Something shifts in his jaw. A micro-movement, barely visible, but I've been reading opposing counsel for twelve years and I know what a hit looks like even when the other side doesn't flinch.
"Ms. Lincoln's qualifications aren't in dispute," he says, and his voice has dropped a degree. Cooler. More careful. Which means I'm getting close to something he doesn't want me near. "Her biology is. And biology—"
"Her biology is none of your business." The words come out sharper than I intend, but I don't walk them back. "You don't get to audit someone's endocrine system as a condition of employment. You don't get to decide that her hormones disqualify her from a job she earned. And you certainly don't get to sit in this room and tell me that 'biology' is a legitimate legal argument when the entire history of discrimination law exists specifically because men like you used biology to keep people like me out of rooms like this."
Silence. His gray-green eyes lock onto mine and for three full seconds neither of us blinks.
"People like you." He repeats it slowly, tasting it. "Meaning omegas."
"Meaning women. Meaning anyone whose body has ever been used as evidence that they don't belong at the table." I lean forward, my palms flat on the oak. "Your Omega Division is a prettier version of the same cage, and the fact that you can't see it tells me everything about who built it and why."
His pupils do something almost imperceptible—a fractional dilation, there and gone. He opens his mouth to respond and—
Something detonates behind my navel.
Not pain. Not illness. Something deeper and more catastrophic—a low, rolling heat that starts in my core and radiates outward like a shockwave. My diaphragm seizes and I lose the end of my sentence. My fingers go rigid against the oak.
No.
Not possible.
The cycle app said fourteen days. Three weeks from red. I checked this morning. Green. Deep, unambiguous green. This is not happening.
Except the second wave hits before the first one finishes, and the heat in my belly drops lower, pools between my hips, and I recognize it the way you recognize the first tremor before an earthquake—with the total, helpless certainty that the ground beneath you is about to open up.
My scent blocker. It's still holding. I can still smell the French jasmine on my own wrists, still feel the barrier between my biology and the room. But underneath it, something is building—a pressure against the fragrance like steam behind a sealed lid.
"Ms. Henderson?" Hunter's voice, clinical. Noticing the pause.
"I'm fine." The words scrape out even and professional while a third wave crests and breaks inside me, hotter than the first two, and the muscles low in my abdomen clench in a way that has nothing to do with the legal argument and everything to do with the alpha sitting six feet away.
Stress. That's what triggered this. Fourteen years of clockwork cycles broken by two hours of going to war with a man whose voice vibrates at a frequency my hindbrain apparently interprets as a mating call. The sheer biological injustice of it makes my vision blur at the edges.
I stand. My chair knocks back against the hardwood too fast, too loud, and I see his eyes narrow—the lawyer in him cataloging the data point, filing it alongside whatever else he's observed.
"I need a minute." My voice is steady. Barely. "Where's the bathroom?"
"Down the hall. Second door."
I walk out of the great room without rushing, my spine straight, my heels clicking against the hardwood at the exact tempo of a woman who is not falling apart. I round the corner, find the bathroom, close the door, lock it, and grip the edge of the sink with both hands.
My reflection stares back at me—wide-eyed, flushed, a sheen of sweat at my temples that wasn't there ten minutes ago. I lift my wrist to my nose and inhale. The jasmine is still there but it's thinning, going transparent, and underneath it I catch the first whisper of my real scent—warmer, darker, richer than anything Beau Masque was designed to conceal.
I pull the blocker from my bag with hands that won't stop trembling and spray. Wrists, throat, elbows, collar. More than before. Twice as much. The jasmine floods back, thick and cloying, and I wait.
The heat doesn't recede. It digs in. Sends roots down through my belly and into my thighs and wraps around the base of my spine like a fist. My underwear is damp. Not yet slick—not yet—but the warning is unmistakable.
Fourteen days. The app said fourteen days.
My phone is in my bag in the great room. Even if I had it, what would I do—call Lila? Tell her that the proud, unmedicated omega who lectures about bodily autonomy is going into heat in her husband's brother's family lodge because apparently her body decided that proximity to Hunter Vaughn was more important than a decade and a half of perfect cycles?
The fourth wave rolls through me and I grip the porcelain hard enough that my knuckles ache. My body has never done this. Never broken schedule, never overridden my planning, never ambushed me with the one thing I've spent my entire adult life proving I can manage without chemical intervention.
And it chose now. This weekend. This lodge. This man.
I lean my forehead against the cool mirror and close my eyes. The jasmine is still holding. Barely. But the pressure underneath is building with every heartbeat, and I know—the way you know a verdict before the foreman reads it—that the scent blocker is a levee, and the river behind it is rising.
I have minutes. Maybe an hour if I'm lucky and the blocker holds and I keep my distance and don't let him see.
I open my eyes. My reflection stares back—the same woman who walked in here two hours ago, except nothing behind her eyes is the same.
Get back out there. Finish the argument. Win the point. Get to the car and drive and don't stop until there are a hundred miles between me and whatever the hell my body thinks it's doing.
I unlock the door, smooth my blazer, and walk back to the table on legs that feel borrowed. He's exactly where I left him—seated, composed, a fresh page of notes already started. "Where were we?" My voice sounds right. Professional. Not like a woman sitting on a ticking bomb.
