Chapter 2
chapter two
. . .
nitsa
The headache had arrived somewhere between the toasts and the cake cutting, settling behind my right eye with the insistence of something that brought snacks and planned to stay.
I'd been tracking it in the gaps between social obligations, a dull throb during a speech, a sharper pulse when Celia's new mother-in-law hugged me for the fourth time.
I'd called it dehydration, then hunger, then the predictable cost of three hundred people in a room built for a comfortable two hundred and fifty.
The dimmed ballroom was beautiful and punishing in equal measure.
The cage pendants had dropped to pools of gold, the oxblood panels deepened to wine-dark, and the cobalt waves underfoot had gone nearly black between the lit tables.
The DJ had found his rhythm somewhere around nine, and the dance floor had been full since.
Bodies moved through the dark in perfume clouds, and every time someone laughed too close, their scent bloomed toward me like a weather system.
Celia was radiant. That was the word everyone kept using, and for once the word was accurate. She'd danced with Marshall until he cried, which had taken approximately ninety seconds, and then she'd rotated through the rest of her pack until the floor cleared around them.
I watched them from my post at one of the high-top bar tables, where I'd been pretending to drink the same glass of champagne for an hour.
The glass was warm. The champagne had gone flat.
I'd been holding it because holding something gave my hands a job and gave people a reason not to hand me another one.
"You're doing the thing," Celia had said to me three songs ago, sliding into the chair beside mine with the flushed, bright-eyed look of a bride who'd danced through her heels and wasn't sorry. "You haven't sat down since the cake. You've been circling the room like a shark."
"I'm making sure everything's running smoothly."
"Everything is running smoothly. The cake is eaten. The toasts are done. Marshall only cried through half his vows, which was an improvement over the rehearsal, and no one's explained chemical obedience to the florist. Sit down."
I sat. She'd squeezed my hand once, hard, our childhood signal for understanding without words. Then Jeanine had called her name, and she'd been pulled back into the brighter center of the room.
Now the headache was worse, and the cramping had stopped being something I could blame on heels, bad posture, a too-hard hotel bed.
It had moved from my lower abdomen into my lower back, a dull pressure that radiated outward in waves.
I stopped checking my watch, because the intervals between cramps were getting shorter and I didn't want to know by how much.
The scents were the worst part. I'd always been sensitive, but this was different.
This was the room turned up to a volume my body couldn't adjust to.
The flowers that had smelled green and sweet during setup now registered as something close to rot.
My heat-sharpened nose had recategorized everything as a threat.
The perfume people had put on for the wedding layered over itself in competing strains: jasmine, vanilla, something like seaweed that caught in my throat.
The food smells from the kitchen, the sweat from the dance floor, the musk of so many bonded packs in one enclosed space.
All of it pressed against my sinuses until my eyes watered.
Celia's pack sat at their own head table for most of the night, a unit of five that moved like a single organism even when they weren't touching.
Her alpha had his arm draped over the back of her empty chair.
Her betas were deep in conversation with guests who came to wish them well.
Marshall, the omega, had recovered from his vow-induced tears and was now demonstrating something with his hands that made the table laugh.
I was happy for her. My ribs drew tight every time I looked at the five of them.
The DJ shifted into something slower, and the dance floor reconfigured into couples.
I watched a beta woman pull her alpha partner close.
I watched another pair sway with their foreheads touching, all that easy physical intimacy belonging to people who weren't fighting their own hormones in the middle of a ballroom.
My hormones had been running the show for most of my life.
I was nothing special, and I'd made peace with that, mostly.
I'd built a life around them: a business that didn't require my designation, a routine that kept my heats managed, my suppressants on schedule, my dealings with alphas professional and theoretical.
The system worked. My system had worked for years.
The system was not working now.
A cramp rolled through my abdomen, low and hard, and I gripped the champagne flute tighter to keep from pressing my hand against my stomach. The glass felt cooler against my palm, and I focused on that.
