Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
PHOENIX
The bedroom door slams behind us hard enough to rattle the oil paintings lining the hallway.
Mason stumbles against the four-poster bed, catching himself on one of the carved posts. His knuckles go white around the wood. Sweat darkens the collar of his wrinkled oxford, and the flush I noticed in the kitchen has spread down beneath the fabric, painting his throat in blotches of pink.
“Sit down before you fall down,” I tell him, steering him toward the edge of the mattress.
My nest is still intact—blankets piled high, pillows arranged in the cocoon formation that took me an embarrassingly long time to perfect.
Mason sinks onto the edge of it like his strings have been cut, and immediately his body curves toward the scented fabric, his nostrils flaring.
A groan escapes him. Low, involuntary, almost pained.
From the center of the nest, Atticus bolts upright. He blinks at us with the disoriented squint of someone ripped from deep sleep.
“What—” He looks from Mason’s hunched form to my face and back again. “What’s happening?”
“Mason’s going into heat.”
That’s enough to snap Atticus fully awake. He swings his legs off the bed, bare feet hitting the hardwood, and crosses to where Mason sits curled around the bedpost. Those green eyes sharpen into something focused, alert—the lazy charm stripped away in an instant.
He crouches in front of Mason, not touching, just positioning himself at eye level. “How bad?”
Mason’s jaw clenches so hard the tendons in his neck stand out like bridge cables. “I’m not in heat.”
I fold my arms. “Mason.”
“I’m not.” He drags a hand down his face, fingers trembling against his stubbled jaw. “My suppressants are military-grade. I take them like clockwork. Every single day. There is no possible way…”
Atticus settles back on his heels, one hand resting on his knee, expression shifting from concern to something more measured. More clinical.
“Mason.” His voice is careful. “You and Judah are bonded.”
Mason’s head snaps up.
“Don’t—“
“The bond is dormant, not dead. It never went away. And Phoenix just spent three days flooding this house with omega heat pheromones.” Atticus holds up a hand before Mason can interrupt.
“On top of that, you and Judah have been under the same roof for the first time in a decade. The separation ending, the pheromone exposure, the emotional stress—any one of those might not be enough on its own. But stack all three together? Even military-grade suppressants aren’t enough to prevent this perfect storm from landing. ”
The color drains from Mason’s face so fast I’m afraid he might actually pass out. His fingers dig into the pillow pressed against his chest, knuckles bone-white against the fabric.
“That’s not—it can’t—“
“Your bond with Judah is trying to reassert itself,” Atticus says quietly. “Your body is responding to his proximity the way it was always supposed to.”
“I am NOT in heat.” Mason’s eyes squeeze shut, and he curls forward with a sound that’s half gasp, half whimper.
His hands find the nearest pillow—one I scented with my own vanilla-citrus two days ago—and he pulls it against his chest, pressing his face into the fabric.
“Oh,” he breathes against it. “Oh, that’s… that smells so nice.”
Atticus and I exchange a look.
“Sure, buddy,” I say, dropping onto the mattress beside him. “You’re definitely not in heat. I bet your next one is months away.”
Mason lifts his head from the pillow just long enough to glare at me with bloodshot gray eyes. The effect is somewhat undermined by the fact that he’s clutching my scented nest-pillow like a child with a security blanket, his body already instinctively burrowing deeper into the tangle of blankets.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” he insists. “Maybe I’m coming down with something. The flu. Food poisoning. That oatmeal at the Seafoam was a biohazard.”
“You ate that oatmeal three days ago,” I point out.
“Maybe this is a delayed reaction.”
Atticus presses the back of his hand against Mason’s forehead. Mason flinches but doesn’t pull away. If anything, he leans into the touch.
“He’s burning up,” Atticus confirms, settling back on his heels. “This isn’t a crisis. We handled your heat. We can handle his, too.”
The confidence in his voice loosens something tight in my chest. But beneath the relief, guilt coils like a snake.
Because I’m suddenly, horribly sure this is my fault.
My manufactured heat, pumping omega pheromones through every room of this house for nearly three days.
Mason has been sleeping down the hall, breathing in my scent, surrounded by my hormonal signals.
Suppressants aren’t infallible. Not when you’re being bombarded by another omega’s full-blown heat cycle at close range.
Cycles syncing when omegas live in close proximity is supposed to be a myth. But what other explanation is there?
