Fifty-Three
FIFTY-THREE
Emiel
THIS WAS HELL. If it wouldn’t have meant leaving Princess alone in the house with everyone else busy in Luca’s heat nest, I’d’ve thrown a toothbrush and some clothes in a bag and headed for the nearest motel... or maybe crashed in the break room at the Hope Project for a few days.
I’d even got as far as checking for pet-friendly hotels on my phone before stopping myself. Princess was still way too skittish for that, and if I tried to take her to the Hope Project, I was afraid she’d slip out to her old haunting grounds, where that asshole a couple of blocks over was probably still trapping strays.
At the moment, I was huddling in a corner down in the basement after a sleepless night, while Princess rubbed against my shins, making concerned-sounding mewing noises. The scent of not one, but two omegas in heat was a bit fainter down here than it was up in my room. I was dreading going up for a shower before work.
I was dreading work, period .
It wasn’t like we didn’t have other people working and volunteering there. But me, Zalen, and Byron were the core crew when it came to day-to-day, hands-on stuff with the kids—and the other two weren’t gonna be doing shit when it came to work for the next several days.
The world might not end if I called in sick or whatever. But it wasn’t like I wanted to be here , either.
It was hard to think straight. I wanted to blame my problems on the pheromone dampeners I was taking, because they didn’t seem to be working for shit. Not since Mia had come stumbling into the house last night and promptly gone into heat. It wasn’t the dampeners’ fault, though. They were from the same batch as the ones Zalen and Byron had taken, and I’d have been able to smell it if either of them had lost control and gone into rut.
Out of nowhere, the image of alphas in rut savaging Mia and Luca slammed into my head like a freight train. Naked bodies writhing, teeth flashing, bloody bite marks on tender mating glands.
“ Stop ,” I gritted out, my jaw aching from clenching it so hard.
Princess made another worried noise and wriggled onto my lap, shoving her forehead against my chin and rubbing. I didn’t understand why she wasn’t afraid of me right now. She should’ve been afraid. Alphas weren’t safe to be around when we got like this. I knew that better than most people.
I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the soft slide of fur against skin, the clean smell of a cat, rather than the summertime-in-heaven pheromones permeating the house. It helped, a bit.
A knock came from the door at the top of the basement stairs, nearly jolting me out of my skin. I’d locked it behind me when I came down, not even thinking about it as I did it. One more layer of protection between me and the two omegas I had no business getting anyplace near.
“ Emiel ?” The muffled voice was Zalen’s. Good... I didn’t think I could’ve handled Byron’s punchable smirk and sex-tousled hair right now.
“What?” I called back, hearing the surliness in my tone.
A slight pause.
“ I need to talk to you for a minute. It’s about —”
“I know what it’s about,” I grumbled. It was about Mia’s heat. What else could it be?
But Zalen was the head alpha of our group. He owned the fuckin’ house. I got up and trudged up the stairs, unlocking the door and opening it. Princess trotted nimbly up behind me, darting out into the main part of the house. Guess even she’d had enough of babysitting me.
“What?” I asked again—still confrontational. I hated that. But the heat scent was already rolling into my sanctuary, stronger than ever. Clinging to Zalen’s skin, to his hair, to the T-shirt and track pants he’d thrown on. The pants did nothing to cover the hard bulge of his dick.
“Sorry to intrude,” he said. “I had to text Mia’s husband and let him know what’s going on. Otherwise, he’d be expecting her at work today, and she asked me to keep him informed if she couldn’t for some reason.”
“And?” I asked, not sure what any of this had to do with me.
“And he didn’t take it well,” Zalen said, with that same infuriating calm that surrounded him like an aura ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of the time. “If he shows up at our front door while the rest of us are busy, you’re going to be the one stuck dealing with him.”
I scowled. “What... you think he’s gonna call the police on us or something if we just don’t answer the door?”
“I wouldn’t completely rule out the possibility,” Zalen said.
My scowl deepened. “Am I your bouncer now or somethin’?”
Zalen’s expression turned careful. “I’m hoping you’re the housemate who can answer the door, tell the angry husband that Mia is here by choice and that she’s safe, and then close the door again.” Deep set eyes that saw too much fastened on my face. “Look... I know that Luca’s heats are hard on you, even if I don’t know why that is. Are you doing all right?”
“Yeah,” I told him. “Peachy. Have I got time for a shower before this asshole shows up?”
“I assume so,” Zalen said. “I just got his text rant about two minutes ago.”
“Great,” I said, and brushed past him, heading upstairs to my room.
