Thirty-Seven
THIRTY-SEVEN
Luca
“WHAT DO YOU mean, there’s a supply shortage?” I asked in dismay. “How can there be a supply shortage of heat blockers ?”
Leah shrugged her narrow shoulders, not looking any happier than I felt. “Sorry, Luca. I’m just the messenger. Most of that stuff comes in by mail from aid organizations in Scandinavia and the Netherlands. Rumor is that the feds busted a huge shipment in customs, and now the supply chain’s screwed until they can smuggle more in somehow.”
An unpleasant shiver of dread skittered up my back. I clenched my jaw, telling myself firmly that there was no reason to panic yet.
I was still two weeks out from my heat. The blockers had a pretty short shelf life unless you had access to a medical-grade deep-freeze, but I always gave myself as much lead time as I could get away with. You never knew when a dealer would get busted and disappear from the scene. If you needed to scramble to find someone else, it was best to have extra time to prepare.
This , though... it felt different, somehow. Bigger. Harder to work around. It was the first time I’d ever heard of an entire region losing its supply.
“How long until you get some?” I asked, trying not to let irrational fear creep into my voice.
Or maybe it wasn’t so irrational, since Leah only shrugged again, looking sympathetic. “I dunno, man. It just depends. They’re saying the Post Office has dogs that can sniff it out now. Maybe they’re tightening things down on the supply side. You want a birth control syringe in the meantime? Just in case, I mean.”
“No.” The word was out of my mouth before my brain could register what a stupid decision it was. I swallowed, debating whether to take it back, but after a moment, I shook my head. There was still time to find a different supplier—someone who hadn’t sold out yet, or who got their pills via different means. “I’m good, thanks. I’ll figure something out. Do you know of anyone else in the area who’s still got some?”
Leah’s expression soured. “No one I could send you to in good conscience. Sorry, Luca.” She consciously smoothed her features. “Don’t worry. This’ll be a one-off, I imagine. They’ll find some way around the new restrictions before long. They always do.”
“Yeah.” I played along, trying not to project my own trauma responses all over the situation. “Okay, thanks anyway. Stay safe, Leah.”
“You, too.” She mustered a smile for me, forced though it was.
The drive back to Ladue gave me way too much time to think... a state of affairs made even worse by the fact that I had to stop at a public charging station north of Granite City to top up the Leaf for the rest of the drive home.
There were lots of dealers located closer to St. Louis—especially on the Illinois side of the river, where the sentences were lighter for possession with intent to distribute. But I was extremely paranoid about going to anyone close enough to East St. Louis or Washington Park that they might have ties to my old gang.
Then again, it wasn’t paranoia if they really were out to get you. Wasn’t that what they always said on TV?
God. Sometimes I hated my own brain. It wasn’t as though I didn’t do natural heats occasionally; meaning whenever my doctor bullied me into doing it ‘for my health.’ That ended up being once a year or so, usually.
It was the control thing that got to me.
If I decided to have a heat, then fine. It was something I chose for myself, because it was the lesser of two evils and better than ending up with multiple forms of cancer by the age of forty. I chose it, and I took a birth control shot, and that was that. Depending on what else was going on at the time, either Byron or Zalen took a dampener so they wouldn’t end up going into rut, and they helped me get through it.
How interesting that alpha dampeners aren’t regulated , I thought, unable to quell a pulse of irritation. The damn things didn’t even require a prescription. You could walk in and get them over the counter.
My irritation over that was stupid, though. After all, the last thing I wanted was an alpha in my nest who wasn’t on dampeners.
And that was right back to my control issues. I knew what it was like to get sucked into a heat you didn’t want, with alphas you hadn’t chosen, who didn’t give a rolling shit for your wellbeing.
I guess I was lucky that Blaze killed any alpha underling in the gang who was stupid enough to bite one of ‘his’ omegas. No one had ever tried to go after my mating gland, though it had taken years for the scars of bite marks on other parts of my body to fade.
Lucky. Yeah... that was me, all right.
I had plenty of other scars. They were just on the inside, like the one that was throbbing a warning right now. I wasn’t choosing this heat. I didn’t want this heat. I’d already told Zalen I wasn’t going to have it. And now the stupid universe was trying to make me a liar; trying to prove that I still didn’t get to choose.
Well, screw that.
I had two weeks to get this figured out. I’d heard the unspoken words behind Leah’s muttered “ no one I could send you to in good conscience .” The gangs were probably sitting on some of the stuff—and making crazy profits by selling into the shortage.
But A) god only knew how old the pills they were selling would be, much less whether they’d been stored properly. And B) I wasn’t actually that stupid. Or that desperate.
I really, really didn’t want to show up at Zalen’s door again, this time to sheepishly explain that I couldn’t find blockers after all, and could he please get me some by whatever means necessary. The good news was, I didn’t need to go down that route yet. Or hopefully at all.
