Chapter 5: Heavy. Slow. Deep.

"Why were you in the laundry room?" I asked. "You're the Wolf King."

"My clothes get washed there." He set the kit on the coffee table. "And I left something behind."

"A pendant."

"Two."

My hand went to the hidden pocket on the left side of my skirt. The red pendant was still there, pressed against the wet fabric, warm from my body heat. I pulled it out and held it up.

The blood-red stone hung in the air. The firelight pierced through it, casting a small patch of red light onto his face, landing right on the faint scar beneath his left eye.

"Your royal crest. There's only one in all of Alpha City. You put it around the neck of an Omega you knew absolutely nothing about."

He stared at the pendant. Silence.

A log cracked in the fireplace, spraying a shower of sparks that landed on the black stone floor at his feet and died.

"Because I felt like it."

I stared at him.

"That's not enough."

I stood. The gauze around my knee pulled tight, the wound throbbing beneath it. In my flat shoes, the top of my head barely reached his collarbone. Craning my neck to look at him pulled my throat into a taut line, stretching the skin tight over my nape.

"Lord Cain." My voice was flat. "I'm not a pawn. If you're using me to spite your fiancée, say so. If you need me to play a part, say so. I took your pendant. I can give it back. What happened in the laundry room, you can tell everyone it was a whim. But don't let me die without knowing why."

He looked down at me.

The way a hunter looks down at his prey, deciding whether to kill it now or play with it a little longer. His ice-blue eyes pinned me, the firelight dancing deep in his pupils like two red-hot nails driving into my sockets.

"You think I'm using you."

His voice was flat. No question in it.

I curled my lip. "What else? A Wolf King, being kind to the lowest, most worthless Omega for no reason. Do you even believe that yourself?"

He reached out.

The movement wasn't fast. But I didn't dodge it.

Thumb and forefinger caught my chin. The other three fingers rested lightly against the side of my throat, their tips settling right over my carotid artery, tracking the beat of my pulse. His thumb pressed down on the corner of my mouth, the rough calluses grating against the tender flesh of my lower lip. The pressure wasn't painful. But I couldn't move.

His fingers smelled of iodine. And other things. Rust. Gunpowder. The metallic-sweet scent of snow.

"What makes you think you're even qualified to be a pawn?" He tilted my chin up, forcing me to hold his gaze. "You're a drugged-up Omega with a gland that's practically dead. What makes you think you have the right?"

His voice was low. It didn't come from his throat. It rumbled from deep in his chest, carrying the raw, oppressive weight of an Alpha's pheromones. Every word landed like a finger pressing down on my nape.

An invisible blow struck my chest.

The cruelty of his words didn't hit me. The truth did.

He leaned closer. Close enough to see the texture of the scar under his eye. Close enough to smell the breath leaving his lips. Mint. Cedar. His pheromones weren't being released deliberately. He couldn't hold them back. They were leaking from his gland, wisp by wisp, curling into my nostrils.

The back of my neck began to burn.

No.

My heat was two weeks away. I'd just injected suppressants yesterday. There shouldn't have been any reaction.

But his pheromones were too thick. Heavy. Scalding. Like an invisible beast extending tendrils that shoved into my nose, crawled down my windpipe, wrapped around my lungs, and squeezed. It seeped into my pores, saturated my bloodstream, and pooled at my nape.

A red-hot needle stabbed into my gland.

A searing numbness exploded from my nape, streaking down my spine to the base of my tailbone. Something deep in my lower belly stirred, a heavy, dull heat surging upward and lodging in my throat.

"Your pheromones..." His brow furrowed, nostrils flaring.

He wasn't smelling the soft bloom of a fertile Omega. This was the strangled whisper of a gland pickled in high-concentration suppressants, crushed into a dead knot and locked inside that shriveled flesh at my nape.

He released my chin.

His fingers slid down my collarbone. The pads traced the hollow at its center, then slipped up over my shoulder and pressed against my nape.

