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As I stood on shaking legs, separating myself from my coworker I’d just become far too intimately close to, I realized my clothes were not work attire. Well, library work attire.

“Oh, shoot…” I stared down at my flour-dusted outfit. “What time is it? I need to go home and change.”

I checked the clock—six thirty in the morning. There was time.

A soft ahem interrupted us as we glanced up guiltily in unison, Isa staring us down in her older form. Foot tapping. “Catnip, I told you.”

My cheeks burned.

“Sorry, Isa. It got a little dicey. Things are—” Zeke waved a hand, and Isa cut him off.

“I’d say. He’s wearing different clothes.” She tapped her foot.

“Well…you know things happen.” Zeke rubbed the back of his neck.

“Just be sure to cover that hickey before you come to work.” She huffed, and I slapped a hand over my neck where Zeke had bitten. It still stung, but touching it made memories of the past night warm my cheeks pleasantly.

“I’ll just take him—” Zeke flinched when Isa cleared her throat.

“Let him go get cleaned up. You and I are going to compare some notes and see if we can get someone out here to help him.” She waved at Zeke to follow her and grabbed her book and the one we’d popped out of, before stomping off.

A hot shower was called for.

Chapter Sixteen

Zeke

Requisitors were a rare bunch, not as rare as my own gift but rare enough that we needed someone with his matching skill to guide him. Ville was out of the question, off on another mission. But Isa and I agreed that Jess, a younger woman in her fifties, though she didn’t look it, would be good to call. She was a doctrinus primarily, but had a very minor skill as a requisitor. She’d brought back small things with great effort, but had extensive training in it and could help Lex understand his gift more.

“Can’t believe you two just went in and fucked like animals.” She huffed, and I snatched the book back, reading over the cover and blurb with a frown. A cursory flip through the pages told me that our little escapade didn’t change anything in the book itself, which was interesting. Requisitors often left a trace of themselves, so being able to do a clean dive was a benefit. Though, how an archivist started out was not always how they matured into their gift. But to do the correct documentation…

Isa followed me into the back room, through my workshop, the plain room with worn carpet and the rich scent of cherry wood inundating the space as fragrant then as it was a hundred years ago. Before I could move to the spiral staircase to ascend to my apartment, she cleared her throat and held out a stack of papers. “I need you to document everything.”

My cheeks heated. “Everything?”

“Every. Thing.” She glared at me and I glanced from her to the book as they made it into my hands. With a huff, her journal slammed shut, and her book fell onto the table beside her with a muted thud.

“Old huss.” I sat at the table with a grumble and jumped when her journal’s clover flapped at me. “I didn’t stutter. I don’t talk awful behind backs.”

The cover snapped again, but I was certain she’d gone to rest after. Her energy wore thin and I didn’t know what I’d do when she became too weak. And we didn’t know if she’d still be the same Isa if I wrote more life into her journal.

Without anything else to do, I sat down at the table and with one hand pulled the key out of my shirt, and the other, I held the book open. While grounded to the library itself, I couldn’t slip back into the book, so the key kept me in place.

I dissolved myself into a fantasy world where women didn’t exist, just one gender and two sexes. Male—then alpha and omega. Alpha males were dominant, knot-wielding hormonal bastards. “Wonder how they keep their population up…”

That question was answered soon enough as I realized that the omegas in the story were their childbearing counterparts—and they often had no choice about it, thrown into irresistible heats and often got stuck with the consequences of an amorous alpha having no legal consequence to stand up for his progeny.

I thought back to the landlord as he appeared in the book, then the son that occasionally tried to worm his way into the odd unlocked door, as a lack of protection constituted consent. “Messed up…”

I followed the main character, how he meticulously locked the doors, protected himself, and exchanged odd glances with the meek alpha that visited his bakery despite being gluten intolerant, buying pastries just to smell his omega—thinking it was the scent of the pastries itself that allured him.

“Sir, one does not achieve an erection from a good beignet.” I thought about it for a moment. “Usually…”

I’d had some good beignets.

The other omega in the bakery received sharp ire from the boss and got a bare mention in the text with the MC realizing the omega below him had let in the landlord’s son. That could have easily been Lex had I not arrived.

I eventually learned about the knot, the pregnancy, and the mating bite, where an alpha chooses his omega for life.