Mia got home a few minutes before midnight. I was waiting up for her, aware that my lack of sleep was starting to catch up to me at work, but pretty sure I would have been awake and fretting regardless.
She looked tired, but she didn’t smell distressed tonight. I hoped that meant nothing else bad had happened at the restaurant. Apparently, I couldn’t make the same claim about my own perfume, because she stopped outside the TV room and peered inside.
“Luca?” she asked, coming in and plopping down next to me on the battered couch. “Everything okay?”
I sighed, and paused the episode of Ashes to Ashes on a frame with the Quattro half obscured by dust as it slewed around a corner, mid-chase.
“Not exactly,” I said, hastening to add, “It’s nothing serious, don’t worry,” when her brows creased in concern.
“What’s up?” she asked. “Something wrong at the Hope Project? It’s not about Tony, is it?”
“No, nothing like that,” I told her. “Look... this is embarrassing, but I guess there was a big shipment of heat blockers stopped at the border, and now none of the local dealers around here can get them. My usual source is out, and she doesn’t know when she’ll get more.”
Real alarm flashed over Mia’s pretty face. “Shit! I’m due in three weeks! What about you?”
“Two,” I replied grimly. “There’s still time, but—”
She nodded, way ahead of me. “Let me run upstairs and grab my laptop. I’ll see if my source is still good.”
Some of the tension drained from my tight neck muscles. “Thanks.”
She smiled, tipping her chin at the TV. “Restart that for me. I love this episode. Be right back.”
I grabbed the remote and went back to the beginning, pausing it to wait for her. She returned a couple of minutes later and sat down next to me, our thighs pressing together warmly as she opened up the computer and powered it on. I set the episode to playing as background noise while she called up an internet browser.
“This source has been solid for a couple of years now,” she said absently, navigating to a popular website for sellers of handmade and vintage items. “She’s in Vermont—one of those people who sells blockers privately, disguised with code words and packed in with other legit items.”
I’d heard of those sources, but I’d never tried to use one. It was probably the gang kid in me, but I’d always been more comfortable dealing face-to-face with people, so I could get a better read on them.
This was definitely a ‘beggars can’t be choosers’ type of situation, though.
“Bless ‘em all,” I said. “If she’s got what we need, she’s my new hero.”
“Right?” Mia said wryly. “Let’s see... okay, here we go. Handblown glass vases... buy one, get a free packet of fifty ‘flower food’ tablets to keep your cut flowers looking fresh.” She paused, punching the air in triumph. “In stock!”
I guessed the blockers came in the packet of flower tablets, which was actually fucking brilliant. It was easy enough for an omega to sniff out a hormone pill from among a bunch of sugar tablets. Much harder for any poor postal drone tasked with screening for controlled substances with a thirty-year-old X-ray machine.
“Quick, get some,” I said with feeling. “In fact... does your restaurant have a freezer? Maybe we can stock up.”
“Not a medical-grade deep freeze, sorry,” she said. “I looked into that, actually—but those are much colder.”
She quickly tapped in an order, and we both held our breath while the payment processed. When the success page popped up, we let it out with a whoosh in perfect unison.
“Crisis averted, hopefully,” she said.
It wasn’t a sure thing—the uncertainty of shipment and delivery was another reason I preferred to deal in person. Still, Mia had been using this source for a long time. I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and leaned over to kiss the top of her head, feeling much lighter than I had before.
“You’re a lifesaver.” Then I noticed the shipping address as Mia went to close the laptop—someplace in Jennings. “Hey, you can get that package delivered here, you know.”
She shook her head and leaned into me, curling up comfortably. “Nah. It’s fine. The downside of sources like this is that if the politicians ever decide to criminalize simple possession, the dealer has a nice, handy list of names and addresses for them if they get busted. No need to put Zalen on a list like that.”
I looked down at her, one eyebrow raised. “Whereas it’s not a problem putting Nat on that list?”
She sighed, her shoulders rising and falling beneath my arm. “I could be a bitch and say something like ‘serves him right’... but the truth is, Nat and I are already on that list, and we have been for a long time.”
It wasn’t an issue at the moment. The culture warriors weren’t interested in the optics of arresting individual omegas for possession. They were only after the distributors, for now.
“As long as it won’t be a problem retrieving the package when it arrives,” I said mildly.
“It won’t,” she replied. “As weird as it sounds, Nat and I are getting along better than we have in a very long time. There should be a tracking number tomorrow, and we can follow it from there. Now, let me watch the show. This part’s good; you’ll like it.”
I settled back with an armful of warm, sweet-smelling omega cuddled against me, relieved to find that the day had gone from seriously bad to pretty damned good, in the end.