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“Opal,” said Hank the cyning, “he has a scent match.”

“Well, not anymore,” said Opal.

“She’s going to get bond sickness,” said Hank.

“What’s that?” said my father.

Damian looked up from Opal’s neck. “What’s that?”

And everyone looked at me.

BUT THE BOND sickness didn’t start right away, and it would come in waves. The waves might last as long as a week, but usually, they only lasted for a day or two. The intensity varied, too.

After Damian and I stopped being in contact, the sickness faded out entirely and I hadn’t had a bout of it in a long time.

He came to see me that night, the night after he bit her.

I woke up, and he was looming over me in the darkness of my bedroom. At this point in time, we had been sleeping in the same bed almost every night for years. We were only teenagers, but there was a quality to my relationship with Damian that made me feel as if we were an old married couple. We were used to each other. We were comfortable with each other.

Waking up to see him there, it made me think—at first—that everything that had happened that day was a nightmare.

I crawled out of bed and hurled myself at him, pressing my body into his, kissing his jaw, ready to tell him what a horrible dream I’d just had, ready to say that I had dreamed he’d bitten Opal, wasn’t that crazy?

He hissed in obvious pain. He extracted himself from me.

It hadn’t been a nightmare.

I settled down on the bed and that was when I cried for the first time.

He cried, too. He sat down, too, in the darkness of my room. He was only a shadowy figure, the only light coming around the shades that hung over my windows. The light was silvery moonlight and it illuminated the edges of him, his shoulders and his hair, just a glowing outline of him. His face was in shadow.

“What happened?” I said in a choked, teary voice. “Damian, what happened?”

“I lost it, Leo,” he said, his voice thick with tears as well. “I don’t even know.”

“What do you mean, you lost it?”

“I’m driving down to find her, and she’s pulled her car into that church parking lot, and I pulled in, too. I went over to her, and she rolled the window down, and I smelled it right then. She was in heat. It went into me, and it was like a series of explosions, right behind my eyes, it was like…”

I shook my head.

“She begged me,” he gasped. “She was pitiful, and she said she needed me, that she needed an alpha—”

“No.”

“I tried to stop,” he said, his voice ravaged. “I swear to you that I tried.”

“No, no, no.”

“She just… she begged me, and her scent was coating everything, and I couldn’t think, and I felt like something took me over, just took me over.”

I hugged myself and sobbed wildly.

He wrapped himself around me, wincing when he did it, and tucked my face into the hollow of his neck, and we cried together, and then we kissed, and he recoiled from it, and I said, “Does it hurt?”

I knew this. I knew that after an alpha was bonded to an omega, it wasn’t like a regular alpha to alpha bond between wolves. It was sacred and special and that meant that it was uncomfortable to go outside of the bond.

“Don’t care,” he gasped. “Ever since this happened, all I’ve wanted is to come home to you. You’re my family, Leo, you’re the only thing I have, and I won’t lose you, I can’t lose you, we have to be together. You and me, we have to find some way through this. I can’t be without you.”