He had been pacing since we reached the landing, three steps one direction, pivot, three steps back. His boots finding the same rhythm against stone that they found on a battlefieldwhen the waiting had gone on too long and action was the only thing his body knew how to offer. His magic pressed against my awareness in short pulses, tightly contained but restless, searching for something to do with itself.
A soft sound came through the door. Not a word. The kind of sound that comes before words, from somewhere below language.
My hands pressed harder against my thighs.
“She needs us,” Malric said.
“She doesn’t want us.”
“Her body is telling a different story.”
“Her body isn’t making the decision.” I kept my voice level. “She is. And she said no. We honor her request. Always.”
He stopped pacing. I sensed the intensity of his stare without making eye contact. “You’re the one who wanted to go to her earlier.”
“I know.” I had. The impulse had moved through me faster than thought, and I was glad he had stopped me, not that I would tell him that. “I was wrong. She’s terrified and her scent is triggering me to claim her. Going in there would have made all of it worse.”
Another sound from behind the door—sharper this time, a caught breath that turned into something small and pained—and I could feel it inside of me. The thread that had appeared between us earlier, faint and new and impossible to fully account for, carried it.
I sensed the connection between Malric and me growing. I had been conscious of that—the battlefield, the decision, the sensation of something aligning that had not been aligned before. I had a reference point.
This was nothing like that and completely like that simultaneously.
“Can you feel it?” I asked.
Malric’s pacing didn’t resume. “The bond.”
“Yes.”
“Since the stairwell,” he said. “It was faint then.”
“It’s getting stronger.”
He said nothing. That was its own answer.
With the back of my head pressed against the door, I looked at the ceiling and tried to sort through what I was receiving from the other side of the wood. Pain—not sharp, not injury, but the insistent demand of a body asking for something it had been denied for far too long. Confusion, tangled through everything else, the disorientation of someone experiencing a physical reality they have no framework for. Beneath both of those, harder to locate but present: shame.
That one landed hardest.
She was ashamed of what her body was doing. Ashamed of having been seen. Perhaps shame arose from her desire, or from her feelings on the landing and earlier, throughout the evening, since our scents first mingled on the stairwell.
She had been taught that her wanting was dangerous. That her body’s responses were precursors to harm. A century of that didn’t dissolve because two alphas arrived and her biology recognized them.
“She doesn’t know what she is,” I said.
Malric’s voice came from closer than before. He had moved without resuming the pacing. “She knows that she is an omega.”
“Knowing the word is different from knowing what it means.” I turned my head enough to look at him. He stood against the opposite wall now, arms folded, watching the door with an expression I recognized—the one that meant he was working through something he had already partly resolved and was looking for confirmation of the answer. “She’s read the histories. She knows the taxonomy. She doesn’t know herself.”
“Because he kept her from knowing.”
“Because he kept her from everything.” I paused. “Including this. She’s never had a heat. Not a real one. Whatever containment is going on with the tower, it must have been suppressing her heats.”
Malric was quiet.
“She thinks this is something wrong with her,” I said. “She thinks the wanting is the danger. He told her the power surge was from her omega nature—that feeling anything toward an alpha was what killed her mother.”
The silence that followed was heavier.