Freezing cold.

His fingers were the polar opposite of his body heat, icy as if just pulled from a bucket of ice water. When they touched my burning, inflamed gland, the shock of hot and cold sent a spike of searing pain through my skin. Like being burned by ice. Like being burned by fire. I couldn't tell the difference anymore.

My knees buckled instantly.

A switch had been flipped on my nape, and every ounce of strength drained out of my knee joints. I slid downward.

His arm locked around my waist from behind.

One arm banded around my hip, hauling me up and pinning me against his chest. The heat of his palm seared through my wet dress and into my skin, a savage contrast to the icy fingertips still pressed on my nape. A current of electricity shot down my spine, numbing me from the nape all the way to my tailbone, then churned back up from my belly and lodged in my throat as a breathless, broken gasp.

"Don't touch there..."

My voice shook. Not with fear. My body had simply stopped obeying me.

An Omega's gland is forbidden territory. Anyone's touch besides a mate or a doctor is a violation. But his fingers didn't leave. He traced the outline of my gland, pressing as he went, sliding from the top down the side, then settling squarely in the center.

He pressed down hard.

His thumb and forefinger caught my atrophied gland like a walnut, and he kneaded. The frozen fingertips worked the swollen flesh in rough circles, grinding so deep I could feel the gland being crushed and spread between his knuckles. The hardened knots locked inside by the suppressants—calcified barriers that had kept me numb and safe for three years—snapped one by one under the relentless pressure of his thumb. Each rupture sent a sharp, hot crack through my bloodstream, the chemical walls shattering like frozen twigs. And in their wake, something else began to seep out. Cloying. Damp. Violently sweet. The scent of crushed winter berries and dormant Omega pheromones, bleeding into the air between us.

My fingers clawed into his arm. Nails dug through his shirt sleeve and into the muscle, leaving deep white gouges. My breathing had fractured into ragged, broken gasps, each one swallowed by the cracking of the logs in the fireplace.

He didn't stop.

His thumb ground down on the most sensitive point at the center of my gland, then crushed it with a twisting press.

My spine dissolved into water. A searing, liquid bolt of sensation detonated from my nape, tearing down my spine and pooling deep in my belly as a hot, aching spasm. My legs gave out entirely. I hung from his arm, my face pressed into his chest, my nose bumping against the buttons of his shirt. My lips scraped across the fabric, and I tasted the bitter tang of cedar and gunpowder.

A faint swallow sounded above my head.

Then his fingers stopped.

He went still. But his hand stayed locked on my nape, thumb and forefinger still clamped around the swollen gland, holding me in a cage of flesh and bone.

I could feel the change in his body. The muscles of the arm locked around my waist had tightened, the tendons in his forearm pressing visibly against his skin beneath the rolled-up sleeve. Pressed against his chest, I heard his heartbeat shift from steady to heavy, each beat a hammer blow inside his ribs. Then I caught a sound. The scrape of cartilage as his Adam's apple rolled down his throat. That sound was right above my head. Heavy. Parched. A wolf who had scented fresh blood after a long thirst.

His hand tightened instead. Thumb locked on the left side of my gland, forefinger pinning the right. His five fingers closed around my neck like a steel cage, his knuckles turning white from the strain.

His breath fanned against my nape. Hot. Ragged. The same terrifying, abnormal temperature as the burning hand I could feel on my thigh.

His pheromones stayed leashed. It was something else he was fighting to cage.

"You've been drugged with suppressants," he said.

His voice had roughened a layer, like sandpaper scraping his throat. But the tone was still flat. Still cold.

No question in his voice. Just a flat statement of fact.

His fingers remained on my nape, his thumb lazily kneading the edges of my gland again. The pressure was lighter than before. More torturous. Every lazy stroke released a tiny current of electricity that zipped from my nape to my tailbone and vanished deep in my belly. I could feel his heartbeat through his shirt against my cheek, matching the rhythm of his fingers. Heavy. Slow. Deep.