Page 16 of Hide or Die

Jax visibly fought his instincts, and forced himself to step back and reclaim his seat against the far wall. He slid down and rested his forearms on his raised knees.

“Alphas aren’t animals,” he said. “Despite what you may have heard.”

Kam cautiously settled down next to me. “I didn’t mean to imply you were. I apologize if it came across that way.”

I tried to draw comfort from my packmate’s familiar presence at my side, but my body didn’t want another omega right now. He kept a careful inch of space between us, and I wasn’t sure if his touch would help me or make everything a hundred times worse. Miserably, I huddled deeper into the blanket and shuddered, trying and failing not to shoot darting glances toward the person my body really craved.

Jax looked back at me frankly. “Please tell me you’ve at least ridden out heats before. Do you understand what you’re in for?”

“Yes,” I snapped, knowing it was a lie. Being trapped in a confined space with an alpha changed everything—and things had been bad enough the first time, almost fifteen years previously, when I’d had to ride it out on my own. This? This was a whole new level of misery.

“All right,” he said, accepting it.

“Leo,” Kam said softly. “Do you want me closer? Or should I give you space?”

I don’t know, I thought, more than a little desperately.I want this not to be happening.

“Just... stay where you are, please?” I managed in a shaking voice. “For now, anyway.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be right here.” With a deep breath—one that did nothing to ease the tension rolling off his body in waves—he turned back to Jax. “What about you? Haveyouridden out an omega’s heat before?”

“Oh, yeah,” Jax said. “Way too many times. I was a breeder for years in the slave pens. Sometimes the omegas were still too weak from their last litters when the plantation owners threw them back into the whelping rotation. Getting pupped again before they were recovered from their last litter could be fatal, so we’d sit out the heat and get through it as best we could.”

“I didn’t realize you came from the plantations,” Kam replied. “Didn’t the overseers punish you for defying them like that?”

Jax gave a humorless laugh. “I imagine it was a bit of a catch-22 from their perspective. Fertility rates plummet if an omega doesn’t have privacy and a sense of safety during heat. That privacy gave us enough freedom to wriggle out of breeding when it would have been too dangerous. Mostly, I think the fact that it helped keep the overall mortality rates lower meant they let it slide.”

Kam had almost ended up in those same breeding pens, I thought distantly.If he hadn’t been too stubborn... too intractable. If his owners hadn’t decided to sterilize him and throw him into the slave auctions instead—

My lower abdomen cramped again, and I swallowed a moan. I pictured the pups he might have produced... how beautiful they would have been. Unlike him, I’d never wanted to carry. I lacked his innate optimism for the future. How could I justify bringing new lives into a world as broken as ours?

Now, though, my body didn’t care about the future, and I hated it for the way it craved breeding, craved pregnancy—craved all the thingsthat I didn’t want, damn it.

“Sometimes walking can help with the cramps,” Jax offered. “For a while, anyway.”

I couldn’t seem to rally words to reply, and I didn’t think my knees would hold me, so I only shook my head and buried my face in the stinking blanket. At least it distracted me from the smell of cypress and ambergris, even if it couldn’t block my own sickly-sweet perfume.

There was nothing to do except try to tough it out.

* * *

Ilasted maybe an hour, at most.

“Please,” I sobbed, writhing in Kam’s arms. I was on fire. Any minute now, it would consume me whole. “I was wrong. I lied! Please, alpha—I need your knot. It hurts! I’m so empty, I can’t...”

Jax groaned—a low noise that ricocheted through my body like a shot, raising gooseflesh in its wake. I leaned toward that rough sound of desire, my nipples hardening into painful points.

“Leona,” Kam said. “Try to hold on. Just a little longer, all right?”

He’d wrapped me up against his body when I’d first started crying—still cocooned in the ratty blanket. As I’d feared, his touch was both better and worse than no touch at all.

“Alpha,please,” I begged.

“Heat blockers,” Jax muttered. “Damn it.”

The words made no sense. I didn’twanthis words. I wanted hisknot.

“What about them?” Kam asked, still keeping me trapped against him.

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