Page 57 of Knot All is Forgiven

"Look, Icky, yeah, this whole thing is messed up. And you know I love Jordan. But if these guys are your pack…"

"Athena, stay out of this. It's more complex than you understand." There's a significant age difference between them, and I can immediately tell his patronizing tone hits a nerve.

"Oh, is it too complex for my itty bitty Beta brain to understand,Icarus?" She pokes a finger into his broad chest, wrinkling her nose. "I may not be an Alpha or an Omega, but I know pack dynamics. Especially dysfunctional ones. You forget I had a pack before their Omega demanded they get rid of me."

Well, that is brutal. I kind of want to know her story. What kind of pack would drop a member so easily? It's precisely the fate we were trying to keep Jordan from having.

"You will continue to be drawn to these other Alphas because it's your destiny just as much as Jordan is. And if they're her destiny, too? You all need to figure it out because otherwise, you'll all be hurting." She shoves her fists into her slim hips. "You're staring down the barrel of scent sickness."

Slime takes several steps closer to the pair, his eyes wild. "What do you mean hurting? What's scent sickness?"

"Oh, do tell them, Icky. Part of me wonders if you've even mentioned it to Jordan yet."

The Alpha with the unfortunate nickname scrubs his hands down his face, shoulders drooping. "I haven't told her. I didn't want to add to her stress. I'm figuring out a workaround."

"One of you want to tell us what's going on?" I ask, crossing my arms over my chest. "Because it feels like you two need to share with the class."

Icarus slumps down in the worn chair and buries his face in his hands. "There hasn't been much research on it, but some studies report adverse health effects in unbonded Omegas who find their scent matches and don't spend significant time around them." He sits up and leans back, adjusting the collar of his shirt before continuing. "Our scent is driven by pheromones, which is a combination of our unique distant shifter ancestry, our genomes, and that strange magic that seems to pull us together. Alphas produce pheromones in spades when around their Omega, which obviously increases tenfold during a heat. It's not actually the knot that satisfies a heat, did you know that? It's the pheromones. Otherwise, how would female Omegas be satisfied through their heat with a female Alpha? Pheromones happen to be at their peak when an Alpha's knot is expanded, so as a society, we've made the correlation that the need for sexual stimulus and pheromones during heat means an Omega needs a knot when, in all actuality, they would be-"

"Get to the point, Icky," the Beta woman, Athena, chastises. "You don't need to show off that you're a doctor. It's grossly obvious."

"Fuck, fine. Basically, there have been several studies showing that an Omega's body gets almost addicted to an Alpha's pheromones if they're a scent match. So to be without them can throw them into withdrawal." He awkwardly pulls at the cuffs of his shirt, looking anywhere but Slime and me. "With the same symptoms of drug withdrawal."

"Hold on," Slime snarls. "Do you mean to tell me that you keeping Jordan from us actively hurts her?"

"There is no way to tell if she'll be affected! It's just a hypothesis right now. The phenomenon is still being studied. There is the possibility that my scent alone will be enough to stave off the sickness."

"No, don't even attempt to hedge it like that. You're a doctor," I say, gesturing at his sister, "your sister just said as much. Tell us, Doctor, do you believe there is veracity to this theory?"

A bell dings over the door as another biker comes in, grunting a hello at Slime and heading onto the shop floor, oblivious to the tension between all of us. Eventually, Icarus closes his eyes and sighs, resting his hands loosely in his pockets.

"While not every Omega is susceptible to it, enough are that it needs to be monitored."

"That settles it, then," Slime says, clapping his hands. "We're coming over for dinner."

Chapter twenty-three

"So what did yousay to that?" I ask, shaking my head and not allowing him to respond. "That presumptuous asshole!"

"I told him he's lost his mind if he thought I'd let him come here." Icarus grabs my feet from where they rest on the couch cushion and kneads the sole with his fingers. I stretch out like a cat at the sensation.

"What do we need to look out for with this scent sickness?" When Icarus first brought up the potential for the sickness, I was furious that he kept it from me. But that fury didn't last long. Vick is a doctor, and he'd been compiling research on it and reviewing it to determine if it was going to be somethingwe needed to worry about. Right now, it doesn't appear to be affecting me. But time will tell.

Blush mews at the base of the couch, and I pick her up and cradle her to my chest as Vick goes through the potential symptoms. "It's like any withdrawal. Irritability, insomnia, nausea, and weight loss are the most common."

I chew the inside of my cheek as I run a system check of my body to see if I've experienced any of that, but it's hard to say. "You'll keep an eye on it then?" I ask quietly. "And intervene when necessary?"

"Yeah, sunshine, of course." Out of nowhere, Dae jumps on the back of the couch, crashing into Vick's head. My Alpha drops my feet and yelps, "Goddamnit, Dae!" as he swats at the massive feline. "Why? Why do you need to jump on my head?"

The feline interruption provides some much-needed levity to the situation. The truth is that there is a very real possibility I will have to spend time with Pack Stargazer soon.

And part of me worries that once that happens, I will fold like a cheap lawn chair.

"Do you… maybe want to consider setting up a meeting on your terms?" Vick sighs, rubbing his hand on the back of his neck.

"You mean reaching out to them?"

"Yeah, and maybe all of us going somewhere public and getting on the same page?" I can tell by the tightness in his shoulders that he's expecting me to get upset, maybe to yell and stomp away.

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