Chapter 5
WREN
My entire body was burning from the inside out.
I lay curled on the thin carpet of the dorm room, fingers digging into the cheap synthetic fibers. The crisis heat had bypassed the usual two-day warning period and dropped me straight into the active phase.
My skin felt too tight, stretched over boiling water. My pulse hammered in my ears, drowning out everything else. Every nerve ending was misfiring — the brush of my sweater against my collarbone, the cool air from the vent — all of it translated into white-hot pain.
But the pain was secondary to the imperative. The imperative was deafening and terrifying.
A screaming need for physical touch, for a dominating anchor, for an alpha.
It was destroying every rational thought I had, reducing a twenty-one-year-old history major into a creature driven solely by the urge to submit and bond.
The scar on the left side of my neck throbbed in time with my heartbeat — a bleeding wound demanding to be filled by a new tether.
"Wren?"
The door banged open. Chloe burst in carrying two cups of mixer punch, came to a dead halt when she saw me on the floor, and dropped them. Red liquid splashed across the linoleum. She dropped to her knees beside me, eyes wide.
"Oh my god. What's wrong? Are you having a seizure?"
She reached for my shoulder.
I flinched away, an animalistic whine tearing out of my throat. Her touch felt like sandpaper against raw nerve endings.
"Don't," I gasped. "Don't touch me, Chloe. Please."
She yanked her hands back. "Okay. Okay. I'm calling campus medical—"
"No!" The panic of public exposure cut through the biological haze. "You can't call them."
"Wren, you are on the floor burning up—"
"It's a heat," I forced out between clenched teeth, another wave of cramps pulling me into a tighter ball. "Emergency crisis cycle. The stress triggered it early."
Chloe stared at me, her brain working fast. "Okay. Heat. I've read about this. What do I do? Medication? Ice? A doctor?"
"I need an alpha," I sobbed. The humiliation of the admission was almost as bad as the pain. "Or a suppression room. I don't have a pack here, Chloe. I don't have anywhere safe."
In the North, an unbonded omega entering heat was immediately moved to a magically reinforced suppression room in the family pack house. Her pheromones were contained. She was protected.
Here, in a mixed-species dorm full of hundreds of unbonded students, I was a catastrophic liability. My scent was already filling the room — thick and sweet, crushed vanilla and wild orchids laced with the sharp distress tang of prey. It was only a matter of time before it hit the hallway vents.
"The top drawer of my desk," I managed, lifting a trembling finger. "Glass vial. Black sand."
Chloe scrambled up and tore the drawer open, scattering pens and notebooks. "Got it. What do I do?"
"Break it on the doorframe. The metal threshold."
She didn't ask questions. She rushed to the door and smashed the vial against the frame. Black sand spilled out, sparking with a flash of violet magic. A shimmer descended over the door and settled — the room sealed.
The scent-bleed stopped.
"Okay. It's working," Chloe said, sliding down the door to sit on the floor. She looked at me — fierce and helpless in equal measure. "The smell is contained. But you still look like you're dying. The magic sand doesn't fix whatever's happening inside you."
She was right. The ward protected the rest of the dorm from me, but nothing was stopping my body from continuing to cook itself. Without an alpha to stabilize the fever with their aura, my internal temperature would keep rising until it caused permanent neurological damage.
I had hours, at best, before the pain made me delirious.
"I have to leave," I whispered, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes. "If the ward breaks, if the legacy packs down the hall smell me—"
"You can't stand up," Chloe said. "Where are you going to go? We don't have a car."
"Knottr."
She stared at me. “The hookup app? The one the frat guys use?"
"It has a hidden emergency beacon built into the code. For unbonded omegas in crisis. It bypasses the social profiles and connects you anonymously to pre-vetted dominant alphas willing to provide biological stabilization. No political strings. No formal claim."
It was the most taboo secret in elite shifter society. The Northern packs pretended the app didn't exist. Using it meant admitting that arranged bonds were failing, that omegas were capable of seeking relief outside pack structures. It meant turning yourself into a transaction.
But as the fever spiked again, I realized I didn't care anymore. I didn't care about my mother's reputation or my father's standing. I just wanted the pain to stop. I just wanted to survive the night.
"That sounds insanely dangerous," Chloe said, voice dropping. "You're going to invite a random predator to come stabilize you? What if they hurt you?"
"It's regulated by neutral zone enforcers. Anonymous both ways — they don't know who I am, I don't know them. We meet at a secure location off-campus. They stabilize the fever, my core resets, we walk away."
Sterile. Transactional. Loveless. What I deserved now.
Chloe looked like she wanted to take the phone away from me. Then I made another choked, animalistic sound of pain as a fresh wave hit, and she exhaled.
"Okay," she said. "Do it. I'll pack you water, suppressants, and clean clothes."
My slick fingers slipped against the screen. I found the app, downloaded it, bypassed the social profiles, and located the hidden Emergency Crisis beacon buried in the settings. A stark black interface asked for my location and biological status.
Status: Omega. Unbonded. Trauma marker: Yes. Crisis Phase active.
I hit submit.
A spinning white wheel. Thirty seconds. I lay on the floor watching it turn, wondering if the emergency system was an urban myth, if I was going to burn out on cheap carpet while my mother sat hours away pretending I didn't exist.
A chime.
The screen flashed green.
Match found. Suppressor: User_AlphaX. Designation: High-Capacity Dominant. ETA to Neutral Zone Safehouse: 15 minutes.
A secure address pinged on my map — three miles off-campus, in the neutral, unwarded section of the city. A time-sensitive entry code, valid for thirty minutes.
"I got a match," I whispered.
"I'm calling an Uber," Chloe said, already swiping. "I'm riding with you to the door. I don't care about your shifter rules or your pride. You're not navigating this alone."
I didn't have the strength to argue, and I didn't want to.
She hauled me off the floor, my legs shaking beneath me, the fever making the room tilt. I grabbed my wool coat and wrapped it around my shoulders in a futile attempt to contain the heat and mask the scent.
Just a transaction, I told myself as I followed Chloe out into the night, barely registering the Uber pulling to the curb. It doesn't matter who User_AlphaX is. He's not real. Just a band-aid. A biological necessity to stop my core from flatlining.
Get through the heat. Walk away. Go back to being a ghost.
I had no idea how spectacularly wrong I was.