"Sweetheart,"he breathed,"we've been watching you this whole time. Every single day. Did you really think you were alone?"
My stepbrothers. The men I'd loved before I understood what that love would cost me. The men I'd fled three years ago, leaving everything behind. The men who, in the dream, surrounded me now—four bodies pressing close, trapping me between them, their hands and mouths and scents overwhelming my senses until I couldn't think, couldn't breathe, couldn't do anything butsurrender?—
I woke with a scream lodged in my throat, my heart slamming against my ribs hard enough to bruise.
For a moment, I didn't know where I was. The darkness pressed in. The scent of Alphas clung to my skin…their scents, as vivid as if they'd actually been in the room. My body burned with need, my core clenching around nothing, desperate to be filled.
Then reality reasserted itself.
My apartment. My bed. My nest.
Alone.
I was alone. God, I didn'tfeelalone. I felt watched. Hunted. Like prey that had finally been cornered after a long, exhausting chase. Slick soaked my thighs, pooling beneath me on the sheets. My nipples ached, hard and swollen against the thin fabric of my shirt. And the scent?—
Myscent?—
Burnt sugar and peaches and lightning filled the small bedroom, so thick I could taste it on my tongue. Sweet and heady and unmistakable. Six years of suppressants, and they'd finally, catastrophically,completelyfailed.
I was going into heat.
Here. Now. Alone in an apartment with no Alpha to help me through it, no pack to take care of me, nothing but my own two hands and the nest I'd built without meaning to.
"No," I whispered to the darkness, to the ghost-scents that still lingered in my nose, to the men who haunted me even in sleep. "No, no, no."
My body didn't listen. My body had never listened. My body had betrayed me at fifteen, presenting as Omega in a house full of Alphas who looked at me like I was something to devour. My body had betrayed me again and again in the years since, crying out for a pack I'd rejected, a bond I'd fled, a fate I'd spent everything trying to escape.
Now it was betraying me one more time. I curled tighter into my nest, pulling blankets over my head, hiding from a world that suddenly felt far too dangerous. My hand slipped between my thighs, pressing against my aching clit, trying to take the edge off.
It didn't help. It never helped. Nothing helped except?—
No. Don't think about them. Don't think about their hands and their mouths and their knots filling you up until you couldn't think, couldn't breathe, could only take and take and take?—
I bit my lip until I tasted blood, using the pain to ground myself.
Alone. I was alone. I would get through this alone, like I got through everything else.
I had to.
The hours crawled by like wounded animals.
I drifted in and out of a fevered half-sleep, my body cycling between burning hot and freezing cold, my mind churning with memories I'd tried so hard to bury. Every time I closed my eyes, I sawthem. Every time I breathed, I smelledthem. And every timeI moved, my slick-soaked thighs reminded me of exactly what my traitorous biology wanted.
I touched myself twice more before dawn. Desperate, shameful orgasms that took the edge off for maybe ten minutes before the ache came roaring back, worse than before. My fingers weren't enough. My toys weren't enough. Nothing would ever be enough except?—
Stop it.
I forced myself out of bed as the first gray light of morning crept through my window. Stumbled to the bathroom. Turned the shower to cold and stood under the spray until my teeth chattered and my skin went numb. It helped. A little. Enough to think clearly for the first time in hours.
I stared at myself in the foggy mirror, cataloging the damage. Dark circles under my eyes. Flushed cheeks. Swollen lips from where I'd bitten them raw. And my eyes?—
My eyes were wrong.
The green had deepened, the pupils blown wide even in the bright bathroom light. Omega eyes. Heat eyes. The eyes of a woman whose body was screaming for something her mind refused to accept.
"Get it together," I told my reflection. "You've survived worse than this. You can survive a few more days."
But could I? The suppressants were failing. My heat was coming. And I had no backup plan, no support system, no one to help me through it.
