Chapter 2 Heat

Julius

I knew she was there before she coughed.

The Lycan bloodline doesn't miss much. I'd heard the water stop and the suspended pause before the door swung open. I'd already finished. I was just slow to fold the clothes back to what they were.

"Slow," Caesar snorts from somewhere beneath my sternum.

Four hours earlier, I had been back from Silvermoon Harbor for approximately ninety minutes, which had not been enough time to do anything except walk from the car into Twilight Tower and begin working through the backlog. The heat had been building since the flight, a low-grade wrongness behind my ribs that the suppressant was supposed to handle.

Supposed to. The witch's words surfaced with their characteristic unhelpful timing: "Each dose yields diminishing returns. When the threshold breaks, only proximity to a she-wolf will be effective. Scent and contact, Alpha Lycan. There is no other method."

I had dismissed this as an overstatement. I was wrong.

The maternal intervention arrived at half past three. My mother appeared in the doorway of my private office with the expression she has deployed against me since childhood, the one that means she has already decided the outcome of this conversation and is offering me the courtesy of believing otherwise.

"The council members are talking," she said. "Three weeks of a son who doesn't visit his mate. Who doesn't take her to family functions. Who hasn't marked her." She settled into the chair across from my desk.

"The mark ceremony is scheduled."

"The ceremony is a formality and you know it." She folded her hands. "I did not raise a man who treats his mate as a box to check between board meetings."

"The circumstances are managed."

"They are visible." Her voice carried weight. "A Lycan Alpha without a stable mate bond is a threat. I don't need to tell you what the other houses are watching for."

She wasn't wrong. I knew she wasn't wrong before she finished speaking, which is always the most irritating way to receive correct information.

I promised her I'd return home that evening and walked her to the elevator.

And then the heat hit me properly.

Not the background static of the previous weeks. The real thing, sudden and total. The suppressant was somewhere in my desk drawer. I took it. It did nothing meaningful. I felt Caesar surface with the force of something that had been waiting for exactly this moment.

"Gloria," he shouted excitedly. "She's still your fated mate. One conversation can..."

"No."

"Julius..."

"No." The word came out with enough edge that the Beta in the outer office went absolutely still. I moderated my tone. "She rejected the bond. I won't chase what rejected me. That's not a discussion."

"Then you're going to stand at this window until your knees give out?"

Patricia, I thought, instead of answering him. Patricia, who had agreed to this arrangement with impossible calm, and who had willingly moved into Blackrock Estate just after our first formal meeting, which is the only one I'd had with her for the past three weeks.

The problem with selecting a random she-wolf for proximity was a practical one: a low-ranking wolf introduced to a Lycan in full heat suppression mode wouldn't provide comfort. She would provide terror, and the pheromone signature of terror makes everything worse.

Patricia, by contrast, had already proven she didn't startle easily. And she was, at minimum, a useful fiction: a Lycan without a mate reads as unstable, and a Lycan whose fated mate had rejected him reads as finished. The outside world knew neither of those things. What they knew was that I had declined Gloria Greyson and chosen her younger sister instead, which was eccentric but not unprecedented, and which conveniently accounted for Gloria's disappearance without requiring me to explain anything I had no intention of explaining.

As for Patricia herself, the arrangement was simple: distance. She had been pulled into this through no fault of her own, and I had no interest in compounding that by marking her. Werewolves hold the Goddess's bond in considerably higher regard than Lycans do. A mark from me would close off every path she had to a real mate, and that was not a thing I was willing to put on her. So I kept my distance until the witch produced a suppressant that actually worked long-term, at which point Patricia and I could stop performing proximity and she could go find whatever werewolf the Goddess had actually intended for her.

That was the plan.

Caesar's objection arrived in a single syllable: "No."

"She's the logical choice."

"She's not. She can't help us."

"Watch me prove otherwise."

I drove myself. Finn offered; I dismissed him. The Arcadia building was thirty minutes from the tower at early-evening traffic, and I spent most of the drive managing Caesar's running commentary.

The lobby had cleared by the time I arrived. But she was still in there, told by the smell. I tracked her scent to the far end of the hallway, to a door that stood unlocked. The shower was running.

I stood in the corridor and understood that the situation required simply waiting.

The heat said otherwise. I was gonna break down.

What should I do? Go to her now? But what if I mark her accidentally through it?

Then I notice the fresh clothes on the shelf.

The witch had said scent and contact. Let's hope the scent was sufficient.

I worked through the stack methodically. The shirt and slacks were surface layer. When I reached the bra and underwear, her scent was much stronger there, warm and concentrated, the intimate trace of skin and body heat that cut straight through the suppressant and settled deep...

The heat receded. Slowly, then faster. By the time the water shut off, I had my footing back.

I folded the clothes and checked for any wrinkles.

Then I heard the door open. Then the cough.

Now I need a way to ease her suspicions.

I'm turning to face her.

"Don't," Caesar says.

I don't know why he said that till I'm fully turned.

Patricia stands in the doorway of the changing area in a robe, one hand still holding the collar closed at her throat. Her hair is dark with water, a strand of it tracking a line down the side of her neck into the shadow of the robe's lapel.

My heat nearly relapses.

She raises her chin slightly and points at my hands. "Those are my clothes."

I hold them out. "Sorry."

She crosses the distance, takes the stack from me, and the brief exchange sends a second wave through my chest that I shut down before it becomes legible. Her scent is considerably stronger at this range. This is a logistical problem I had not fully modeled.

She takes the stack and settles back, fixing me with a measured gaze. "What are you doing here? And... why are you... smelling my clothes?"