“They want leverage on me. My friends and I used to work for them, and they’re not happy we left.” Riot began to pace, his large frame making the small room feel even smaller. “Now they’re using you to get to me.”
“But I’m nobody important.” Cass shook his head, which made the room swim. “I’m just a failed missionary who can’t recruit anyone. Why would criminals care about me?”
Riot stopped pacing. His nostrils flared, and his whole body went rigid—that predator-stillness Cass had seen before, like a hunting animal that had spotted movement.
“Princess,” he said slowly, “when’s the last time you had a heat cycle?”
The question was so unexpected and so personal, that Cass felt his face burn. “That’s—I don’t—that’s not possible.”
“Not possible?”
“I can’t go into heat without my sacred bond partner.” Cass said it like it was obvious, because it was. Everyone knew that. “Unbonded Omegas don’t experience cycles until they’re spiritually prepared for partnership. Brother Matthias explained it when I was sixteen.”
Riot just stared at him, then closed his eyes as he took in a deep breath, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Show me your medication,” he said after he exhaled.
“My what?” Cass was getting whiplash from the conversation changes. “I don’t take medication. Just wellness supplements for spiritual focus and good health.”
“Show me.”
There was a command in Riot’s voice that made Cass’s hands move; he grabbed the bottle from the nightstand and held it out.
“I only have a few left,” he said as Riot took the bottle. “But if you want some, I suppose they could help keep you healthy too.”
Riot looked at the Elysian Dynamics lotus logo, then opened the bottle and poured a few pills into his palm. Cass pressed his palms flat against his thighs, then lifted them, then pressed them down again—unsure what to do with his hands.
“I think they have spiritually harmonious roots and flowers,” he offered. “Echinacea and kava kava—”
Riot popped one into his mouth and chewed.
“You’re supposed to swallow them whole,” Cass said, wincing. “They’re quite bitter—”
“These aren’t vitamins, princess.” Riot poured the pills back into the bottle and handed it to Cass, his voice flat. “These are industrial-grade heat suppressants. The kind they use in corporate programs to control Omega cycles.”
Cass stared at the bottle in his hands. The familiar logo. The pale tablets he’d been taking every morning for eight years.
“That’s not possible,” he said. “Brother Matthias said—”
“How long have you been taking these?”
“Eight years.” The words came out small. “Since I started partnership preparation with Honey.”
Riot made a strange sound, like he was tired, and ran his hand through his pretty red hair. “Princess, you’re going into heat right now. That’s why you’re feverish, why your scent is changing, and why everyone in the marketplace was watching you. Your body is trying to cycle through suppressants that should have made that impossible.”
“No.” Cass shook his head, clutching the bottle tighter. “That’s not—I can’t go into heat. Not without Honey. That’s not how it works.”
“That absolutely is how it works.”
“But the Elders…no, they wouldn’t lie about that.” His voice was rising, panic threading through it. “Elysian is about natural harmony and spiritual truth. They don’t even let us eat modified vegetables. Why would they give us—”
Another wave of heat crashed through him, stronger than before, and he had to grip the edge of the mattress to keep from falling over.Maybe the supplements were blocking negative energy. Maybe without them, the Neutral Zone’s disharmony is affecting my spiritual frequency.
But even as he thought it, the explanation felt thin. Flimsy. Like a paper wall trying to hold back a flood.
“This is just the flu,” he whispered. “The Neutral Zone has diseases that don’t exist in Elysian territory. That’s all this is.”
“It’s not the flu.”
