"You're not dying," he says, his voice rougher than I've ever heard it. "Your body is finally doing what it was designed to do."
He carries me into the laboratory and sets me on the examination table, but the moment his hands leave me, the agony returns. I grab for him desperately, clinging to his shirt with shaking fingers.
"Don't let go," I beg. "Please, when you're touching me it doesn't hurt as much."
His golden-green eyes go dark with something that might be hunger, and when I look closer, I can see they're not quite human. Too bright, too knowing, with flecks of actual gold that seem to move in the light. Fae eyes. Ancient and wild and utterly inhuman.
The realization should terrify me. Instead, it makes the ache between my legs pulse stronger.
"This is heat, isn't it?" I whisper, the admission torn from somewhere deep in my chest. "I'm having my first heat."
He goes very still. "Maya..."
"I know what this is." My scientific mind finally stops fighting what my body has been trying to tell me. "The wetness, the fever, the desperate need for an alpha's touch. I'm omega. I've always been omega, and now I'm in heat."
The words hang between us like a confession. All those denials, all that insistence that the testing was wrong, that I was just human—lies I told myself because the truth was too terrifying.
"Say it," I demand, my fingers fisting in his shirt. "Tell me what I am."
His massive hands frame my face, thumbs stroking across my burning cheeks. "You're omega," he says softly. "Perfect, beautiful omega in her first heat."
The words hit like a drug, making me arch against him with a desperate sound I don't recognize as my own voice. This is what Iam. What I've always been. And this magnificent Fae male is my alpha.
"I don't care," I whisper, shocking myself with the honesty. "I don't care that you lied, don't care that you've been conditioning me. I just need?—"
"What do you need, little omega?"
The endearment makes my pussy clench and gush more slick. I'm soaking through my underwear, through my dress, and the embarrassment is lost in the desperate need for his touch.
"You," I gasp. "I need you. Your hands, your mouth, your—" I can't finish the sentence, but the way his eyes darken tells me he understands.
"My cock?" he suggests, voice rough with barely controlled hunger. "My knot? My seed filling you until you're bred properly?"
The explicit words make me whimper and spread my thighs without conscious thought. "Yes. All of it. Everything."
"Such a perfect little omega," he murmurs, his hands beginning to work at my dress. "Finally admitting what you are. What you need."
The fabric falls away, leaving me naked and shaking on the table. I should be embarrassed, but the relief of cool air on my fevered skin makes modesty impossible. Besides, the way he looks at me—like I'm the most beautiful thing he's ever seen—makes shame irrelevant.
"Look at you," he breathes, his voice carrying that inhuman quality that makes my omega nature sing. "Virgin omega in full heat. Do you have any idea how rare you are? How precious?"
His hands begin mapping my overheated skin, and everywhere he touches, the fire transforms into something bearable. More than bearable—into pleasure so intense I can barely breathe.
"Your skin," he murmurs, tracing patterns across my ribs that make me arch desperately. "It's starting to shimmer. Do you feel that? The magic responding to your heat?"
I look down and gasp. There's a faint luminescence under my skin, like starlight caught beneath the surface. As his fingers trace my stomach, the glow intensifies, following his touch with golden light.
"What's happening to me?"
"You're becoming what you were always meant to be." His voice carries centuries of authority, making my body want to submit without question. "Omega. Mine. Ready to be claimed and bred and filled until you're perfect."
The possessive words make me clench around nothing, desperate for something to fill the aching emptiness inside me. But when his fingers finally brush between my legs, I scream at the intensity of sensation.
"So wet," he growls, and there's something inhuman in the sound that makes primal fear spike through me. But it's the kind of fear that comes with arousal, the thrill of being prey to something magnificent and dangerous. "Slick everywhere. Your body preparing itself to be taken by something much bigger than any human male."
His fingers part my folds, and I can feel how swollen and sensitive I am, how my body has changed in preparation for claiming. The slick coating my thighs is different too—thicker, sweeter, designed to ease the way for an alpha's knot.
"Please," I beg, my hips moving against his hand. "I can't take much more of this."
