I look up at my alpha brother-in-law, though doing so makes my head swim. “What is?”
“Stasia, the omega you just served, came from a good family. Her father would have made advantageous matches for her, but she picked her own pack. And now look at them.”
They lookhappy. Saints, is that what pack life could be? Happiness at the cost of all else? Love so overpowering it’s worth not having a roof over your head?
I sway in my stilettos and grab onto the edge of the table as my insides squeeze, fever racking through me.
Tom wrinkles his nose, but I see how his pupils narrow. How his nostrils flare and his eyes go dark.
Fuck, my impending heat has me perfuming. Willow grabs my arm tightly and drags me away, flashing the press a perfect smile.
“You just had to make this all about you, didn’t you? You said your heat wasn’t due until tomorrow!” she hisses. “And now you’re perfuming in front of my husband?”
Husband, not mate, because two alphas can’t mate like an alpha and omega can—and there was no omega mate to be had for my alpha sister. Male omegas are so rare as to be nonexistent, considered abominations by alphas like my father. They rarely make it past the end of the year of their reveal as an omega. So, like a lowly beta, my sister is married, not mated.
And her husband, a hot-blooded alpha just like she is, could be the happiest husband on the planet, but his head still turns at a lush omega’s scent.
“Accident,” I manage, my mouth and throat suddenly dry from the fever.
Willow snatches a bottle of water from the back room at the food bank and shoves it into my hands.
“I can’t even spend the evening with my family now because of you.”
“I’m your family too,” I whine, my heat crashing over me, stealing all reason, leaving behind only instinct and emotion.
“How I wish you weren’t,” she mutters, as she bustles me into her sleek sports car and peels off into the night.
* * *
I linger at the precipice,not falling into my full heat for hours, longing for the quiet safety of my nest back at Fairhaven. For my little cottage and the protection and care of my honor guard, not the sour-tempered beta nurse who applies spelled patches of painkillers and fever reducers to my skin by the dozen. Saints, I miss Marcus’ gentle touch, his calming presence, his soothing scent.
Safe. I don’t feelsafehere as loud voices carry to my suite, to the nest I can’t get just right even though I brought all my favorite nesting materials back to Rose Manor with me, even though the nesting materials still smell like my real home—the little cottage I share with Marcus.
I don’t fall deep into my heat until the next morning when exhaustion finally breaks me.
Pack, my instincts whisper to me.Go find yourpack. The pack I can never have. The honor guard who will never want me, who can’t. The professor who says he can’t, the beta who says he won’t. The alpha who said he would mate me in a heartbeat, who loves me.
I don’t dream of their bodies, lust after their knots. I dream of their bites, their bonds. Saints, I can’t even bond with Simon, but I dream of him regardless, pulled under by the haze of my heat.
I toss and turn for what feels like an eternity, pain ripping through my body like wildfire, every nerve ending alight.
Voices and footsteps echo down the marble hallways of Rose Manor, dragging me from what fitful sleep I manage.
The nurse comes by every few hours to force water and bites of a protein bar down my throat, to stick more spells to my skin. I try to count the days of my heat by her appearances, but the hours and days all blur together in the dark of my nest, in the haze of my heat.
Pack, it whispers.
And I long for it, with all my heart.
As I tangle in the sheets, I hope and wish and pray for it.
For a pack.
* * *
We’re forcedto celebrate late because of my heat, and our festivities are elegant and understated in a way that only the extremely wealthy can achieve.
Just as any Rose gathering should be.
