Chapter 9 Mattaniah #2
Tamsin's eyes find me the second I round the corner into our section.
She tracks me all the way to my chair, her gaze cataloguing the fresh clothes, the damp hair at my temples, and the way my hands are still trembling as I pull my keyboard toward me.
She doesn't say anything, but her expression carries a question I'm not equipped to answer.
I focus on the screen and try to type, my fingers continually hitting the wrong keys.
"What the hell was that," I mutter under my breath.
Richard didn't trigger it. No Alpha has ever triggered anything like that in my entire life, not the rent-an-Alpha techs, not my mother's marks, not even random encounters on the street.
My heats have always been predictable and manageable.
Whatever happened in that bathroom wasn't a heat and it wasn't normal and I don't have a framework for understanding it.
The rest of the day is beyond awful. I can’t concentrate on any one thing, my hands shake more than usual, and my vision keeps unfocusing.
The worst part is that it feels like I ran a whole marathon, my muscles clenching and spazzing at random intervals.
Paired with a residual cramp rolling through my abdomen every so often, I have to grip the edge of my desk until it passes.
As long as Richard and my stepbrothers leave me alone, I might just make it to the end of the work day. It doesn’t make sense the way Dominic and Amos backed off, but I’m grateful for it. Mostly. I kind of miss that feeling when—
My stomach clenches, slick gathering around my hole and I immediately push away that memory.
"You sure you're okay?" Tamsin asks from behind the partition, her voice pitched low enough that only I can hear it.
"Mm-hm." I don't trust myself with more than that.
She's quiet for a moment. "You look like you need to go home."
She's right, but going home means the mansion, and the mansion means Richard, and my body can't handle another Alpha's proximity right now. So I sit at my desk and stare at a spreadsheet I can't read and count the hours until five o'clock.
By the time the building empties enough for me to slip out, the exhaustion has settled into something that makes even standing feel like a negotiation with my own body.
The car service Richard arranged drops me at the mansion's front door, and the moment I step out, the cocktail of Alpha scents saturating the property hits me so hard my knees nearly buckle.
“Fuck no. Definitely not going in there,” I mumble to myself. The house is out of the question because the thought of walking through rooms drenched in Richard's scent with my body still raw from the bathroom makes my stomach lurch.
The garden behind the east wing is the only place on the property that doesn't reek of him. I find the farthest bench, the one half-hidden behind a wall of boxwood, and sit down and stuff my face in my hands, just needing a moment to think.
Mom is going to come looking for me soon. She'll want a full report on the day, and she'll want to know whether I performed well enough to justify uprooting our lives for this man. When she finds me out here, she's going to know something went wrong.
"Just go," I mutter into my palms. "Just leave. You don't have to be here."
The old apartment is still technically on the lease for another two months because Mom didn't bother canceling it.
My Romano's savings could cover first month's rent if I stretched them.
I could pick up shifts at another restaurant, live on ramen and tap water, and figure something out.
It wouldn't be comfortable but it would be mine, with no Alphas in the hallways and no rulers on the desks.
My fingers dig into my scalp as the fantasy dies before it finishes forming.
Mom would find me. She always finds me, because leaving isn't just leaving when my mother has built her entire operation around my face.
Walking out on Richard means walking out on her scheme, and the last time I disrupted one of her operations, the consequences lasted months.
I can't really afford the apartment anyway, now that I think about it.
Mom already had me fired from Romano's, so I don't have income.
I don't have references she doesn't control.
Every exit I try to map leads back to the same dead end, which is that I'm twenty-six with a degree nobody cares about and a mother who has spent my adult life making sure I can't function without her.
"Okay. Okay, so you're stuck." I press my palms harder against my eyes. "You're stuck, and your body is broken, and you're sitting in a garden talking to yourself. Great. This is great."
My throat starts to close as I press my fingers into my eye sockets trying to hold it together, but my body already spent everything it had in that bathroom stall and there's nothing left to hold the tears back with.
Once the first one falls, the rest follow in a rush, my whole body shaking with the force of it. I don't understand what's happening to me. Whatever happened in that bathroom was something my body had never done before, and it did it without an Alpha to ground it.
"Niah."
My head jerks up. Amos is standing at the gap in the hedgerow with his hands in his pockets and his expression carefully neutral in a way that tells me he can smell exactly what kind of day I've had. I scrub my cheeks with the backs of my hands. "What... why... how did you find me?"
"You've been avoiding us." Amos steps further into the garden.
A watery laugh scrapes out of my throat. "You've been l-letting me avoid you." I smack at my eyes, though it doesn't help much. "Our rooms are across the hall from each other and I work in the same building. If you had wanted to find me, you would have."
"We were giving you space to process."
I snort through the tears because that is such obvious bullshit, but I don't have the energy to push it. He sits beside me on the bench, close enough that his scent mingles with whatever's left of mine underneath the extra cream I slathered on after the bathroom.
"Why do you even care?" I push out, trying to steady my voice. "You don't know me, and I've been here less than a week."
