The sweater had pulled open in the struggle. The jagged, pulsing lines of the broken bond scar were fully visible above the collar.
The shock that radiated from him was palpable. The claiming instinct and his horror at realizing who he was holding — and what he was looking at — waged a visible war in his expression.
"Wren," he breathed. Raw. Devoid of every polished, controlled thing I'd ever known him to be. The voice of a man standing at the edge of a precipice.
Before either of us could move, another cramp seized my abdomen. The heat was escalating again. I screamed, my backarching off the mattress, vision flashing white as the fever spiked.
"Wren—" Hayes caught me before I went over the edge of the bed.
The heat wasn't stopping because the anonymity was broken. The fever was rocketing toward the permanent neurological damage threshold. If I didn't get a stable anchor immediately, I was going to burn out on this cheap mattress.
But Hayes couldn't do it alone. His feral response to my scent was too strong, too possessive. If he tried to anchor the fever solo in this dark room, the instinct to bite and claim would be impossible to suppress.
He pulled his phone from his pocket with a shaking hand, holding me against his chest with the other arm. The screen lit up the sharp angles of his jaw.
"I need you," Hayes growled into the phone, bypassing any greeting. "Both of you. The Knottr safehouse on 4th. Right now."
"Hayes, what's wrong?" Tristan's voice came through immediately, charm gone, fully alert. "Ambush? Are you engaged?"
"No." Hayes's large hand came up to cup the back of my head, pressing my face gently into the crook of his neck — offering whatever small biological comfort his aura could provide without biting. "Feral override. I've broken containment. I cannot hold the suppression line alone. If you're not here in three minutes, I'm going to claim her."
He hung up and dropped the phone onto the mattress.
He gathered me into his arms and rocked me slightly as the fever tore through my veins. "Hold on, Wren. I'm sorry. Just hold on. I've got you. You're safe."
Both of them.He had called both of them.
My fractured, fever-riddled brain couldn't process the scope of the incoming disaster. The shame of one high-lineagealpha witnessing my broken state was agonizing enough. Now, because I had triggered a feral override in the Heir, I was going to be exposed in front of all three of the most powerful wolves on the Aldridge campus.
I buried my face in his shirt and sobbed, trapped by my own biology, as we waited in the red-lit dark for the rest of the Northern monsters to arrive.
8
WREN
The wait was agonizing, a crawl through pure fire.
Hayes held me flush against his chest, arms locked around my waist, refusing to let me pull away despite my frantic struggles. A solid wall of dominant energy, his pine and ozone scent saturating the room, pressing down on my fractured instincts with the weight of something three generations deep.
Every time his aura flared with the urge to claim the distressed omega in his arms, the broken bond scar on the left side of my neck throbbed — a cruel reminder of the last alpha who had touched me with that kind of unchecked intensity.
Defective. Rejected. Unworthy.
"Let me go," I sobbed, twisting my hands into his dark shirt. "You have to let me go, Hayes. You can't be here."
"Stop fighting me," he said, voice a low rumble against my ear. Terrifyingly calm. The iron control of an alpha managing a dangerous biological situation. "If I let go now, the separation shock spikes the fever into a fatal range. Your core is crashing. I have to hold the suppression line."
"Not you," I cried, the last shreds of my Northern pride finally gone. I was thrashing in his lap, the heat destroying everylogical thought. "Anyone but you. You saw me at the mixer — you know what I am. You know I'm broken."
Hayes stiffened, his grip tightening. "You are not broken."
"I am!" The words tore out of me raw. "Trent severed it. He threw me away because I'm defective. Tell them not to come. Please. Don't let them see me down here like this."
The steel door blew open.
Not clicked open — slammed against the alley wall with a metallic crash that shook dust from the ceiling. The safehouse wards flared violet as two massive purebred signatures hit the wards simultaneously.
"Hayes!" Tristan's voice cut through the dark, sharp and cold. The charming frat-boy persona was gone. He hit the bottom of the stairs before the echo had faded, his aura crashing into the room like a tidal wave.
