“Can I ask you something?” Cass said, working his arm out of his undershirt without undoing all of his safety pins.
“You’re going to anyway.”
“When you’re in heat with Dante, does the bond feel louder? Like it’s turned up?”
“It’s deafening.” Orion leaned back against the supply closet. “Everything through the bond is amplified. His rut, my heat, the whole thing feeding back on itself. It’s intense.”
“Is that scary?”
“Sometimes. At the beginning it was terrifying. Now it’s just...” He searched for the words. “A lot. It’s a lot. But it’s ours.”
Cass pulled his undershirt off. The air on his bare skin helped—not enough, but the relief made him sigh. His scars were visible , the circles healed to smooth pink, mapped across his chest and ribs, but he didn’t try to cover them anymore. “Can I ask you something else?”
“Cass.”
“Just one more.”
“You’re going to ask twelve more. I know you. Go ahead.”
“When you go into heat, does the, um, does the need start in your belly or your chest? Because mine starts in my chest. In the bond place. And then it moves down. But I don’t know if that’s how it’s supposed to work or if that’s a Primal Triad thing.”
“The chest,” Orion said. “In the bond. Then it spreads. I think that’s the Triad. Normal heats start lower.”
“So our bodies are different from—”
“Our bodies are different from corporately bonded Omegas, yes. Everything about the Triad is different.” Orion shifted, trying to find a comfortable position and failing. “The heat calls your Alpha specifically. Other Alphas can smell it but it doesn’t hit them the same way. It’s like—everyone else gets a whiff, but your Alpha gets hit in the face with it.” He paused. “Dante turns into a caveman.”
Cass laughed. He knew Dante was lewd and crass, and nine times out of ten, when Cass saw him and Orion together, they looked like they were two seconds away from fist fighting, but Dante had an easy composure about himself. Imagining him like a ‘caveman’ was very funny.
“Don’t laugh. It’s mortifying, he gets so spanky and then I can’t sit right for days.” Orion was trying not to smile. “Every single time.”
“Riot was very intense with my heat,” Cass offered, blushing as he said it. He sat down beside Orion, looking at the lock pieces still on the ground like maybe they could make him feel less embarrassed. “But he worries about being too rough when I want him to just…be.”
“Be what?”
“Be himself. Berserker and all.” Cass’s face was hot, and not just from the heat. “When he stops asking and just, I don’t know, follows what his body wants? Because his body wants me and my body wants him and we don’t have to translate anything into words.”
“The classic approach,” Orion chuckled. “Very effective.”
“Don’t make it sound like a strategy.”
“Everything between two people during a heat is a strategy. Some strategies just involve less thinking.” Orion wiped his face. “Christ, you smell good.”
“You can’t say that.”
“I can say whatever I want. I’m in heat, you smell like cinnamon rolls, and I’ve lost all dignity. This was established.” He shifted closer. “Okay, I think we need to talk about the elephant in the greenhouse.”
“I read that elephants are bigger than this greenhouse?”
“It’s a metaphorical elephant, Cass. An elephant where two Omegas in heat are sitting shirtless on a greenhouse floor, their Alphas are somewhere on this property, and both are about to come running like their hair is on fire.”
Cass could feel it. Some signal had reached Riot and through the wire, Cass could feel the shift from whatever Riot had been doing toCass. Where. Now.
“They’re coming,” Cass said.
“Maybe if we hide in here long enough, they’ll get tired and just fuck each other?”
“Orion!” Cass covered his face, horrified by the idea.
