Chapter 14
Fourteen
Rhett
Her heat is four days out. Maybe five. I can smell it on her from clear across a room, and it is taking me apart one nerve at a time.
I’ve always had the best nose in the house. Cal jokes about it, calls me a bloodhound, and he’s not wrong. Six years I’ve smelled every mood in this pack before the man having it knew he was having it. It’s a party trick. It has never once mattered.
It matters now. Because I caught the change in Wren days ago, before Eli, before any of them.
A new sweet note climbing up under the vanilla, richer every morning, ripening like fruit in the sun.
My body knew the word for it before my brain would agree to say it.
Pre-heat. She’s tipping toward her first heat, and every alpha instinct I’ve spent a lifetime keeping on a short leash is standing straight up in me, hauling toward that little bakery like there’s a rope tied to my sternum and she’s got the other end.
I get home from the shop, and I can’t sit still.
Can’t eat Eli’s dinner, and I always eat Eli’s dinner.
I stand at the back window looking at nothing.
My skin’s a size too small. My blood’s running hot and low, and I know this feeling, distantly, like you know a song you’ve never had a reason to sing.
It’s the edge of a rut. I haven’t had a real one in six years, because you don’t rut without an omega to rut for.
Your body doesn’t waste the ammunition. And now there’s an omega just across the street, her scent going sweet and ripe on the evening air.
Every animal part of me has decided she’s the one, and it’s quietly, ruthlessly warming up the engine whether I vote for it or not.
I want to feed her. I want to build her a den, somewhere dark and safe, and put her in the middle of it where nothing can reach her.
I want to be there when the heat takes her.
I want it with a force that empties the air out of my lungs, want to be the one she reaches for when her body stops taking no for an answer, want to give her that small knot again and then, God, the real one, want to be what gets her through the worst and best days her body’s ever going to hand her.
That’s the rut talking, and the rut is a caveman, and he’s unfortunately correct about everything except the one part where he thinks he’s going to get any of it.
My hands ache with it. Actual, physical ache, the want sitting down in the joints of my fingers.
I’ve laughed at other alphas for exactly this, glassy and gone stupid over some omega, and here I am at a dark window aching in the hands over a woman who thinks I forgot her name the second I zipped my goddamn jeans.
And I won’t be. I already know it. I settled that on a street corner the night of the counter. I fixed my grin, walked out light, taught her in the plainest terms I had that I’m a good time and not one thing past it.
“You’re doing the window thing,” Cal says behind me.
“I’m admiring the yard.”
“It’s full dark. There’s a raccoon in the trash, and that’s the entire show.” He comes and stands beside me anyway, because Cal cannot stand next to a bad feeling without trying to fix it with his body heat. “You all right?”
No. “Peachy.”
He doesn’t buy it. But Cal’s kind, so he lets it lie, and for a minute the two of us watch the raccoon commit felonies.
He smells like worry under the cedar. Cal always does, when one of us is off. Six years and he still can’t help trying to carry a mood that isn’t his. It’s the best thing about him. Also, the most exhausting. Right now, I love him for it and need him gone, in roughly equal measure.
Nobody in this house is saying the thing out loud tonight.
They can smell her on me. Have been able to for days, the whole story of that counter written across my skin in a language a pack reads without trying.
Not one word about it. Not from Cal, not from Eli.
No fight, no cold shoulder, because that isn’t what a pack is, Della had that dead right.
But the not-saying has a weight all its own, and I’ve been lugging it around like a sack of wet sand, because the truth underneath is worse than any argument could be.
I went first. Alone. I put my hands on the omega this pack has waited six years for, on a bakery counter, before my prime had said a single word, and then I strolled out and left her believing it was nothing.
So I didn’t just cut the line. I might have taught her, in one clean lesson, that we’re exactly the thing she’s scared of.
Three men, a good afternoon, no one who stays.
Eli comes in from the kitchen with the dish towel over one shoulder. He looks at the pair of us at the window. Then he looks a beat longer at me, like he always does. Weather versus a verdict.
“She’ll go into heat this week,” he says. Flat, low, laying it on the table because somebody has to. “First one of her life. She doesn’t understand yet what’s coming. Dot will sit her down tomorrow and walk her through it.”
“And then what?” Cal asks.
“Then nothing.” Eli’s voice stays level, but the knuckles on the towel go white.
“Then we wait. She’s got no bond and no pack.
No claim on any of us, and none of us on her.
So we don’t go over there. We don’t crowd her.
If she wants us through it, she knows exactly where the firehouse is.
If she doesn’t, that’s hers to decide, all the way down, and we respect it no matter what it costs us.
” He turns his head and says the last part to me.
Not unkind. Just making sure it reaches the man in the room most likely to do something loud and stupid about it.
“I know how consent works, Vance.”
“I know you do.” Quieter. “I’m saying it for me as much as for you.”
And that lands, because it’s true. Even Eli, steady as a load-bearing wall, is standing in his own kitchen strangling a dish towel because there’s an omega tipping into heat down the street and every cell he’s got wants to be there for it.
It’s not only me. That helps a little. It does not help enough.
And under all of it, under the wanting and the guilt and the certainty I’ll get left out, there’s a plainer thing I can’t shake loose.
She’s about to go through the hardest thing her body has ever done, for the first time, with no idea what’s happening to her.
And she’s the exact brand of stubborn that will try to ride it out alone rather than ask a single soul for help.
I’ve seen her haul that whole shop on her own like asking for a hand is a moral failing.
She’ll do the same with this. And the picture of her white-knuckling a first heat by herself in that apartment, scared and hurting and too proud to knock on a door forty feet off, does a thing to me that has nothing to do with wanting her.
It’s just, please. Let her not be alone for it.
Even if it’s not us. Even if it’s not me.
Because when the time comes, they’ll offer, and they’ll do it properly, which is precisely what I didn’t.
And if she says yes to anyone, she’ll say yes to them.
I’ll be at the back of the room, the one who had his shot and threw it in the trash, cracking jokes so nobody up front notices.
I know that spot cold. Never once means I wanted it for this.
“Rhett.” Eli hasn’t taken his eyes off me.
“I’m fine.” I scrape myself off the window and slot the grin back into place, because it’s the only tool I’ve ever trusted, and I point it at both of them.
“This is a great look for us, honestly. Three grown alphas standing at a window sniffing the night air like dogs at a cookout. Very dignified. I’ve never been prouder. ”
Cal snorts. Eli doesn’t. Eli just keeps aiming that quiet, seeing look at me, the one that slides under the act and settles in behind it, and for one bad second I’m sure he’s going to say the thing.
The real one. Ask me straight out what happened on that counter and how I actually feel about the woman at the far end of it.
He doesn’t. He lets me keep the joke, because he’s a good prime and he can tell I’ll go under if he takes it off me tonight.
“Bed,” he says instead. “All of us. Nothing to do but wait.”
I go up to my room. I lie on top of the covers with the window open, because I can’t stand it shut, not tonight, and somewhere out under the pines and the woodsmoke of the whole sleeping town I can still find her.
That thread of warm and sweet and getting sweeter, pulling steady on the rope tied to my sternum.
Four days. Maybe five.
And the cruelest joke of the whole night, the one I would never say out loud to a living soul, is this. I would give anything to be trusted with her when it comes. Anything at all. And I’m the one who made good and sure I won’t be.