Chapter 3 #2
I should have been able to relax. The wedding was beautiful, and Celia was radiant.
There had been no medical emergencies, family feuds, or property damage from uncles with opinions about government scent-control programs. The venue had performed exactly as it was supposed to. My sister was married.
I wasn't waiting for something to go wrong.
The low-grade hum in my chest insisted it already had.
That hum had been there since we arrived.
I'd taken in the cobalt carpet, the corporate-luxe florals, the ballroom that looked like every other ballroom I'd ever walked into.
All of it was fine, a competent venue for a beautiful wedding that had gone off without a hitch.
It just wasn't Stillwater.
Isak unfolded from his stool first, the movement casual but aimed.
He'd been waiting for Miner to check his phone, and when Miner didn't, his restlessness tipped into forward motion.
"We should call it," he said, stretching his arms overhead, the shirt pulling tight across his chest. "It's almost eleven.
The bar's closing. Your sister told us to have fun, and watching your uncles debate scent-blocker conspiracy theories isn't fun. "
"It's educational," Miner said.
"Celia's happy," I said. "The rest is optional."
"Then let's opt out." Isak was already moving, sliding his phone into his pocket, draining the last of his whiskey. "We've got a suite. We've got a week off. Miner's got three slices of cake in his system and nowhere to be until next Saturday."
The ballroom doors opened to the same navy-wave carpet I'd been staring at for too many days.
Out in the corridor the air was cooler, quieter, the reception's noise dropping to a low thrum behind us as the doors swung shut.
I could still feel the bass from the DJ's speakers through the floor, a dull pulse that matched the uneasiness in my chest.
"She's really married," Isak said as we walked toward the elevator bank. The performance dropped out of his voice, leaving it soft. There was no joke waiting underneath. "Four people. She found four."
"She did."
"You're proud of her."
"I don't know how to be anything else."
Isak glanced at me, the small silver stud in his ear catching the hall light, and didn't push. He walked beside me without filling the quiet. Sometimes his silence was mercy. Sometimes it was only a longer setup for the next needle. I'd spent years learning the difference.
I could see our reflections in the elevator doors while we waited for one to arrive.
I'd loosened my tie somewhere around the toasts.
Isak had never worn one. Miner's had been perfectly knotted since noon.
The knot hadn't shifted once. He didn't come undone in public.
He saved that for the closest people in his life.
Miner's phone chimed.
The sound was unmistakable: a double vibration, then a chime like a game-show ding, short and sharp. The pattern we'd set for emergency alerts.
Isak's head came up. Miner's hand was already moving to his pocket.
"That's the alert," Isak said.
"I know what it is."
Miner pulled out his phone, thumbed it open, and went still.
The more information he processed, the less of it reached his face.
His expression gave the rest of us no warning about what he was reading.
He read the alert while the elevator doors opened and we stepped inside, the car lit warm gold and mirrored on three sides.
"Emergency callout," Miner said. "SOS. Omega in heat, suppressant failure, needs responders now."
The doors slid shut. The elevator didn't move.
"Where? How close?" Isak asked.
"I haven't accepted yet."
"Accept it."
"Give me a second." Miner was scrolling, his thumb moving with the precision he brought to everything. "She's twenty-four. Verified profile. Nit4You."
The name landed somewhere in my brain and didn't stick.
A pun, probably. Most of the handles were puns, jokes, the aspirational usernames people came up with when they were being clever about something they couldn't say directly.
Like Isak. I'd seen a hundred profiles scroll past in the years we'd been on the app, and none of the names had mattered.
What mattered was the emergency. The timing.
Isak took Miner's phone before I could open my mouth.
His fingers moved faster than his brain, which was standard operating procedure.
By the time I'd processed what he'd done, the request was accepted and the app chimed confirmation.
Miner only watched him. Three months of this had apparently used up his surprise.
"We're at a wedding," I said. "In a hotel full of my sister's extended family. Half of whom are still downstairs."
