Chapter 2
I shake my head. He lets go of my elbow. Steps back. Another efficient transaction in the biology market.
I keep moving. The floor is bigger than it looked from the edge.
Alcoves cut into the walls, some curtained, some open.
A pair in one of the open ones catches my eye and I can't look away.
The omega is on his back, legs over the alpha's shoulders, and the alpha is buried in him to the root, grinding slow, and the omega's hands are scrabbling at the concrete floor like he's trying to hold onto the world.
His mask is still on. His mouth is visible beneath the bottom edge and it's wet, slack, making sounds that are almost conversational.
Like he's trying to talk and his body won't let him form words.
The alpha leans down and puts his mouth on the omega's neck, right on the scent gland, and the omega arches off the ground like he's been electrocuted and comes between their bodies in thick spurts that nobody wipes away.
I watch and I feel my own body responding like sympathy pain.
A cramp low in my belly, a fresh wave of slick, my hole clenching on nothing.
I'm so empty it hurts. That's the part nobody tells you about heat, or maybe they do and I refused to listen.
It's not just arousal. It's absence. Your body screaming that something is supposed to be inside you and nothing is, and the emptiness is its own kind of agony.
I've been on the floor for maybe fifteen minutes and I've gone from terrified to desperate.
The part of my brain that got a 3.9 last semester and aced organic chemistry has exactly nothing useful to contribute.
It keeps trying, keeps offering facts about pheromone cascades and limbic activation like a Wikipedia page nobody asked to read.
None of it helps. Knowing why you're drowning doesn't teach you how to swim.
Two alphas are squaring off near the center of the floor.
Not a fight, but close. One of them is huge, arms corded with muscle, his mask showing teeth.
The other is leaner but his scent is aggressive enough that I can smell it from here, sharp and territorial.
They're circling each other, shoulders squared, chests puffed, flooding the air with pheromones.
A low growl rolls out of the bigger one's chest and I feel it in my stomach.
An omega between them is swaying on his feet, head turning from one to the other like he's caught between two riptides.
His hand is pressed against his own cock through his pants like he can't help it, like the competing alpha scents are doing something to him he can't control.
The bigger alpha lunges forward, gets in the other's space, and for a second I think they're going to fight.
But the leaner one drops his eyes. Steps back.
Yields. Dominance decided in three seconds without a fist thrown.
The winning alpha puts his hand on the omega's lower back, low enough to be possessive, and guides him toward an alcove.
The omega goes boneless, already leaning into the touch, his legs barely holding him.
The losing alpha watches them go, jaw tight behind his mask, then turns and scans the room.
His gaze passes over me and I feel it like a thumb dragging down my spine.
He doesn't approach. Something about my scent, maybe, or the way I'm standing, wound tight and rigid. Whatever he reads, he decides not for me and keeps moving.
I'm starting to think I made a mistake. Not the coming here part, although that too.
The specific mistake of thinking I could handle this.
I thought I'd walk in, find an alpha, let biology do what biology does, walk out the other side with the worst of my heat managed.
Clean transaction. No feelings, no names, no shame I couldn't compartmentalize afterward.
Instead I'm losing. The heat is winning and I can feel it happening in real time, my composure thinning out with every breath of pheromone-thick air.
Sweat on my lower back. Slick soaking through my jeans.
My cock so hard it aches and I can't even adjust myself without drawing attention.
I'm going to end up like the omega on the floor, the one with his face pressed to concrete and his hips pushing back against nothing.
I'm going to end up on my knees in front of strangers begging for someone, anyone, and the pride I walked in here with is going to be the last thing I feel before my heat burns it out of me completely.
Then I smell it.
It comes through the wall of competing scents like a blade, like a clean line cut through static.
Not louder than the others. Sharper. More specific.
And underneath the alpha musk and the pheromones and the heat-charged air, there's something I recognize.
Something I've smelled before, not here, not in this context, somewhere safe, somewhere ordinary, somewhere I can't place because my brain is short-circuiting and the rest of me doesn't care about placing it.
My body just says him.
A full-body flush hits me so hard my vision blurs. Slick soaks through my underwear in a rush that's humiliating and undeniable. My hole clenches so hard I stumble, actually stumble, and grab the back of a leather couch to keep from going to my knees.
Everything else in the room goes quiet. Not literally. The bass is still shaking the floor, the omega in the alcove is still crying out, the alphas are still circling. But in my head, the noise collapses down to a single point. One scent. One direction.
I'm moving toward it before I've decided to move.