I typed:
ROSSI
Enter.
The screen unlocked instantly, opening to a website full of guns–long guns, handguns, things with attachments I didn’t recognize and prices that made my stomach drop. None of them looked particularly legal, but I didn’t have time to judge his shopping habits.
Instead, I double clicked the search bar at the top and got to work.
Pregnancy bond rot
Bond rot unmarked omega pregnancy
Bond rot symptoms omega
And everything of the sort I could think to google.
Page after page loaded. Some of them were personal anecdotes on public forums, rambling posts from omegas who were scared and angry and looking for validation. Some were PSAs wrapped in thinly veiled propaganda about the declining birth rate and howstubborn omegas refusing the bondwere apparently to blame for everything wrong with society.
I skipped those immediately.
Others were medical journal clinical and mercifully uninterested in assigning moral fault. I felt the safest with those.
Bond rot is a physiological response to prolonged exposure to alpha pheromones in the absence of a completed bond. In pregnancy, the condition progresses more rapidly due to increased hormonal demand.
I frowned but kept scrolling.
Common early symptoms include fatigue, appetite suppression, nausea, headaches, body pain, anddifficulty sleeping.
My mouth twisted. That all just sounded like what I lived with thanks to fibro, plus I had an alpha, she just didn’t get me pregnant. I couldn’t have bond rot. That was just ridiculous.
I kept scrolling anyway.
As bond rot progresses, symptoms may intensify and include immune suppression, fever, pregnancy complications, and cardiovascular strain.
My nose wrinkled, that felt rather dramatic. Maybe I’d been wrong about this being an unbiased source and it was propaganda too.
In untreated cases, bond rot can be fatal.
I snorted quietly.
Fatal.
Yeah, there was no way. If unbonded pregnancies ended in death, like half the omegas in this world would have been gone alongtime ago.
Bond rot had to be some made up disease created with the goal of controlling unbonded omegas. When I looked at it that way, the idea of bond rot was amusing, which is why I kept reading. No other reason.
Temporary symptom relief may be achieved through direct inhalation of the unbonded alpha’s pheromones.
I paused. Well, if that were true, I’d crave being around him–which Ididn’t. I just liked his attention because I liked attention in general, not because I wanted to breathe in the scent of coffee and cinnamon, it was just a nice bonus.
I continued scrolling.
In very early stages, complete removal of the omega from the unbonded alpha’s environment will reverse symptoms and prevent the bond from decaying further.
…. Was that why Skye wasn’t sick? Or did Vinny get him pregnant too? I hadn’t really bothered to ask, it didn’t really seem important.
But now—
