Chapter 12
I stayed out by the shed until I was sure I'd freeze.
That was the plan. Put my back to the cold wood and let it do the work. Freeze the biology inside my body so it can’t react to the stupid alphas in that house.
So I stayed out there. Long past when I should've gone in—until my fingers went stiff and my breath smoked and my teeth started going, until a body should've been chilled straight through.
It didn’t help at all.
All that cold and underneath it I was still burning, banked and low and untouchable, like the frost couldn't find a way in. When I understood the cold wasn't going to win, I gave up and went inside. Straight up to my room.
I haven't come out since.
It's late now—the windows have gone dark. I've been up here all day, curled on top of the blankets, telling myself staying put was my idea and not the only option I had.
Stay still. Don't start anything.
I let the day pass over me like weather because the thought of facing anyone in this house has bile rising in my throat.
But it’s been a rough day.
Not long after locking myself in my room, I was too warm. I'd kicked the blanket off and it didn't help. The heat wasn't coming down onto me from the room—it was coming up, out of me, and that was wrong. I pressed the back of my hand to my forehead the way a nurse would and it was hot.
Fever. It’s just a fever.
Flu, I decided.
It's going around. It's always going around. A month in a hospital recovering from a bad heart and then days of cold and no sleep and hard work—of course I'd caught something. That's all it was. My body was run down. It picked up a bug.
People get fevers.
I held onto the flu for a couple of hours.
It was a good lie. It explained the heat, the ache starting up low in my back, the restless pull in my hips like I'd slept wrong on every muscle at once.
It explained why my skin had gone strange and oversensitive—why the drag of the shirt across my chest made me shiver.
Flu does all of that. Fever does all of that, right?
No big deal…
Someone brought a tray up around noon.
I heard the feet on the stairs and knew them before the knock came—not the heavy easy stride, not the boots. Careful. Even. Calder.
My whole body turned toward the door before I'd decided anything, which pissed me off. So I laid back flat and all but forced myself not to move.
The knock was soft. "Hey."
A pause.
"Brought you something to eat."
I didn't answer. I had the blanket half over my face and I was breathing shallow through my mouth and I just—couldn't.
If I opened the door he'd be right there, all that cut-grass green, close enough to breathe in, and I didn't trust what I'd do.
I didn't trust the thing that had been building in me since the shed. And I wasn’t brave enough to face what happened earlier either.
It stayed quiet on the other side of the wood, but he didn't leave right away. I could feel him standing there, and I pressed my knuckles against my mouth, and waited.
"I'm leaving it out here," he said finally. Then, lower, almost to himself, like he wasn't sure he meant to say it out loud: "You didn't eat much yesterday either."
The feet went back down the stairs.
I blew out a ragged breath when I was sure he was gone.
I waited a long time before I cracked the door.
The hall was empty. There was a tray on the floor—half a sandwich, a glass of water gone room temperature, an apple.
Cut in half so it wouldn't look like so much, because he probably remembers I don't finish big meals.
That small stupid consideration made my chest tighten, so I brought the tray in, set it on the dresser, and didn't touch it.
I wasn't hungry.
That wasn't a lie, exactly. My stomach was a fist, but the hunger was just gone, burned off, replaced by something else that had nothing to do with food.
I looked at the sandwich and felt nothing.
I looked at the closed door he'd stood behind and felt the ache roll through me low and deep, and sat down on the edge of the bed fast, both hands fisted in the sheets.
Not that. It's not that. I'm sick. I'm just sick.
I tried the shower again in the afternoon.
Freezing cold just like this morning. This morning it wasn't the water that ended up taking the edge off—it was my own hand, and the shame after was worse than the ache.
I wasn't doing that again. So I stripped out of Calder's clothes with shaking hands, stepped under the spray, and made myself stand in it.
It didn't work.
And that's what finally scared me—cold water sheeting down my back and my skin still on fire underneath it, the cold running over the top like rain on a hot road.
My body didn't want it. It recoiled, turned me toward the memory of warmth instead—an arm heavy across my back, a firm grip on my hip, the gentle steady of a man fixing things—and I slapped the tap off and stood there dripping and gasping because I nearly, I almost, my hand nearly—
No.
