She doesn't push it, but her eyes linger on my face for a beat longer than the situation calls for. "Let me know if you need anything else," she says, and the way she says it makes it clear she means more than clothes.
I close the door before she can get any closer, quickly changing into the dry fabric and then pulling out the scent blocker cream I keep for emergencies. The fresh clothes help but my legs feel like they're filled with sand. At the very least, the blocker mutes my scent almost completely. The spike took everything out of me, and the exhaustion sits so deep in my bones that my vision keeps going soft around the edges. My body just went through something it wasn't built to handle alone, and the aftermath feels like the worst flu I've ever had compressed into the space of an hour.
I detour to the stairwell first because the bag with my ruined pants needs to go somewhere far from the fifteenth floor. Two flights down there's a trash can in a corridor nobody seems to use, and I shove the bag to the bottom of it under someone's leftover lunch and head back up.
The walk back to my cubicle takes me past the corridor outside the bathroom, and I keep my head down and my pace steady even though my legs want to buckle. Two Beta staffers are standing near the water cooler, one of them wrinkling his nose as I pass.
"Jesus Christ, has anyone been in the west wing bathroom?" he says to his colleague, not bothering to lower his voice. "Smells like a whole ass heat in there." He pauses, then adds with a low whistle, "God, whoever it was smells wonderful though."
My face burns. I keep walking and don't look back.
Tamsin's eyes find me the second I round the corner into our section. She tracks me all the way to my chair, her gaze cataloguing the fresh clothes, the damp hair at my temples, and the way my hands are still trembling as I pull my keyboardtoward me. She doesn't say anything, but her expression carries a question I'm not equipped to answer.
I focus on the screen and try to type, my fingers continually hitting the wrong keys. "What the hell was that," I mutter under my breath. Richard didn't trigger it. No Alpha has ever triggered anything like that in my entire life, not the rent-an-Alpha techs, not my mother's marks, not even random encounters on the street. My heats have always been predictable and manageable. Whatever happened in that bathroom wasn't a heat and it wasn't normal and I don't have a framework for understanding it.
The rest of the day is beyond awful. I can’t concentrate on any one thing, my hands shake more than usual, and my vision keeps unfocusing. The worst part is that it feels like I ran a whole marathon, my muscles clenching and spazzing at random intervals. Paired with a residual cramp rolling through my abdomen every so often, I have to grip the edge of my desk until it passes.
As long as Richard and my stepbrothers leave me alone, I might just make it to the end of the work day. It doesn’t make sense the way Dominic and Amos backed off, but I’m grateful for it. Mostly. I kind of miss that feeling when—
My stomach clenches, slick gathering around my hole and I immediately push away that memory.
"You sure you're okay?" Tamsin asks from behind the partition, her voice pitched low enough that only I can hear it.
"Mm-hm." I don't trust myself with more than that.
She's quiet for a moment. "You look like you need to go home."
She's right, but going home means the mansion, and the mansion means Richard, and my body can't handle another Alpha's proximity right now. So I sit at my desk and stare at a spreadsheet I can't read and count the hours until five o'clock.
By the time the building empties enough for me to slip out, the exhaustion has settled into something that makes even standingfeel like a negotiation with my own body. The car service Richard arranged drops me at the mansion's front door, and the moment I step out, the cocktail of Alpha scents saturating the property hits me so hard my knees nearly buckle.
“Fuck no. Definitely not going in there,” I mumble to myself. The house is out of the question because the thought of walking through rooms drenched in Richard's scent with my body still raw from the bathroom makes my stomach lurch.
The garden behind the east wing is the only place on the property that doesn't reek of him. I find the farthest bench, the one half-hidden behind a wall of boxwood, and sit down and stuff my face in my hands, just needing a moment to think.
Mom is going to come looking for me soon. She'll want a full report on the day, and she'll want to know whether I performed well enough to justify uprooting our lives for this man. When she finds me out here, she's going to know something went wrong.
"Just go," I mutter into my palms. "Just leave. You don't have to be here."
The old apartment is still technically on the lease for another two months because Mom didn't bother canceling it. My Romano's savings could cover first month's rent if I stretched them. I could pick up shifts at another restaurant, live on ramen and tap water, and figure something out. It wouldn't be comfortable but it would be mine, with no Alphas in the hallways and no rulers on the desks.
My fingers dig into my scalp as the fantasy dies before it finishes forming. Mom would find me. She always finds me, because leaving isn't just leaving when my mother has built her entire operation around my face. Walking out on Richard means walking out on her scheme, and the last time I disrupted one of her operations, the consequences lasted months.
I can't really afford the apartment anyway, now that I think about it. Mom already had me fired from Romano's, so I don'thave income. I don't have references she doesn't control. Every exit I try to map leads back to the same dead end, which is that I'm twenty-six with a degree nobody cares about and a mother who has spent my adult life making sure I can't function without her.
"Okay. Okay, so you're stuck." I press my palms harder against my eyes. "You're stuck, and your body is broken, and you're sitting in a garden talking to yourself. Great. This is great."
My throat starts to close as I press my fingers into my eye sockets trying to hold it together, but my body already spent everything it had in that bathroom stall and there's nothing left to hold the tears back with.
Once the first one falls, the rest follow in a rush, my whole body shaking with the force of it. I don't understand what's happening to me. Whatever happened in that bathroom was something my body had never done before, and it did it without an Alpha to ground it.
"Niah."
My head jerks up. Amos is standing at the gap in the hedgerow with his hands in his pockets and his expression carefully neutral in a way that tells me he can smell exactly what kind of day I've had. I scrub my cheeks with the backs of my hands. "What... why... how did you find me?"
"You've been avoiding us." Amos steps further into the garden.
A watery laugh scrapes out of my throat. "You've been l-letting me avoid you." I smack at my eyes, though it doesn't help much. "Our rooms are across the hall from each other and I work in the same building. If you had wanted to find me, you would have."
