The office was empty. My head whipped around, taking in everything as quickly as I possibly could. The back window was wide open, and there was no denying the smell of burnt honey in the air. It was Flora… her fear. She had been scared. No, downright terrified, and I hadn’t been there, stuck outside like some fucking?—
“Dammit!” I slammed my fist into the wall, still searching for anything that might give us more information.
A chair was pushed over, and a few papers were scattered around like there had been a scuffle. What the fuck had happened to my omega while I was standing on the other side of the goddamn door?
Nausea and tension snaked through every part of me, my pulse skyrocketing. She was gone. Flora was nowhere in this fucking room, and that TA had done something to her. It was like something deep within me was being ripped out of my chest. Calm and collected, the stoic, serious one who remained level. That all fell away. I roared, dragging my hands through the mussed papers on the desk, hoping I’d dig gouges into the fucking wood.
A stranger had my omega. A stalker who’d already declared just how unhinged he was, and he’d been under our noses the entire fucking time. We’d missed it.
I’dmissed it.
The only time I'd come close to feeling a fraction of what I did now was when Bear had his accident, when it had looked like, for a moment, we might lose him.
“Bear is on his way.” Chase’s voice cut through the noise in my head, pacing through the office, turning over everything with the tip of his boot. “Can you smell that?”
“Yes.” I choked out the word, growling.
Chase’s face went pale. “No… It’s not just Flora. I think—here!” He picked up a bottle off the floor, holding it up to the light. The artificially, chemically sweet smell emanating from it was easily recognizable. I snatched the bottle from his hand, putting it to my nose before looking back to the open window.
The smashing of glass breaking screamed through the quiet room as I crushed the bottle in my grip, dropping the pieces to the floor as my palm smeared with red.
“The fucker drugged her.”
Chapter 44
Flora
Over the years, I’d experienced my fair share of headaches. They were par for the course when studying something like advanced mathematics. Plus, there was dehydration, the odd bump here and there, and even hangovers on the rare occasion I actually drank.
This headache, though, was worse than anything I had ever gone through.
My head pounded like a damn freight train as I turned over, trying to get comfortable. My skin itched, and my mouth had a weird, dry, metallic taste to it. I’d only gotten really drunk a handful of times, and while this was similar, everything felt much worse, and somehow much more like waking up after anesthesia. I’d had my wisdom teeth taken out just before college, and, aside from the headache, it was very close to my current level of discomfort.
My eyelids were heavy, like I had napped a little too hard. Instinctively, my hands reached out to grab any of my alphas or another pillow to bolster my head, improving the weird angle it was at. But the surface below me was quite hard, actually. Mynest was a lot softer than this. Had I fallen asleep on the sofa? Or, more likely, the floor?
Why would I be on the floor?
But no. I was on a sheet. The fabric I was lying on was too scratchy, though, not the plush blankets I had stashed all around the apartment. The guys had even changed their own bed sheets to the ones I preferred. They did it several weeks ago, pretending they were doing it for themselves, but deep down, I knew it was thanks to my love of high-thread-count, ultra-fancy sheets.
Ugh, you need to get up. You need to deal with the academic probation thing.
It took monumental effort, but after a few minutes, I managed to open my eyes. They were thick and heavy with sleep, my vision somewhat blurred, but I looked around anyway, rubbing away the sleep so I could see better.
I was in a bed, but not one that I recognized. When I sat up, I looked around groggily, my eyes landing on one of the throw pillows. Circular and pink.
I knew that pillow—I knew it well, in fact. It was the one that had gone missing from my nest a few months earlier.
What the…?
My stomach dropped, my throat constricting as tension squeezed each muscle, my blood pumping with surging levels of adrenaline… and fear. Through the haze, my mind replayed the last few hours, a chopping mishmash of events stitched together hastily.
I had gone to the university’s faculty building. I was meeting people… professors. Because… of my grades. Yes, the academic probation. I’d been sitting in a chair, something had felt wrong when I met with—Ugh, Lyle!
Lyle.
Rage swelled behind the consuming fear. He had been the one stalking me. All the times I sat with him during class and waved to him in the hallway, never knowing he was the one terrorizing me.
My stomach turned over violently, and it took everything I had not to hurl.
