No,I thought, the social panic becoming pure biological terror.It's too early. Not due for another six months. The suppressants should hold.
Another wave hit, stronger than the first. My knees buckled. I slid down the wall until I was kneeling on the linoleum.
Fever spiked instantly. My internal temperature rocketed upward so fast my teeth chattered. The air in the hallway shifted— the sterile smell of bleach and stale popcorn drowned out by the heavy, unmistakable sweetness of an omega in crisis heat. Crushed vanilla and wild orchids, laced with sharp distress pheromones.
The exile. The severing. The encounter with Hayes confirming my worst shame aloud. My damaged biology, already fractured by Trent ripping the tether from my chest, had finally given out under the compounded pressure. My body was bypassing the suppressants, plunging me into an emergency heat in a desperate biological attempt to force a new bond to fill the hollow in my core.
An unbonded omega in a crisis heat in a mixed-species dormitory was a catastrophic event. The scent would broadcast through the vents to every unmated alpha within half a mile, triggering their most primitive instincts.
I dragged myself the last twenty feet to room 314, vision swimming, the edges of the world going dark. I fumbled the keycard against the lock with slick, shaking fingers, shoved the door open, and collapsed onto the thin carpet.
I kicked the door shut.
The lock clicked just as the fever took hold and dragged me under.
5
WREN
My entire body was burning from the inside out.
I lay curled on the thin carpet of the dorm room, fingers digging into the cheap synthetic fibers. The crisis heat had bypassed the usual two-day warning period and dropped me straight into the active phase.
My skin felt too tight, stretched over boiling water. My pulse hammered in my ears, drowning out everything else. Every nerve ending was misfiring — the brush of my sweater against my collarbone, the cool air from the vent — all of it translated into white-hot pain.
But the pain was secondary to the imperative. The imperative was deafening and terrifying.
A screaming need for physical touch, for a dominating anchor, for analpha. It was destroying every rational thought I had, reducing a twenty-one-year-old history major into a creature driven solely by the urge to submit and bond. The scar on the left side of my neck throbbed in time with my heartbeat — a bleeding wound demanding to be filled by a new tether.
"Wren?"
The door banged open. Chloe burst in carrying two cups of mixer punch, came to a dead halt when she saw me on the floor, and dropped them. Red liquid splashed across the linoleum. She dropped to her knees beside me, eyes wide.
"Oh my god. What's wrong? Are you having a seizure?"
She reached for my shoulder.
I flinched away, an animalistic whine tearing out of my throat. Her touch felt like sandpaper against raw nerve endings.
"Don't," I gasped. "Don't touch me, Chloe. Please."
She yanked her hands back. "Okay. Okay. I'm calling campus medical?—"
"No!" The panic of public exposure cut through the biological haze. "You can't call them."
"Wren, you are on the floor burning up?—"
"It's a heat," I forced out between clenched teeth, another wave of cramps pulling me into a tighter ball. "Emergency crisis cycle. The stress triggered it early."
Chloe stared at me, her brain working fast. "Okay. Heat. I've read about this. What do I do? Medication? Ice? A doctor?"
"I need an alpha," I sobbed. The humiliation of the admission was almost as bad as the pain. "Or a suppression room. I don't have a pack here, Chloe. I don't have anywhere safe."
In the North, an unbonded omega entering heat was immediately moved to a magically reinforced suppression room in the family pack house. Her pheromones were contained. She was protected.
Here, in a mixed-species dorm full of hundreds of unbonded students, I was a catastrophic liability. My scent was already filling the room — thick and sweet, crushed vanilla and wild orchids laced with the sharp distress tang of prey. It was only a matter of time before it hit the hallway vents.
"The top drawer of my desk," I managed, lifting a trembling finger. "Glass vial. Black sand."
