Page 6 of Hide or Die

“The worst,” I concurred. “I feel like a butterfly pinned in a glass case.”

“Do you think, if we’re quiet...?” he began, before trailing off.

I knew exactly what he was asking. It was a risk—but this close to my heat, my judgment was apparently becoming suspect. Mostly, though, I needed a decent night’s sleep before wading into battle with Nikolayev and his Committee tomorrow.

“All right,” I said. “We can hang the do-not-disturb sign, and there’s a swing latch on the door. We’ll have to put everything back well before dawn, though.”

“I know,” he said. His hand closed around my thigh and squeezed lightly. “Dibs on the bathroom.”

“Diva,” I told him, without any real heat.

He rose and crossed to the door, opening it just enough to hang the DND notice on the doorknob outside. With that accomplished, he shut it and swung the bar-latch closed for extra security. Together, we dragged a mattress off one of the beds. Being careful not to knock anything over or otherwise make noise, we jammed it into the gap between the two bed frames, where it formed a squashed U-shape on the floor. While he went to take a shower, I pulled the woefully inadequate curtains closed across the offending wall of glass, and gathered all of the available pillows and blankets together.

When it was my turn in the bathroom, I peeled off my velvet evening gown and hung it up carefully. After removing my makeup and brushing out my waist-length red hair, I stepped into the shower, turning my face into the warm spray. I emerged some time later, blow-dried, plaited, and wearing a thigh-length silky nightgown.

In my absence, Kam had finished constructing our makeshift nest by stretching one of the blankets over the gap between the beds, weighting the edges with our suitcases to form a tent-like covering. A single lamp cast a pool of soft yellow light in the darkness of the room. With a heartfelt moan of relief, I lifted the front edge of the hanging blanket far enough that I could crawl inside and wriggle into Kam’s arms inside the soft, womblike space.

THREE

Leona

WE SQUIRMED arounduntil we were both comfortable—arms and legs tangled together, pillows jammed around us to stand in for the bodies of other nonexistent packmates. The U-shaped sag of the mattress kept us pressed close, and the blanket overhead reduced the glare from the single lamp to a soft, diffuse glow.

The smell was wrong—laundry detergent and furniture spray rather thanus. Between my weekly dose of pheromone suppressors, and... what had been done to Kam when he was young, the nest wouldn’t take on our scent no matter how long we huddled here. But aside from that, everything else was as close to beingrightas it ever got for people like us.

I burrowed my nose into the place where Kam’s neck met his shoulder, taking comfort in the act of scenting him even if there was, in reality, nothing to scent. He gave a tiny shiver, and a heartbeat later, all the tension drained out of him at once. He pressed his cheek against my hair, and the breath flowed out of his lungs in a slow exhale.

“Needed this,” he murmured.

Me, too, I thought—but that was another dangerous thing to think.

“Just for a few hours, though,” I whispered against his skin. He nodded silently, and I pressed my lips to the skin over his mating gland in apology.

A tremor ran through his body in response, gooseflesh rising in its wake. One of my thighs was pressed between his, and I felt his vestigial omega cock twitch through the thin cotton pajama bottoms he was wearing. Despite the black market testosterone injections he took to stimulate beard growth and make building muscle easier, I knew that it wouldn’t harden any further than that.

Kam and I shared every intimacy, and in safer surroundings than this, we gave each other what pleasure we could, when the desire arose. But biology limited us in a number of ways. It wasn’t ‘sex’ in the way that betas defined sex. It wasn’t ‘mating’ in the way that alphas and omegas experienced mating.

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