Chapter 26 #3
The sound was involuntary. Loaded. Carrying the specific, compressed disappointment of a man who had just been informed that the Omega whose heat had been filling his house for four days would not be cycling again for months, and whose body had registered this information as a supply shortage rather than a scheduling update.
“A shame.”
She smirked against my shoulder. The movement of her lips against my skin producing a warm, curved pressure that I felt in the nerve endings of my trapezius and in the less anatomically precise region of my chest where things that shouldn’t ache were aching.
“Your loss.”
I sighed. Decided the conversation had explored enough vulnerable territory for one evening—or morning, technically, since the predawn light was beginning to gray the edges of the bathroom’s frosted window.
“Finish your bath. I’m gonna get you some clothes.”
But she didn’t let me go.
Her arm tightened around my neck. Not the headlock—not the aggressive, interrogation-grade, I-will-scream-for-reinforcements compression she’d deployed earlier.
A hold. Gentle but firm. The specific, stay pressure of a woman who had decided the conversation wasn’t finished and whose physical language was overriding my verbal attempt at exit the way a hand on a leash overrode a dog’s attempt to cross a street.
I stilled.
The way you still when you recognize that the person holding you has earned the authority to hold you, and that the thing they’re about to say requires the stillness as its precondition.
Her whisper arrived against the skin behind my ear. Close. Warm. Carrying the weight of a request that had been forming since the nosebleed and that was now, with the full context of the disclosure assembled in her awareness, ready for delivery.
“Can you please stop those blockers?”
I went completely still.
Not the voluntary stillness of a man choosing to be motionless.
The involuntary, system-wide, did-she-just-say-what-I-think-she-said arrest that my body produced when an input arrived that exceeded my pre-existing framework for responses.
The muscles locked. The breathing paused.
The blood in my veins—the blood that was currently leaking from my nose because the pharmaceutical compound she’d just asked me to discontinue was degrading my vascular integrity—seemed to stop moving for the duration of the beat it took my brain to verify that the words had been real and not a hallucination produced by sleep deprivation and emotional depletion.
I looked over my shoulder.
Slowly. The rotation measured, the movement carrying the cautious, I-need-to-see-your-face-when-I-ask-this energy of a man who required visual confirmation that the request was serious before he could begin processing it.
She leaned forward to meet my gaze. Her face appearing over my shoulder at the angle their positions permitted—close, wet, the storm-gray eyes carrying the steady, focused, I-know-what-I’m-asking-and-I’m-asking-it-anyway directness that she brought to every decision she’d already made and was now communicating rather than deliberating.
“Are you being serious?”
She bit her bottom lip. The gesture was small, nervous—a rare break in the sovereign confidence she typically maintained, the brief, visible processing of a woman who understood the weight of what she was proposing and was accepting that weight rather than retreating from it.
Then she nodded. Slowly.
“You helped me qualify for the Winter Olympics.” Her voice was low, steady, building the argument with the same structural precision she brought to constructing a skating program—element by element, each one supporting the next, the whole composition designed to arrive at a conclusion that was both logical and emotionally devastating.
“On the system, it shows we’re a pack. Whether we like it or not, the next couple of weeks, we’re going to be training together.
Living in proximity. Dealing with each other’s bullshit before the actual Games. ”
She held my gaze.
“If you’re having nosebleeds, those are signs of your body rejecting the medication.
Vascular fragility. The capillaries in the nasal mucosa are the canary in the coal mine—they’re the smallest, most vulnerable vessels, and when they start failing, it means the compound is producing systemic damage that the larger vessels will eventually mirror.
” She paused. The clinical vocabulary settling into the conversation with the specific, authoritative weight of a woman who had absorbed this knowledge from a father who’d spent decades managing the medical realities of elite athletes.
“That leads to worse side effects, Kael. Significantly worse.”
I huffed.
The sound was defensive. The reflexive, I-can-handle-it exhale of a man whose relationship with his own health had been managed through willpower and tolerance rather than prudence, and who interpreted medical concern as a challenge to his capacity rather than an observation of his limits.
“I can handle it.”
She didn’t accept the dismissal.
Her free hand found my face. Fingers against my jaw—wet, warm, gripping the bone with enough pressure to override the rotation I’d begun—the instinctive, I’m-done-with-this-conversation turn away that she intercepted with the physical authority of a woman who had decided that avoidance was no longer an option she was permitting.
My eyes had no choice but to remain on hers.
The storm-gray irises were serious. Fierce.
Carrying the specific, concentrated, I-am-telling-you-this-because-I-care-about-you-and-you-are-going-to-listen intensity that she deployed when the subject was non-negotiable and the audience was a stubborn man who needed to hear the thing he was refusing to hear.
“You’re going to start experiencing delayed ejaculation that worsens beyond what you’re already dealing with,” she said, and the words were clinical, direct, delivered with the unflinching specificity of a woman who did not believe in softening medical truths because softened truths produced softened compliance.
“Paralysis in the knotting mechanism. Potential cardiovascular complications if the vascular degradation progresses. I know this because my doctor explained that rut blockers and heat suppressants share the same compound family and produce the same escalating side-effect profile. You’ve been taking them on and off for five years.
More consistently in the last two and a half.
The deterioration is going to accelerate, and I don’t know how being in proximity to an Omega now—after years of deprivation—is going to interact with a system that’s already under pharmaceutical stress. ”
She held my jaw. Her thumb resting against the corner of my mouth. Her eyes steady, unwavering, demanding the receipt of what she was delivering.
“So I want you to stop. Not cold turkey—there are discontinuation side effects that require medical management. But gradually. Tapering. Under supervision. With the understanding that the transition is going to be uncomfortable and that the pack is going to need to be involved in managing the adjustment.”
I frowned.
Not from disagreement. From the concern I could see forming in the depths of her argument—the unspoken worry beneath the clinical language, the I-am-scared-for-you frequency that her doctor’s-daughter delivery was attempting to contain and that her storm-gray eyes were leaking despite her best efforts.
She was worried. Genuinely, structurally, in-the-place-where-caring-lives worried about the man who’d hidden in his room for four days and whose body was producing nosebleeds as distress signals.
Her voice dropped. The clinical register giving way to the private one—the whisper, the four-walls voice, the frequency that lived beneath every other and that she guarded with the same ferocity she guarded her heart.
“You’d never hurt me.”
The words entered my chest like a key turning in a lock I’d forgotten existed.
She leaned in. Closer. Until her lips were a breath from mine and the steam was the only thing between us and the five years of distance that had been engineered by a man who’d never deserved access to either of their lives.
“That’s the one thing I can confidently say when it comes to you.
” Her breath was warm against my mouth. Her gray eyes holding mine at a distance that required no focus because the proximity had eliminated everything peripheral.
“You would never hurt me. You’d never do a thing to me that I don’t want.
And if it happens—if the withdrawal produces a moment where the control slips—I know you don’t mean it.
But we can’t keep playing with your health. ”
Her thumb shifted against the corner of my mouth. The lightest possible pressure. A touch that was less contact and more punctuation—the physical emphasis on the sentence she was about to deliver.
“Or your dream. You can’t risk the Winter Olympics by putting your body through pharmaceutical damage that’s going to compromise your performance, your reaction time, and your ability to be the captain this team needs you to be.”
You would never hurt me.
Five words. Delivered as a fact rather than a hope.
Not a request for reassurance but a statement of belief—the kind of belief that was tested and verified and load-bearing, the kind that a woman who trusted almost no one was placing in a man who had given her every reason to withhold it and who was, in this moment, in this steam-filled bathroom, receiving it like a pardon he hadn’t applied for and didn’t know how to hold.