I got out. Dried off rough, punishing, pulled the clothes back on. I took my heart pill at the sink because I don't skip, ever, even now. Tipped my chin back, worked it down—and then my hand went for the second one on pure instinct.
Years and years of muscle memory. The heart pill, then the fat white one that always came after, every night of my life.
My fingers were already reaching before I remembered there wasn't a second pill anymore.
That it was in pieces, in an inch of black water under the cellar. That there'd never be another one.
I looked up and caught myself in the mirror. Flushed, wrecked, feverish—some stranger wearing my face—and standing there looking at him, I started to curse her.
Starla.
For the pills, for putting me on them before I was old enough to ask what they were for. For keeping me on them so long that stopping might be the thing that kills me. For walking into these people's house and stealing something precious and leaving me behind to cover what she took.
For all of it, the whole long con of my life, every town and every lie and every emergency room.
And then, quieter, the one I never let myself get to: for having me at all.
I slid down the cabinet to the floor and sat there on the cold tile with my knees to my chest, and I let the thought come the whole way up for once.
That if this was all it was ever going to be—one long stretch of things to survive, one body that had only ever been a problem to manage—then it would have been kinder, easier, cleaner, if I'd just never been born.
By late evening I can't pretend it's the flu anymore.
The heat coursing through me isn't a fever—fevers don't pool low in your belly, don't turn every shift of fabric an erotic touch, don't make you ache empty and deep in between your legs.
My heart's going too, fast and skittering, but even that I can't fully blame, because when I lie still and honest for one second I can tell the difference: panic. My heart is going crazy from sheer panic.
The other thing is an omega’s heat. Molten. Rising. Coming up out of the center of me like something that's been waiting twenty years for the door to finally open. Now it’s cracked open and my biology is taking over.
But none of this makes sense. There's no alpha in here. I'm alone—been alone all day, door shut, nobody touching me—and it's still happening.
That's what I can't figure out. Everything I ever read said heat needed an alpha. A bond. Something to pull it out of you. I thought that was the rule. I thought as long as I stayed untouched, the worst of it couldn't reach me.
I guess I was wrong. It's building anyway, alone, in the dark. Which means it was never them doing this to me.
It's mine. It's coming from inside me. It's what I am with the pills gone, finally, completely, no strip left to swallow it back down.
I lie in the dark—I never turned the lamp on, the room's gone blue-black around me—and I put my hand flat on my own stomach.
I’m going into heat.
I can’t stop it.
Killian can already smell it.
It won't be long now until everyone in this house knows just how much I… my body… wants them.
∞∞∞
Vincent
The drive home is the only quiet hour I get, and tonight I don't want it.
Usually I do. Forty minutes of dark road between the city and the house, no one asking me for anything, no son to manage, no ledger to read—just the engine and the white line and my own head.
Tonight the quiet keeps handing me the same thoughts over and over.
The boy.
Sonny.
Last night keeps circling back, and I can’t make sense of it.
He came into my room in the dark and admitted he'd overheard us—that he'd been listening, that he knew more than he'd let on—when he could have kept his mouth shut and I'd never have been the wiser.
He had every reason to stay quiet and he handed it to me anyway.
And I did nothing with it. Told him he was nothing like his mother. Meant it. Then fell asleep like it wasn’t insane to have him pressed against me that close.
I don't like what that was.
Twenty years I've kept a clean line on this.
I decide, then I act, in that order, every time.
Last night I did it backwards—and I've been aware since the apartment that something's been pulling at me where that boy is concerned.
Instinct, not judgment. The baser kind, the kind I put down a long time ago and haven't picked back up since.
Those baser instincts have been running me for days.
I've been turning it over all day between meetings. Why I carried him to his bed when he passed out on me. Why I sat in that chair in the dark to make sure he kept breathing. Why the sight of that boy folded small on a stool in my kitchen has my chest tightening up so bad.
He’s leverage. He’s paying off his mother’s debt. He’s the one card I hold against a woman who took everything. That’s what he is, that’s all he is.
I've also been lying to myself since roughly the moment I took his chin in my hand and felt him go soft under it.
My phone lights up from the passenger seat. The doctor.