Chapter 15 #2
He won't stay still. He curls up tight around his own middle, then kicks the blanket off, then drags it back. He moans into the pillow. Names things that aren't in the room.
Twice he says my son's name. Once he says mine.
I crack the window. Open the door wider. It doesn't do a damn thing—his sweet, thick heat scent in the curtains in here now, it's in the bedding, it's all over me.
Every time he makes one of those sounds my body answers before I get any say in it. Hands closing. Teeth together. That low pull dragging at the base of my spine like something with a hook in it. My cock so hard I think I might pass out.
Forty of those fifty minutes I spend on my feet.
Then Sonny turns his face into my pillow and breathes in deep and goes quiet. "Vincent."
Barely a sound. Like a plea, said into the pillow with his eyes shut.
He's scenting me. Sick out of his mind, unconscious, and he's got his face buried in my bed because it smells like me.
Not any alpha. Me. He said my name.
I need to be out of this room. I storm out and go down to check on Killian.
The cellar door's still bolted. The bleach comes up through the gap underneath, sharp enough to sting. That was the whole point of it—four gallons on the floor and the lights off, so there'd be nothing down there for him to smell but chemicals.
I put my hand on the door and listen.
He's stopped shouting. I’m not sure I like that any better. My youngest son is a fighter, since the day he was born. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d torn this house apart to get to Sonny.
"Killian."
Nothing. Pain twinges my chest. Locking him in here? This is all fucked up. He’s right… Sonny caused all of this and it isn’t fair to my family.
"I'll come down when the doctor's gone, Kill."
A long pause. Then, through two inches of wood, hoarse and flat:
"Is it over?"
His voice is wrecked. Hours of shouting will do that.
I stand there with my hand on the bolt. "Not yet. Doctor's on his way."
Nothing for a while. Then something shifts down there and the pipe knocks against the wall.
"Don't let me up," he says.
I nod, rolling my lips between my teeth. He knows. He’s too dangerous for Sonny. "I won't."
I stand at that door a while longer. He doesn't say anything else and neither do I.
I head back upstairs and headlights swing across the front windows. The tension in my shoulders eases slightly and I let the doctor in.
We head upstairs together and then he’s standing over my bed, looking at the boy in it. He doesn't touch him yet, just takes inventory—color, breathing, sweat, the twist of the sheets.
Then he reaches down and tilts Sonny’s head to the side, looks at the throat.
He's quiet about four seconds. "Yours?"
I wish.
It arrives before I can stop it. "No," I say.
He nods once, like the answer doesn't change anything he's about to do, and gets out a cuff and a stethoscope and starts working. I stand at the foot of my own bed with my hands behind my back.
"When did the heat start?"
"First scent of it was yesterday." When I let him curl up in my bed.
"Full onset?"
"Hit him earlier this evening."
The doctor puts the stethoscope to Sonny’s chest. "Has he been through it with someone, or has he been alone in a room screaming?" He doesn't look up. "It matters clinically. I'm not asking for the pleasure."
"He… hasn't been alone."
He nods once. Keeps working. Listens to that chest a long time. Longer than I want.
"His heart's a disaster," he says. "Which I told you. This is what I meant. A first heat is the hardest thing a body does, and his was never built for it."
He straightens.
"He's syncopal. Tachycardia, fever, and not one ounce of nutrition in him. Has he eaten in two days?"
"I–" Fuck, I don’t know. Maybe not? “I’m not sure.”
"Get fluids in him when he wakes."
"Is he going to die?" My voice is barely audible. Sonny’s body flashes and suddenly Angela is flushed, her eyes red as her body gives out. Then it’s Sonny again, curling in on himself with too little color in his cheeks.
The doctor looks at me properly for the first time. "Not tonight. But I’m going to break the heat to be sure."
He takes out a syringe and vial and holds it to the lamp.
"This suppresses the cycle. Not the way those pills did—that was chemical castration on an installment plan. This just stops it. His body will burn through the heat in about an hour and he can recover."
He draws it up. Taps the barrel.
"Buys him a few weeks. Then he cycles again and we're back here."
Logically, I knew the heat wouldn’t be put off forever, but hearing him say the word has my heart pounding. "Weeks?"
"Maybe less. There's no version where he doesn't go into heat again, Mr. Kingsley. His biology is twenty years behind and it's making up the difference."
He finds a vein in the back of that thin hand and slides the needle home. Sonny whimpers and my chest tightens.
He caps the needle. Sets it in the tray. "The bite," he says.
"What about it?" I rub at the stubble on my chin.
"It's hours old, and it's over the gland, and it went deep enough to scar." He straightens up and looks at me. "Was it consented to?"
The clock in the hall keeps going. I don’t know what the fuck to tell him. I wasn’t there. By the way Calder ran out of the house, I’d say no.
"He was in heat," I say.
"That's not an answer and you know it." Still flat. Somehow worse than judgment. "I'll tell you what it does, since somebody has to. It's initiated a bond. It hasn't completed one. That takes reciprocity, or a full cycle, or both. Neither happened."
"So what does he have?"
"An open circuit." He shuts his medical bag. "He'll feel the pull. Badly, in heat. Worse when the alpha's in the room. Worse still when he isn't."
"Can it be undone?"
"No." He picks up the bag. "It can be left unfinished. That's not the same thing. An unfinished bond doesn't dissolve. It sits there and aches."
Jesus Christ Cal. I shake my head.
"Separation's survivable," he continues. "It isn't comfortable."
He heads for the door but stops just before rounding the corner. "Vincent."
“Yeah,” I respond, but my eyes are still trained on Sonny.
"What do you plan on doing with him?"
The question of the century.
I don't answer.
"He's got a claim mark on him and no bonded alpha in this house to stand behind it.
He'll cycle again inside a month, and I won't be able to stop it as cleanly the second time.
" He leans against the door frame, nodding his chin at the omega in question.
"And there's you, and there's your two boys, one of whom I gather is currently in your cellar. "
He’s known Killian going on two decades. "You gather correctly."
"I'm not asking to judge you." He exhales and puts a hand up like he’s surrendering. "I'm asking because he can't."
I don't know.
"I'll handle it."
He looks at me a while longer than I'd like, not moving from that spot. He says there’s no judgment but maybe there should be.