19. Ember
EMBER
Morning comes gray and wet and I'm still alive, still myself, still alone in the spare room, and that last part is a gift I don't have a frame for.
They held the line. All of them. All night.
I know because I was awake for most of it, riding the waves down one after another on the floor with my back to the door, and the door never opened.
Not once. Sometime in the worst of the dark I heard Cass settle onto the floorboards of the hall on the other side of the wood, his back to my back through two inches of pine, and he didn't speak and he didn't try the handle, he just sat there, a wall between me and the rest of the house, between me and even himself.
Every so often there'd be the soft scrape of him shifting his weight. Proof of presence. Nothing asked.
At some point near dawn I'd croaked out one word, water, and the door had opened exactly far enough for a hand to set a glass through the gap and withdraw, and it had been Gideon's hand, and he hadn't looked, and the door had closed again.
That's the thing I can't get my arms around this morning.
Not that they wanted me. I knew they'd want me, that's just biology, that's the cheapest thing about any of this.
It's that they wanted me that badly and didn't. Four alphas, an omega in full heat flooding their house, every instinct they have screaming at them, and the sum total of what they did about it was set a glass of water through a door and sit in a cold hallway making sure I wasn't alone.
Nobody has ever done that. In my whole life. Nobody has ever had power over me and simply declined to use it.
I sit up. I'm wrung out and sticky and my whole body aches like I ran it up a mountain, which I suppose I did, in a sense.
The heat's quiet now, banked low, a coal instead of a fire.
But it's not gone. I can feel it sitting there in me, waiting, patient as my father, and I know enough about my own body to know this morning's quiet is a lie it's telling me.
There's a soft knock. Gideon's, this time. I'm learning their knocks the way I learned their scents.
"Decent?" he says through the door.
"Define decent."
"Dressed enough that I can look at you like a medic and not have to leave again."
I pull the blanket around me. "Come in."
He comes in with another glass of water and something that smells like broth, sets both on the nightstand, and crouches by the bed with his hands where I can see them, the way he did the first morning.
The iron and clove of him is steady. If last night cost him anything, and it must have, he's filed it somewhere I can't see.
"Tell me how it's going to go," I say. "All of it. Don't soften it."
"I won't." He says it like the courtesy it is.
"What broke last night was the first wave.
The suppressants masked your scent and they banked the cycle both, for six years, and now there's nothing doing either.
So this runs its course now. Days. Three, maybe four, maybe five if your body's been starved of a proper cycle long enough, which it has.
" His voice stays level, clinical, kind.
"It'll come in waves with quiet stretches between, like last night.
The quiet stretches will get you thinking it's over.
It won't be over. It'll keep cresting until it's run itself out, and there's nothing in this house or this state that stops it now.
We're past stopping it. We're only choosing how you get through it. "
"And those choices are."
"Two." He holds my eyes. "You ride it out the way you rode out last night. Alone, behind a door, the four of us keeping the line and bringing water. We'll do it. We did it. We'll do it for as many days as it takes and not one of us will hold it against you." A pause. "Or."
"Or."
"Or you don't ride it out alone." He says it without weight, no push, a man laying both options flat on the table for me to pick up or not.
"Heat shared is easier on the body than heat endured.
That's not a line. It's physiology. The cresting comes gentler, the recovery's faster, the worst of the pain doesn't get its claws all the way in.
But that's a door only you open, and it stays exactly as shut as you want it, for exactly as long as you want it, and if the answer is the locked room and the glass of water through the gap, then that's the answer and it's a good one.
" He stands. "I'm a medic before I'm anything else in this.
I'd be failing you if I didn't tell you the second option exists.
I'd be worse than failing you if I pushed you toward it.
So. Now you know it exists. The rest is yours. "
He leaves the broth. He leaves the choice. He goes.
I sit with it a long time, the blanket around my shoulders, the gray light coming up at the window.
The thing is, I already know. I knew somewhere in the cold hours of last night, listening to Cass breathe through the door he wouldn't open.
Six years I spent making sure my body was the one thing no one could get their hands on, and I was right to, and I'd do it again.
But I built that wall against people who'd have taken.
These men had every chance to take and set a glass of water through a door instead.
Maybe the wall was never the point. Maybe the point was getting to choose who I take it down for.
I get up. I wash, slow, careful of the leg. I dress. The heat's still banked low and quiet and lying to me about being finished, and underneath the quiet there's a pull, and I stop pretending I don't know which direction it points.
Not Cass. Cass I'll come to last, and I think some part of me already knows that too, that Cass is a thing I'm saving without deciding to.
He's been there the whole time, that's the thing.
Through every door I've opened to one of the others, he's been the one in the next room not opening his.
Sitting against the wood all night with his back to mine.
Sending the others up the stairs and staying down them.
Watching me choose his pack one man at a time and never once making it a competition, never once stepping into the line to be picked.
Of the four of them he's the only one who hasn't reached for me, and it isn't because he doesn't want to.
I've seen the cords stand out on his throat.
It's that he's decided the having of me is a thing I get to walk all the way across the house for, on my own feet, last, when there's no fever and no fear and nothing left deciding it but me.
So that's what he'll get. The version of me that comes to him with everything else already chosen and him still standing exactly where he put himself, waiting.
He's earned the wait. I just haven't been ready to make him stop.
Not Gideon, who just walked out rather than tilt the scale.
Not Rhys, who I had in the dark with the rain on the glass.
The one who hasn't touched me. The one who wouldn't. The one up on the roof in the cold holding a line nobody asked him to hold.
I find him in the woodshed.
The door's open to the gray morning and Knox is inside with his shirt off despite the cold, an axe in his hands, and he's splitting wood.
Methodically. Steadily. A round set up on the block, the axe coming down, the halves falling away, another round set up.
There's already a stack beside him taller than I am.
There's already more split wood in that shed than this cabin could burn in a month.
He's not splitting it because we need it.
He hears me. Of course he hears me. The axe comes down one more time, buries itself in the block, and he leaves it there and goes still with his back to me, the muscles of it tight, his breath clouding in the cold air, the smoke-and-earth of him cut through with that sharp ozone note that only comes up when I'm near.
He doesn't turn around.
"You shouldn't be out here," he says.