Colt slows. Not stopping. Just shifting down from sprint to something deliberate, his posture changes in a way I feel before I can articulate it. Every line of his tenses and changes, frommoving fasttomoving carefully, which are meaningfully different states.
The alpha presence that's been a pressure at the edge of my awareness steps fully into the foreground. Not aggressive. Just… present. The particular quality of attention that says everything in the environment has been folded into a single processing operation, and he is the processing operation.
My omega instincts, which have been staging a gradual coup since this man walked into my containment doorway, complete their takeover in a single breath. My pulse spikes. Heat uncurls in my lower abdomen like something waking up from a very long and medically induced sleep. My cock is twitching, and my hole is leaking so suddenly that the sensation almost has my knees buckling underneath me.
I stop walking. This is not the most convenient time for this to be happening. Colt notices that I've stood still for a full second. His grip shifts on my wrist, not tighter, just different. His attention is redirected from the corridor to me with the fast efficiency of someone who monitors more than one variable at a time.
"Move," he grunts out.
"Working on it," I rasp, with genuine effort, "my nervous system is having an independent meeting and didn't invite my rational brain."
He looks at my face. Then, at my posture. Something in his jaw tightens almost imperceptibly, a fractional clench, gone fast.
"You're going into heat."
"No."
Silence. I feel my face doing something complicated.
"...Probably not." I can’t hold back the whimper that escapes on the last word. His expression does something I haven't seen it do yet, which is shift toward something that isn't entirely neutral.
"Probably."
"In my defense," I say quickly, before he can build too much momentum on that syllable, "I was raised in a controlled laboratory environment. The omega development literature was not part of the curriculum. They gave us injections and observation windows, not biology classes. I'm working with incomplete information about my own-"
The roar that comes up through the floor cuts the sentence in half. Close. Closer than before. Close enough that the sound doesn't just hit my ears but moves through the walls and into my sternum and stays there.
Colt's free hand moves to his rifle. Then he does something I don't anticipate. He pulls me in. Not roughly. Not slowly. One motion, deliberate, his arm coming around and drawing me against his chest like this is a solution he's already done the math on.
My brain stops producing language for approximately two seconds.
"Oh, fuck me," I breathe out.
He's-
Solid. Warm in a way that has nothing to do with temperature regulation and everything to do with the specific heat of a body that is built to be large. I can feel his heartbeat under my hands where they've landed against his chest, and his heartbeat is faster than his face suggests, which is the most interesting data point I've collected all morning.
His scent hits me at close range with the subtlety of a structural collapse. Smoke and steel and something underneath both of those things that my hindbrain is categorizing asshelterandsafeand several other words I am refusing to process right now. I said I wouldn't finish that sentence. I'm not finishing it.
I don’t know what comes over me, but before I know what’s happening, I lunge forward, and my teeth sink into his neck. He lets out a grunt, and my hands curl into his jacket. My cock throbs with need, and my jaw locks down. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing anymore, but it feels… right.
“Fucking hell,” he grunts out, but instead of pushing me away, he pulls me closer. I let out a whimper that I’ll have to find time to be embarrassed about later.
"You need to regulate," he grits out above my head. I slowly, reluctantly unlatch myself from his neck. His voice is lower than it was a moment ago, which I'm noting purely academically.
"I'm regulated," I say into his tactical vest. He lets out a scoff, letting me know he doesn’t believe a word I just said.
"Your hands are shaking."
"The building is actively falling down around us."
"Your hands were shaking before that."
I don't have a rebuttal for this because it's accurate. His hand moves. They slide up my arm from wrist to shoulder with a slow, deliberate pressure. Firm. Steady. The specific kind of contact that bypasses cognition and goes straight to the nervous system with a message about hierarchy and safety, andstop.
Every nerve in my body receives the message and responds with enthusiasm that I find deeply embarrassing.
"Oh my fuckinggod," I whisper.
