When they disappeared inside the tower, I didn’t know what to do.
The tower had been guiding me without effort before, its awareness brushing mine like a hand at my back, urging me toward the windows, toward the balcony, toward the truth I had not been ready to see. Now that sensation disappeared, leaving me unmoored, as if the structure itself had turned its attention inward, folding its awareness around something moving through its lower levels.
Them.
I pressed my palm flat against the inner wall, fingers splayed, breathing shallowly as though sound itself might betray me. The stone was warm beneath my skin, warmer than it had ever been before, not the cool, distant temperature I had known all my life, but something closer to body heat, steady and deliberate. The tower was not alarmed.
That realization unsettled me more than the knowledge that they were inside.
Even when my father visited, the tower was tense, alert, watchful. Poised on the knife-edge between peace and danger. This was none of those things. This was controlled, purposeful, and worst of all, permissive, leaving me to feel unsteady and unsure of how to react.
I stepped back from the wall, then stopped, uncertain where to go when I felt exposed in the chamber. The upper level of the tower had always been mine alone, wide and bare in its simplicity, stone floors worn smooth by my pacing, tall windows letting in filtered light. I had never thought of it as a place that could be entered.
Now it felt like a threshold I was standing on the wrong side of.
They had vanished from my senses when the tower folded them inward, but the absence didn't last. It shifted instead, resolving into something else entirely. A pressure change. A subtle thickening of the air that made my breath catch halfway through an inhale.
The scent reached me then.
It was faint at first, just a suggestion riding the warm current spiraling up the tower’s core, but it slid past thought and straight into my body, settling low beneath my ribs in a way that made my knees soften before I could stop it. I grabbed for the edge of the nearest window ledge, fingers digging into the stone as my breath stuttered.
No.
The word formed without sound, a reflexive denial that came too late to matter.
Alpha.
I had not spoken the word aloud since childhood, not since Father’s voice had gone sharp with warning, his lessons clipped and incomplete. Omegas were dangerous, he’d said. Bondswere dangerous. Desire was a weakness the world exploited, especially in those it sought to control.
This wasn’t desire.
This was recognition, my body sensing something before I consciously understood it.
Warmth bloomed low and sudden, my body reacting as if it had been waiting for this exact stimulus, every nerve sharpening in response. My skin constricted, too aware of the air brushing it, the fabric of my gown grazing my thighs. My breath came shallow, then deeper, as if my lungs had decided I needed more oxygen than before.
I didn't understand what was happening to me.
I only knew that my body did.
I forced myself to straighten, to step away from the window ledge and stand on my own, even as a tremor ran through my legs. Panic threatened to rise, sharp and familiar, but it tangled with something else, something warmer and more insistent that refused to be ignored.
Another scent followed the first.
This one struck harder, cleaner, charged in a way that made my pulse skip and then race. The air itself was altered by it, prickling against my skin, raising fine hairs along my arms. My breath caught again, this time on a soft, involuntary sound that startled me enough to clamp my lips shut.
I pressed my thighs together without meaning to, the motion instinctive and mortifying, as heat coiled lower, tight and restless.
Alpha.
Another.
My hand drifted to my stomach, fingers splaying there as if pressure might contain the sensation, as if I could physically hold myself together long enough for this to pass. I had been alone for so long. My body had been quiet, dormant in waysI had not questioned because there had been no point in questioning them.
Now it was as though something inside me had been nudged awake and didn't know how to lie still again.
The tower hummed beneath my feet, a low vibration that traveled upward through stone and bone alike. It was not warning me. It was carrying them.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs.
