Page 130 of Packed in the Fire house

Sunny's reaction was instant, her shoulders tense, her posture hunched. “I'm not going into heat,” she growled softly before turning her attention to feeding Luka little bits of pancake.

Rune looked at me with surprise, his eyebrows raised in question.

“Sunny, you know the signs,” I said as gently as possible.

She shook her head. “No. I can’t,” she insisted, not looking any of us in the eye.

“Why not?”

“I can't let myself not be lucid,” she admitted in a small voice.

“We’ll be here to look after you and Luka,” I assured her, but she shook her head again.

“You guys would be focused on me. You couldn't give enough attention to him.”

“He will never be alone. One of us would always be with him.”

“No. I can’t. I just can’t,” she said, running a hand through her hair. “Luka needs a bath,” she muttered, plucking our son out of his high chair and hightailing it out of the room.

We all looked after her for a second, trying to digest what she had just said.

“She's being delusional.” Blaze frowned. “It's clear as day that she's about to go into heat. There's no stopping it.”

As Rune leaned against the kitchen counter, crossing his arms, he looked like he had aged years in the last few weeks. His usual smile was replaced by a constant look of worry. “I don't think she can even use medication to stop her heat at this point. It's already starting.”

There were ways to suppress the heat, but once it got going, there was no stopping it.

“Who can blame her for feeling this way?” I sighed, running a hand through my hair. “I failed us. I should have known Gregory was going to be a bigger threat.”

Blaze shook his head. “You had no way of knowing he was going to go completely off the rails once my mother made it known he was being a dick in their social circles. If it wasn't your smart thinking with the tracker, we probably wouldn't have found him for a long time.”

“Without the tracker, that bastard could have gotten him on a plane and out of the country before we realized,” Rune said quietly.

That thought made my stomach turn queasy.

“We’re supposed to protect her,” I said, unable to keep the emotion out of my voice.

“And we are protecting her, but now we need to figure out what it’s going to take to make her feel secure enough to go through her heat.”

“I'm guessing getting a nanny for the duration of her heat is out of the question,” I said.

Blaze chuckled, but there was no humor in the sound. “I think it's going to be a very cold day in hell when any of us ever trust a nanny or daycare provider again.”

“Usually, I would reach out to her family to see if anyone could help, but I doubt she would feel comfortable going intoheat in the same building as her brother. This house is big, but sound certainly carries.”

“I'm also pretty sure she won't want to go to a hotel or a heat hostel,” Blaze said. “You know they have some fancy ones in the city now. They're basically luxury apartments you can rent out just for the sake of going through a heat.”

I raised my brow. “Well, this is LA.”

Racking my mind, I considered all the possibilities.

Everything seemed to be a dead end. I needed to find a way to make her feel secure and comfortable to have people looking after Luka that she would trust to keep him safe, but also close enough that she could go through her heat.

“Won’t she hurt herself if she refuses to go through heat and tries to avoid it?” Blaze asked in a worried voice. He had hardly touched his pancakes either. None of us really had an appetite anymore.

Rune frowned. “If only we had a soundproof pack bedroom, but all the windows make that difficult.”

Realization dawned on me. I sat up straighter in my chair, looking between my two pack mates as a grin slowly spread across my face. “I think I have an idea. It's going to be a lot of work, but I think it's what we need to do.”

---