Even though it was more than the recommended dosage frequency, I took another dampener shot out of the medicine cabinet and injected it. At least when my face was under the shower spray, I couldn’t smell what was going on downstairs on the second floor.
My hand ached to close around my cock, but that was a terrible idea. For one thing, I’d be stuck squeezing my knot for half an hour afterward, since popping a knot with nothing to hold it was a goddamned miserable experience. And for another, I didn’t need even that much of a taste of what I was missing.
Plus, of course, Mia’s ball and chain would probably show up soon.
Yeah... I could hardly fuckin’ wait.
The universe did at least throw me a scrap. The extra dampener shot was kicking in, and when I got out of the shower, I didn’t feel quite as much like I was about to go insane. I could still smell Mia and Luca, but enough of the receptors in my nose had been blocked now that I no longer had to fight the urge to scratch all the skin off my arms.
I got dressed for work and gave Princess a treat from the stash in my nightstand when she hopped up on my bed and meowed at me.
Right on cue, the front doorbell rang.
“We coulda been holed up at a posh, pet-friendly hotel somewhere, you know,” I told my cat, who made a trilling noise of agreement.
I trudged down the stairs, holding my breath as I passed the second-floor landing, just in case. The doorbell sounded more insistently.
Maybe this guy would try to force his way in, and I’d have an excuse to punch him in the stomach. That actually sounded kind of appealing, now that I thought about it. I jerked the front door open, letting my bulk fill the doorway.
“Yeah?” I asked, making no attempt to rein in my belligerence.
I recognized the guy on the doorstep from the time Zalen and I had taken clients to Mia’s restaurant, before we’d known it was Mia’s restaurant. Gym bro, about five-foot-eleven, Asian or maybe mixed race. An accountant with weight-machine muscles, who’d probably never been in a real fight in his life.
“I’m Mia’s husband,” he said, and there was the faintest hint of a tremor beneath the words. “She wasn’t due to go into heat yet. I need to know that she’s safe, and that she’s here of her own free will.”
I glared down at him. “Ain’t nothin’ gonna harm a single hair on the head of any omega in this house while we’re here,” I told him. “And of course she’s here because she wants to be. She’s the one who told Zalen to keep you in the loop. It’s not like he had to text your ass this morning.”
The soon-to-be-ex-husband squared his shoulders. What the hell was his name again? Nate, or Nat, or something?
“I need confirmation of that. Not just your word. I need to see her for myself.”
In a strange way, I kind of had to hand it to the guy. I’d figured this whole thing was some kind of a pissing match, like he thought the others were poaching on his territory even though Mia had already left him. But he was genuinely frightened, and I was pretty sure, based on his muddled beta scent, that it wasn’t for his own safety when confronted with a surly alpha twice his size.
The idea that he’d drive out here and confront an entire pack of alphas, just to make sure someone he cared about was safe and not being taken advantage of, stabbed a needle someplace deep inside me. It was a place that I didn’t dare look at too closely.
Still, that didn’t change the reality of the situation.
“You tromp up to that heat nest uninvited, and you’ll get your head ripped off your pretty shoulders whether the others are on dampeners or not,” I told him. “You run that nice restaurant with Mia, don’t you? So, I know you’re not actually stupid.”
“They’re on dampeners?” he asked.
“Of course they’re on dampeners. We’re all on fuckin’ dampeners.”
A faint hint of relief loosened his shoulders. “And... you’re not part of it?” he asked.
I stared at him. Maybe he really was that stupid.
“Do I look like I just walked out of a heat nest?” I gestured at my casual suit and button-down shirt.
“Right. No,” he said, still on the back foot. “I guess not. But they’d let you in, wouldn’t they? You live here. You could bring her down, just long enough for me to check that she’s okay.” His spine was ramrod straight. “I won’t leave until I have it directly from her that she wants to be here. And if you try to throw me out, I will call the police for a wellness check.”
The needle pierced deeper, digging into a well of old pain that had scarred over even as it festered.
Silence stretched for several long moments, as I tried not to think about the sensation of something inside me squeezing and malforming, threatening to erupt.
“Let me go see if she’s lucid right now,” I said eventually, and shut the door in his face.
He’d come here alone, ready to do battle and send in the police if he didn’t get the reassurance he wanted that Mia was safe. Him, a beta whose marriage was already on the trash heap, and he still cared enough to come check on her.
Even after Mia had rejected him, he cared enough to do the one thing that no one in my early life had ever cared enough to do for me.