"So?" Isak handed the phone back to Miner. "She's not in the ballroom. She's in a bedroom somewhere. And she needs help. Suppressant failure, heat incoming, verified profile. What part of that doesn't sound like something we're qualified to handle?"
"The part where we're supposed to be decompressing after three days of being responsible." I pressed the button for our floor. The elevator finally moved, a smooth upward glide that felt too fast for the decision we'd just made. "And the part where you don't have app privileges."
"I used Miner's account."
"You used Miner's account without asking."
Miner tucked his phone away. "I would have said yes."
"That's not the point."
"That's exactly the point," Isak said, and grinned at me. "You're not actually mad. You're mad because you wanted to say no, and you don't have a reason."
The elevator doors opened on our floor. The hallway stretched empty in both directions, the navy wave carpet quiet underfoot, the wall sconces dimmed for the late hour.
I stepped out first because that's what I did, and the other two followed in the formation we'd been walking in for years: me in front, Isak off my left shoulder, Miner bringing up the rear.
"She's twenty-four," Miner said as we walked. "Heat Seekers verified. Clean panels."
"You looked at her medical paperwork in thirty seconds?"
"I skimmed. The basics are on the profile."
I scanned the corridor ahead of us. Empty.
Good. The wedding had thinned enough that most of the rooms on this floor were either occupied by older relatives who'd already gone to bed or by people still downstairs.
The night shift staff had a skeleton crew.
With fewer eyes and questions, there was less chance of someone I'd grown up with stepping into the corridor and catching me headed toward a heat response with Isak's swag bag.
"Is she my family?" I asked.
Miner shook his head. "I don't think so, but she didn't have a name. She's anonymous like us."
That didn't mean she wasn't connected to someone downstairs.
The wedding had three hundred guests. Maybe half of them were my relatives, and Celia's pack had their own people mixed in.
I ran through the mental inventory: the aunts were all accounted for, most of them already retired to their rooms. The uncles were still drinking, based on the last time I'd seen them.
My mothers were probably asleep or close to it.
Celia's pack was downstairs, obviously. The cousins…
Our suite was three doors down from the elevator.
Miner swiped the keycard and I pushed the door open, flipping the light on with my elbow.
The room was exactly as we'd left it that morning: beds unmade, suit jackets draped over chairs, Miner's laptop closed on the desk, Isak's garment bag hanging in the open closet.
The air smelled like us: toasted pine, brown butter, sweet mint, layered with the faint residue of the cologne Isak had put on six hours ago and the hotel's neutral air filtration doing its best.
Isak went straight for the duffel. He'd stashed it in the closet behind his hanging clothes, the black bag with the slightly too-strained zipper, and he pulled it out with the reverence of a man retrieving something he'd been waiting all weekend to use.
"You packed for this," I said.
"I packed for contingencies. Like a responsible adult."
"You packed a heat-response kit for a wedding."
"At a hotel. Where heat responses happen.
" He unzipped the bag and started inventorying without looking up.
"Scent neutralizers. Hydration packets. Electrolyte tabs.
The good lube, not the hotel stuff, and the cherry one I know you like so much.
Scent wipes if she wants them. Clean towels. Comfort items."
"You brought comfort items to a wedding."
"I brought a weighted blanket. Folded. It takes up less space than your shampoo kit."
Miner leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching us with the patient amusement of someone who had long ago accepted that his job was to stand between two alphas and the consequences of their decisions. "We should wait for her location."
"We will," Isak said, still digging. "I'm just making sure we have what we need."
What we needed, apparently, was everything Isak had ever thought to put in a bag.
I watched him pull out items with the efficiency of someone who had packed and repacked this same kit a hundred times: the hydration packets organized by flavor, the electrolyte tabs in a labeled tin, the scent neutralizer in its travel-size bottle.
The lube was the expensive kind, the one we used at Stillwater for the heat-ready rooms. Isak had opinions about lube.
He had opinions about everything that touched skin, which was part of why our properties had the highest guest satisfaction ratings in the region.