Jay turned the monitor so I could see her screen. “Calendar's clear after yesterday. But look—her upcoming out-of-office entry? ‘Personal medical leave.’ Starts today. Runs five days.”
“Five days,” I repeated, the words catching in my throat. “You think she’s in heat?”
But she wasn’t an omega. Why the fuck did my brain go straight to her being in heat?
Jay didn’t blink. “I think we don’t know what we don’t know.”
Which wasn’t a no.
“She’s not an omega.” I tested the words out, my understanding of them, and my knowledge of Wren. If anyone was an alpha, it had to be her. Right?
“You asking me or telling me?” Jay was such a cool-headed prick sometimes.
I scrubbed a hand down my face, pacing a slow line across the office while Jay clicked through her email tabs with surgeon-level calm.
“She’s too careful,” I muttered. “She wouldn’t just go off the grid like this. Not unless?—”
“She didn’t want anyone to know where she went.”
Jay's voice cut through mine, clean and sharp.
I stopped pacing.
“She’s been planning this,” he added. “Check the sent folder—she rescheduled meetings, reassigned her PR rotation to the assistants, cleared the schedule for every major player interview through the weekend.”
“But she didn’t tell us,” I said quietly.
Jay’s mouth pulled tight.
In that moment, I saw it too.
Thehurt.
He was the calm one, the sane one, the guy who never lost it—but that didn’t mean he didn’tfeelit. His silence wasn’t indifference. It was control.
And it was cracking.
“She didn’t trust us to handle it,” I said.
Or she was scared.
Or ashamed.
Or trying to protect us from something we didn’t even understand.
“She didn’t want witnesses,” Jay said.
I turned toward him, mouth open to argue—but then I caught the way his hands hovered just above the keyboard, not typing. Not clicking.
Just…tensed.
“It has to be a heat. She’s close,” he said, more to himself than to me. “Or maybe she thinks she will be. Then she didn’t want anyone to see it.”
“What if she went to help another omega with their heat?” The minute I asked the question, I kind of hated myself a little. Because the idea of her touching anyone else, even a needy omega just pissed me off. The anger was flash fire hot and incandescent.
“If she was helping an omega, she wouldn’t have to hide it.” Jay sounded so damn certain.
“How do you know?”