"Right now, I want you to stop white-knuckling it alone and let someone sit with you."
"That's n-not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got tonight."
The boxwood blocks most of the wind, but the evening air is cool enough that I can feel it on the damp patches where I scrubbed the tears away.
We sit in silence for a moment, my defenses crumbling one brick at a time.
He’s waiting for an answer but unlike Richard, I don’t feel like I’ll be losing something when I tell Amos.
Maybe it’s dangerous but there’s no one else to talk to.
"Something happened to me today at the office." My voice comes out barely above a whisper. "My body did something it's never done before. I think... something is broken."
Amos is quiet for a beat, then his voice shifts into the register I recognize from his office. "When was your last heat?"
I don’t know what that has to do with anything but I answer him anyway. "Six weeks ago, right on schedule. Every three months since I was fourteen."
"And your blockers have been failing since you moved here."
I nod.
"Has anything like this ever happened before, around other Alphas?"
The question makes me actually think, cycling through every Alpha I’ve ever known. "No. Never."
"You're living in a house with three unmated Alphas, Niah.
" He says it gently but the weight beneath it keeps it from sounding like reassurance.
"You've been on heavy suppressants for a while, right?” He waits for me to nod before continuing.
“Your system artificially locked down. Has it occurred to you that your body isn't breaking, that it might be responding to pheromones it's never encountered at this concentration? "
I stare at him while the implications hit faster than I can process them. "It's going to keep happening, isn't it?" I whisper.
"Probably." He doesn't soften it. "But you don't have to go through it alone."
His arm comes around my shoulders. My muscles lock and my hands clench in my lap because letting Amos hold me while I'm crying and vulnerable is the stupidest thing I've done all week.
"You don't have to trust me," he says. "You just have to let me sit here." He’s going to want more than sitting. All Alphas do. Dominic did. Richard seems to. And every Alpha Mom ever brought into the house wanted more. And yet... I don’t move.
I stay stiff inside the circle of his arm, braced against the pull of his warmth. Then he tilts his head and presses his nose into my hair.
His arm tightens, his grip locking me against his side with a possessiveness that has nothing gentle about it. A startled "oh" escapes my mouth, and then I'm gone.
My weight drops into his chest and my face presses into the curve of his neck.
My hands find his shirt and twist into the fabric.
My breathing dissolves into something much slower and deeper, a sound starting in my chest that I've never heard myself make, a low vibration that hums through my ribs and into his body.
I'm purring against him and I can't stop.
His hand cradles the back of my skull with his fingers threading into my curls.
His other arm wraps tighter around me, the grip communicating something very different from comfort.
My body shut down every defense I had without asking, and instead of fighting, I'm burrowing deeper into his neck and breathing his scent in greedy pulls.
"There you go." His voice has a roughness that the gentle version of him never shows. "There you go, Niah. I've got you."
The purring tapers off slowly. My thoughts resurface, foggy at first, then sharper as I register where I am and what I'm doing. I'm curled against Amos' chest on a garden bench with my face in his neck and my fingers tangled in his shirt, and his arm around my waist shows no sign of loosening.
"What just happened to me?" My voice comes out hoarse against his collar.
"Your body recognized something it needed and stopped waiting for your permission to get it."
I pull back enough to look at him, though his arm keeps me close. My face must look wrecked, but the expression on his tells me he's not seeing the mess. He's seeing something else entirely, and the satisfaction underneath it isn't even slightly hidden.
"I c-couldn't stop it." My voice wavers. "I couldn't think. My body just went and I had no control."
"I know." His thumb keeps its rhythm against my scalp. "That's not something you need to be afraid of."
"It's the most frightening thing that's ever happened to me."
He holds my gaze for a long moment before reaching for my phone. I let him take it. He types, scrolls, types again, then hands it back. "Mine and Dominic's. When this happens again, you call us instead of handling it alone in a bathroom."
"How did you know about the bathroom?"
His mouth thins. "I didn't, until you just told me." He lets that sit for a second before his expression softens. "But I could smell my father on you when I got close enough, which is a conversation we're going to have. Just not tonight."
He stands and pulls me up with him, keeping a hand on my waist as I find my balance. His thumb presses against my hip bone through the fabric, lingering while I steady myself.
"Food, water, sleep, in that order." He commands but they don’t feel overbearing. It feels nice not to have to think. "Let's get you inside."
My body is still humming from whatever happened when he scented my hair. I walk beside him toward the house without arguing, his hand remaining on my waist the entire way with his thumb making small circles against my hip.
After a quick sandwich and a glass of water, I scurry to my room and close the door, before curling up in the corner of my bed.
The makeshift nest is a poor imitation of the one I used to have but it’s better than nothing, my body curving against the cushions as I allow myself to relax for the first time all night.
My thoughts run rampant before falling on Amos’ words. He seemed so... sincere but all Alphas do, when they want something, don’t they? Except... his version would be better than Richard’s.
Right?