TWENTY-THREE
Gage
BESIDE ME, TONY SLAPPEDa hand over his eyes and whirled to face away from the open doorway. “Oh, mygod!” he yelped, sounding about as appalled as I felt.
In the next instant, the full force of an omega’s heat pheromones hit me like a slap in the face. But not justanyomega’s pheromones.
Mate,the scent screamed.Pack. Belonging. Need.
I opened my mouth to gasp air like a fish, and of course that only made everything worse. The overwhelming urge to tear off my clothes and dive face-first into Jez’s pussy tugged me forward a step. Before I could take a second one, a hand wrapped around my upper arm and yanked me back the way we’d come.
A growl rose up in my chest before I connected the hand to the harmless beta kid standing next to me.
“What the fuck?” Tony was whisper-shouting; his voice an ugly, strangled thing. “Gage,what the fuck? What is Heath evendoinghere?”
Right now, he’s doing Jez. I managed to keep the words from making it out of my brain and past my lips, at least. The heat scent was still wrapped around my spinal cord like a ravenous anaconda, but as I stumbled after Tony, it faded to the point that I could think again.
“She’s in heat,” I said hoarsely. “Heath’s in rut. They probably couldn’t stop themselves.”
Tony came to an abrupt halt and let my arm go. “She’s in...” He shook his head sharply, as though trying to shake something loose. “If her heat was this close, wouldn’t she have said something? And, I mean, wouldn’t you have been able to smell it on her before now?”
My mouth opened and closed, but the words were all jumbled up against the wreckage of my higher brain functions. I nodded instead. I’d stake my knot that Jez hadn’t been coming into heat when I’d had her in my bed, less than half a day ago.
Tony paced up and down the short stretch of hallway, his hand pressed over his mouth as though he wasn’t sure what would come out of it next if he uncovered it. Beta scents were weird, but in my heightened state of awareness, I could sense the distress coming off him in waves.
Once again, he came to a stop without warning. His hand dropped to his side.
“There was a camera in that cell,” he said. “And that omega kid who ran past us looked like he was escaping from something terrible. If Jez wasn’t in heat before, but now she is...”
“Maybe that’s what they do here,” I finished, feeling nausea roil in my gut.
Tony looked just as queasy, but he raked me up and down with a worried look. “Jez is your scent match. If she’s in heat, are you going to be able to keep it together?”
“Probably not,” I admitted, all too aware of the painful ache in my cock—not to mention the way it was making a spirited attempt to split the seams of my trousers.
Tony licked his lips, and I made a valiant effort not to stare at the quick dart of his tongue over the pink flesh—becausewhat the fuck, brain? I realized I was openly panting, and took a hasty step back. Tony did the same.
“There was, um... I saw a room with a medical gurney sitting outside as we went past,” he said. “If those dead alphas back there by the cells brought on Jez’s heat artificially, they probably had dampeners on hand so they wouldn’t be too distracted to do their work, right?”
I slogged through the torrent of words, trying to make sense of them past my growing haze of incoherency.
When I didn’t respond fast enough, Tony blinked at me.
“Dampeners?” he repeated, with understandable worry. “Would that help?”
I nodded wordlessly again.
“This way,” he said.
Resisting the painful pull that insisted I was going in the wrong direction, I followed him. I remembered passing the gurney earlier, but it hadn’t been the most important thing at the time. The room next to it was just as dingy and run-down as everywhere else in this place, but it had better lighting and a small fridge plugged into a self-contained battery-powered inverter.
A long counter by the far wall had been wiped off. Several plastic drawers and boxes were scattered across it, along with a couple of laptops. Tony ignored the computers in favor of rummaging through the mini-fridge, taking out little bottles and examining the labels before putting them back.
“There’s stuff labeled heat-stim and rut-stim in here,” he said, his distracting mouth curling down in disgust. Then he paused. “Wait. Here we go. Alpha scent dampener. Someone’s definitely been using it; the bottle’s two-thirds empty.”
