“What do you mean, you can’t?”
“The tower hasn’t allowed us an exit,” I said. “It opened for us, then sealed us with you. It’s responding to you—and to us. It wants us here.”
“Why?” Her voice wavered. The heat in the air pulsed in response, as if answering for her.
Footsteps approached from the corridor behind me.
“For you,” Malric said.
His voice carried differently than mine—precise, controlled, cutting straight through confusion to the core of it. He stopped a few paces back, not crowding but present.
“The tower recognizes what you are,” he continued. “An omega without a mate. Suppressed for too long. That imbalance cannot remain forever, no matter what your father does to keep you in stasis.”
Inside the room, something struck stone—not violently, but hard enough to echo.
“You don’t get to decide what I am,” she said. Anger sharpened her tone, and her scent shifted with it, edged now with something fierce and defensive.
“I’m not deciding,” Malric replied evenly. “I’m stating a fact. You’re an omega without an alpha.”
“You’re making decisions for me. Like everyone else.”
The accusation landed harder than she probably meant it to. I stepped away from the door and turned slightly, lowering my voice.
“That’s enough,” I said to Malric.
He met my gaze. His jaw was tight, not with anger at her but with the strain of holding too many implications at once.
“She needs the truth,” he said.
“She needs stability first.”
For a moment, we stood in that narrow corridor, the tower humming around us like a held breath.
Malric exhaled slowly. “Fine.”
He stepped back, boots quiet against stone, though I could feel the restraint in him—feel how much he wanted to press forward, to solve, to stabilize through structure.
When he disappeared around the curve of the hall, I turned back to the door.
“Aveline,” I said softly. “He’s not trying to control you. He’s trying to help you.”
“Then he can do it somewhere else,” she replied, but the heat in her voice had softened, thinned into something closer to strain.
Her scent rolled through the cracks of the door again, stronger than before. It wrapped around my lungs and pulled at something deep and instinctive. I forced my breathing slower, careful, so she wouldn’t feel my response spike through the bond.
“What does it mean?” she asked after a moment. “Being denied my nature.”
“It means your body hasn’t been allowed to complete its cycles,” I said. “Omegas regulate through connection. Throughbonding. Through presence. If that’s suppressed for too long, when it finally breaks through, it doesn’t come quietly.”
“And how do I make it quiet?”
“You don’t,” I said gently. “You can’t. You have to ride it out.”
There was movement inside—pacing now. I could hear the faint shift of her steps against the nest’s layered furs.
“I don’t know how,” she admitted.
“You’re not supposed to. Not alone.”
