a real one. Whatever containment is going on with the tower, it must have been suppressing her heats.”
Malric was quiet.
“She thinks this is something wrong with her,” I said. “She thinks the wanting is the danger. He told her the power surge was from her omega nature—that feeling anything toward an alpha was what killed her mother.”
The silence that followed was heavier.
“That’s why she ran,” Malric said. Not a question.
“That’s why she’s in there, ashamed of something her body is doing without her permission, yes.” I looked back at the ceiling. “She’s not afraid of the heat. She’s afraid of what she believes she’ll do to us.”
Another sound through the door—quieter now, more controlled, the sound of someone working very hard to contain themselves. The thread between us pulsed once with it, warm and pained.
I exhaled slowly.
Malric unfolded his arms. He moved to the stairwell and paused there, his back to me. “I’m going down to the lower level.”
I looked at him.
“Distance will help,” he said. “My scent is—” He stopped. Started again. “Staying here is not making this easier for her. It’s not making it easier for me.” A pause. “You’re better at this than I am.”
The admission cost him. I didn’t point that out.
“I’ll be back before dawn,” he said. “If anything changes—”
“I’ll call you.”
He descended. His footsteps faded below.
The corridor quieted.
Her scent was still present—would be present until the spike ran its course—but without Malric’s added to it, the quality of the air shifted. Still difficult. Still doing things to my instincts that I was managing one breath at a time. But different. Slightly less impossible.
I settled more fully against the door, adjusting the angle so my shoulder blade was against the wood rather than the center of my spine, and let myself become still in the way I had learned to become still on long watches—not passive, not absent, but settled. Present and patient.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said quietly, toward the wood. “You don’t have to respond to that. I’m just telling you.”
No sound from the other side.
“The thread between us—you may be able to feel it. I don’t know if you can. But I can feel you, faintly, and I want you to know that what you’re feeling—” I stopped. Considered what was true. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. This is all perfectly natural. It’s part of your biology as an omega.”
The tower hummed beneath us, slow and steady.
“What’s happening to you is not wrong,” I continued.
“It’s not dangerous. It’s not evidence of anything except that you’ve been suppressed for a very long time and your body is trying to complete a process that was interrupted before it could finish.
” A pause. “You haven’t hurt us. You’re not going to hurt us.
I know you don’t believe that yet. That’s all right.
We can be patient until you believe me.”
Silence from the other side. But the thread shifted—something in it softening, fractionally, the shame note not gone but less sharp.
I stayed where I was.
The hours moved the way hours move when you are waiting for something you cannot accelerate—slowly, and then in sudden jumps, time behaving strangely at the edges.
The tower’s ambient light didn’t change.
I tracked time by the quality of the air, by the gradual shifts in her scent as the spike moved through its phases.
At some point, I became aware that the cramping quality had eased. The urgency had not gone—that would take longer—but the acute pain of it had reduced. Our connection felt more drained than desperate.
“Thane.” Her voice, quietly, through the door. The first time she had spoken in hours, beyond low cries.
I straightened. “Here.”
A long pause.
“It’s getting better,” she said. “The worst of it.”
“Good,” I said. Then, because it was true, “I’m glad.”
Another pause, shorter. “You didn’t leave.”
“No.”
“Malric did.”
“He went downstairs. He thought his scent was making it harder for you.”
The silence that followed had a different texture—processing rather than shutting out.
“That was—” she started, then stopped. “That was considerate.”
The surprise in her voice when she said it told me everything about what she had been taught to expect from alphas, and I filed it in the place where I kept the things that made me want to take apart the king’s system piece by piece until nothing of it remained.
“He’s not always what he sounds like,” I said carefully.
“Neither are you,” she said.
I leaned my head back against the door. Through the wood, I could feel the faint warmth of the nest on the other side, the tower’s temperature running slightly higher in that chamber than in the corridor. “Sleep, if you can. The spike will finish faster if you rest.”
A long quiet.
Then, so softly I might have imagined it. “Thank you.”
I closed my eyes and stayed where I was, my back against her door, the thread between us running warm and tentative in the dark, and didn’t move until morning came.
The spike broke close to dawn.
I perceived the change in the thread before I heard it.
The severe cramping that had been present for hours was diminishing, transforming from pain into a profound exhaustion.
The urgency withdrew by degrees, the way a storm withdraws, the pressure dropping and the air thinning until what remained was simply the aftermath.
I stayed where I was for a while longer.