Page 18 of The Girl Beneath the Sea

I suppose that depends on how much they asked for. How much is a crown prince worth? Monteverra does not have a lot of money but we do have some. Would Reinhardt pay for me?

The thought strikes that I have no idea. I am the only heir. I thought that made me valuable or at least made my marriage valuable but perhaps it would simply make his life easier.

No. It wouldn’t. A war of succession is the last thing that the country needs. I can think of at least four politicians who would try to gain power if my father and I were both incapacitated.

Or dead. Is that what this is?

I feel my scent go. I can’t stop it. Fear rises up off my skin in a wave and there is nothing between it and him but a few feet of air.

His head snaps to me and I see his dark eyes widen.

His breath goes in hard through the wool, and his hand closes on the edge of the chair seat. For a second he doesn’t say anything at all.

“Not that,” he says, deep again. The sound of it reverberates against my sternum. “Quit it. You haven’t done anything. Nobody else is coming in here. Quit it.”

I try. It doesn’t work like that. The fear is still going. But under the fear my body is still reacting to him like that. I know he can smell that too because he shifts on the chair and looks at the floor between his boots instead of at me.

“It’s your heat,” he says.

I stare at him.

“I can scent it. You’ve got a couple of days, maybe less. Maybe a lot less, the way you smell right now.”

I stare at him.

Heat. In here.

With him on the other side of the door. Or not on the other side of it. My mind gives me a picture before I can stop it: his weight on me and his body on mine. In mine.

I want it so badly my stomach turns over.

“I don’t have heats,” I say. It comes out like something a child would say.

“All omegas have heats.”

“I don’t.”

He stares at me again, those dark eyes drilling into me.

Then he says, “You do now. Whatever they had you on didn’t come with you. I guess nobody thought of it.”

He rubs the back of his neck through the mask. “So I’m not supposed to talk to you. I’m not supposed to be sitting here. If you tell anyone I did this I am dead, you understand me? Not in trouble. Dead.” He looks up. “But if you go into heat right now, that is a situation that is going to get us both in the shit, and I don’t need that, so here we are. What are you on?”

“On?”

“Suppressants. What do they give you? Brand. Dose. Anything.”

I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.

I don’t know. I get an injection every eight weeks in the palace clinic. They don’t tell me what’s in it. Then there are tablets in the morning in a little paper cup with my tea. I take what I am given. It never occurred to me to ask.

Suddenly, I feel ashamed. I don’t know what is in my own blood.

“I don’t know,” I say.

He looks at me for a long moment.

“They gave me injections,” I say. “Every two months, and tablets in the morning. I don’t know what they are called.” I hate every word of it. “I’m sorry. That isn’t useful to you.”