The cramp passed. I breathed out. I checked my watch.
Nine forty-seven. I'd been here six hours.
The reception would run another two, maybe three.
Celia was happy. Jeanine was handling maid-of-honor duties with the enthusiasm of someone who'd studied the role.
The cake had been cut, the toasts delivered, the formal pressure points all cleared.
No one needed me. No one would notice if I slipped out for twenty minutes, went up to my room, took something for the headache, and came back.
No one would notice if I didn't come back.
I stood before the thought could settle, set the flat champagne on the table, and smoothed the front of the body-con dress Celia had chosen.
I'd been wearing it since morning. Now the fabric felt too tight across my abdomen, though it had no less give than when I put it on. Tight was the point. I'd worn tighter.
I made my way around the edge of the room, keeping close to the walls where the light was dimmest. The guest book table was still there, my sign still standing, the stack of blank cards depleted by half.
Someone had left a note written in purple ink, the letters looped and generous, taking up the whole card.
I didn't read it. I didn't straighten the pen. I kept walking.
My room was on the seventh floor. The elevator would take thirty seconds. I could be horizontal in five minutes. I could take something for my head, lie down in the dark…
The hallway outside the ballroom was empty and cool, the carpet a relief of silence after the noise of the reception.
The same navy wave pattern ran under my feet, but out here it was only carpet, stripped of music, perfume, and the press of bodies from every direction.
I stood in the quiet for a count of ten, breathing through my mouth, letting the cooler air settle against my skin.
Another cramp hit, this one with nausea. I eyed my options in the hallway and chose the most inconspicuous. The women's restroom was twenty feet down the corridor. I pushed through the door, braced my hands on the marble counter, and looked at myself in the mirror.
I looked fine. I looked like someone who'd been at a wedding for six hours, which was true. My hair had held its style, more or less. My makeup had surrendered to the evening: shine at the forehead, a smudge at the lash line. Nothing that would read as distress to anyone who wasn't looking for it.
Then another cramp hit, and I watched my own face go tight. My jaw locked. My knuckles whitened on the marble. The pain was no longer something I could describe as pressure. It was pain now, full and deep, low in my abdomen, radiating into my back, the kind of pain that had a rhythm.
Heat cramping. I knew what it was. I'd felt them before, obviously.
But I shouldn't be feeling them here. I still had a week.
Three weeks of suppressants, monitored for efficacy, the math done carefully around Celia's wedding date.
I should have had a week left before the window closed. The suppressants should have held.
They hadn't held.
In the mirror, my face had gone pale. The olive warmth that usually sat in my complexion had drained to sallow, and my pupils had dilated until my eyes looked too bright.
For the first time all night, no one could have mistaken it for wedding fatigue.
My heat was coming in fast and hard at the worst possible moment.
I left the restroom. Turned right instead of left, away from the ballroom. My heels sank into the carpet with every step, so I took them off, worried I'd lose my balance on the grand staircase up to the elevator bank.
The elevator arrived empty, and I thanked my lucky stars.
No amorous couples fogging the air with scent.
I leaned against the back wall as the doors slid shut.
The car was mirrored on three sides, so I got to watch myself from three angles while the adrenaline, the pain, and the suppressant failure hit at once.
My reflection looked composed. My reflections left me terrified.
I closed my eyes until the doors opened.
The seventh floor was silent. No music from the ballroom, no voices from the bar, just the hum of the building's systems and the soft give of carpet under my bare feet. My room was a standard guest room on the same floor as the rest of the wedding party, but right now I was the only one up here.
I got the door open on the second try, my hands shaking, fine motor control going, and stepped inside.
The room was dark. I didn't turn on the lights.
I locked the door, engaged the deadbolt, and stood in the cool quiet with my back against the wood, breathing through my mouth, cataloging the space by feel: the bed in front and to my left, the window ahead, the bathroom to my right.