Amos
ThethirdspikehitsMattaniah in the afternoon and drops him to his knees beside the nest chair in Dominic's office. I'm across the room before his knees hit the carpet, my hand on his back. His body curls forward and a cramp rolls through him hard enough that I can feel the muscles seize under my palm. His scent punches through the blocker with a sweetness that fills the office in seconds, thicker than this morning and richer.
"Breathe, Niah." I rub circles between his shoulder blades while he pants through the wave. "Just breathe through it."
"I'm trying." His voice comes out through gritted teeth, his forehead pressed against the carpet. "This is the third one today, Amos. Three in six hours. That's not normal."
He's right that it's not normal. The spikes have been escalating for weeks, coming closer together and hitting harder each time. But the frequency today has jumped past anything we've seen. The scent rolling off him right now is telling my body something my brain hasn't caught up to yet.
The spike passes in four minutes. Mattaniah sits back against the nest chair and presses his palms against his eyes, his shirt damp with sweat, his breathing still ragged.
"I'm fine," he says before I can ask. "Just give me a minute."
I give him a minute and use it to pull out my phone and text Dominic, who left thirty minutes ago to deal with the aftermath of the boardroom evacuation.
His spikes are less than 5 hours apart now. Third one just hit. His scent has changed.
Dominic's response comes in twelve seconds.Changed how?
I look at Mattaniah, who has pulled the throw blanket down from the chair and wrapped it around his shoulders. His eyes are closed and his lips are moving, counting his own breaths.
I text back that his scent is deeper and richer, all the indicators that his heat is a week away at most.
The three dots appear and disappear twice before Dominic's reply comes through.Stay put. I’m coming to you.
Dominic is through the door four minutes later, his sleeves still rolled from whatever he was doing in the boardroom. He closes the door, his nostrils flaring at Mattaniah's scent, his pupils dilating before he locks it down.
"Sit him on the couch." Dominic's voice is clipped in the way it gets when he's running calculations. "Then close the door."
I settle Mattaniah on the couch with the throw blanket still wrapped around him and close the door. Mattaniah curls against the arm of the couch and pulls his knees up, his eyes already drooping.
"He's going into heat." I keep my voice low enough that Mattaniah can't hear me from the couch. "A real one. Not a spike, not a pre-heat episode. His body is gearing up for a full suppression-breakthrough heat and based on the frequency of the spikes today I'd estimate we have around a week before it hits."
Dominic's shoulders tense as his eyes move to Mattaniah on the couch, then back to me. "Not here."
"No. Not here." I sit on the edge of his desk and lower my voice further. "A breakthrough heat after seven years of suppression is going to be violent. His body has seven years of cycles to compensate for and the first unsuppressed heat is going to hit him harder than anything he's experienced. He’s had heats before but nothing without the blockers fully in his system. He'll need both of us for the duration, which means we can't be in the house where Father can walk in."
"The apartment." Dominic says it without hesitation. The apartment is the two-bedroom unit we've maintained downtown since college, the one Father doesn't know about, the bolt-hole we've kept for exactly this kind of emergency. "It's stocked?"
"Heat supplies, blockers for us, food, water, medical kit." I run through the inventory mentally. "I refreshed the supplies a little ago but the bed is the king from the old place and the sheets are clean."
"Cover story for Father?"
"Business trip. Overnight conference in Philadelphia. I'll have my assistant book the hotel reservations as a paper trail." I pull up my calendar on my phone. "If we leave tonight we can have him settled at the apartment before midnight. The heat won't hitfull force until tomorrow at the earliest, which gives us time to prep the space."
Dominic stands and crosses to the window, his hands in his pockets, his gaze fixed on the city below. His scent has shifted from the controlled leather of his work persona into something darker, the possessive edge that surfaces when Mattaniah is vulnerable and Father is a threat.
"Father hasn't left his office since the boardroom." I watch Dominic's reflection in the glass. "His assistant says he's been drinking since two. He hasn't made a single call or sent a single email."
"He's planning." Dominic says it to the window.
"He's always planning. But the drinking tells me his plans are emotional right now, not strategic. A strategic Father is dangerous. An emotional Father is unpredictable." I set my phone down. "Either way, we need Mattaniah out of the house before Father's next move, and we need him out before his pre-heat scent gets strong enough to carry through the walls."
"If Father catches that scent, he'll know that Mattaniah is headed toward a full-blown heat." Dominic turns from the window and his expression is the one I've learned to read as barely-contained fury wearing a mask of calm. "An Omega in heat in his own house, unbonded, unprotected. He'll try to claim it."
"Then we don't let him catch it. We move tonight."
Dominic crosses to the couch where Mattaniah has fallen asleep with his face pressed into the throw blanket and his legs curled beneath him. He crouches beside the couch and brushes a curl off the Omega's forehead.