The realization must show on my face because Atticus reaches across the bed and catches my wrist. His thumb presses against my pulse point, grounding.
“Whatever you’re spiraling about…stop,” he says quietly. “This is going to be fine.”
Mason moans into the pillow again, his body curling tighter around it. His scent fills the room—chamomile and black pepper, richer and deeper than I’ve ever experienced it, layering over the remnants of my own heat-scent until the air feels thick enough to swim through.
I crawl closer and brush the damp hair from his forehead.
His eyes flutter open.
“I hate this,” he whispers.
I smooth my palm across his burning cheek. “It’s going to be okay.”
Atticus moves first, hooking his hands under Mason’s arms and shifting him toward the center of the nest. Mason’s head lolls, his body going loose and compliant in a way I’ve never seen from him.
The man who color-codes my schedule and alphabetizes my vitamin supplements is melting into my nest like candle wax, boneless and easy, his fingers still twisted in the scented pillow.
“We need to get his shirt off,” Atticus says, already reaching for the buttons. “He’s practically sweat through it already.”
“Right.” I scramble to the other side, working the oxford from the bottom while Atticus handles the top. Mason’s skin radiates heat through the damp cotton, his chest rising and falling in rapid, shallow breaths.
For a moment, he’s completely limp. Surrendered. His head tips back against the pillows, eyes closed, lashes dark against flushed cheekbones.
Then my fingers brush the skin of his stomach as I pull the fabric up, and his eyes snap open.
“Wait—” His hand shoots down, grabbing the hem of his shirt and yanking it back into place. “Don’t.”
“Mason, you’re soaking wet. You need—“
“I said don’t.”
His voice cracks on the word, and the desperation in it freezes me for half a second. But his grip is weak—heat-weak, trembling-weak—and when I pull the fabric again, it slides free of his fingers without resistance.
The shirt clears his chest.
And that’s when I see it.
My hands stop moving. My lungs stop working.
There, on the left side of his chest, just below his collarbone—a scar. Raised and silver-white against his skin, the distinctive crescent shape of teeth marks pressed deep enough to leave a permanent impression. Not random. Not accidental. The unmistakable topography of a claiming bite.
A bond mark.
The world reshapes itself around this single detail.
Every beach day excursion or time spent lounging poolside where Mason wore a tank top.
Every time I changed clothes in front of him without a thought, and he always, always stayed covered from the collarbone down.
I chalked it up to modesty. To his buttoned-up personality, his discomfort with casual intimacy.
I never thought—
I never once—
“You’re mated,” I hear myself say.
The words fall out of my mouth like stones dropped into deep water.
Mason squeezes his eyes shut. A sound tears from him—guttural, anguished—and he rolls away from me, curling onto his side with his back to both of us. The knobs of his spine press against the skin between his shoulder blades, each one visible through the sheen of sweat.
“Not anymore.”
My brain races, shuffling through three years of data. Every deflection when I asked about his romantic history. Every flinch when alphas got too close. I assumed he was like me, so sick of the terrible alphas out there that he wrote all of them off entirely.
“But who?”
The question doesn’t even finish leaving my lips before the bedroom door bangs open so hard it bounces off the wall.
Judah fills the doorframe.
His chest heaves. Ocean eyes are blown nearly black, pupils swallowing the blue until only a thin ring remains.
His nostrils flare wide, jaw locked in an expression that strips away every ounce of the steady, polite alpha I’ve spent the last few days getting to know.
What stands in his place is something older.
Something that runs beneath language and reason, wired into the base of the skull where instinct lives.
Alpha. Responding to an omega’s heat way more strongly than a stranger would.
Dominic crowds the space directly behind him, one hand gripping Judah’s shoulder like he’s physically holding him back. Dom’s usual smirk has fractured down the middle, dark eyes darting between Judah and the bed where Mason lies curled and trembling.
“Judah.” Dom’s voice is low, strained. “You need to stay calm.”
Judah doesn’t seem to hear him. His gaze has found Mason’s bare chest, the exposed planes of his ribs, and the claiming bite now clearly visible to everyone in the room.
The realization crashes through me with the force of a rogue wave, and suddenly every strange, inexplicable thing about the last four days rearranges itself into devastating clarity.
Judah’s mysterious mate has been right under my nose this entire time and I was just too stupid and self-absorbed to see it.
Judah’s mate is Mason.