Page 42 of Stream Heat
My chair shrieked against the floor as I got up. Every protective instinct I’d spent twenty years hiding just broke surface, all teeth and adrenaline. Why did it always have to be the Omegas who got left like this? Couldn’t keep picking apart waveforms while someone was three doors away clawing through hell.
The hall felt twice as long as usual. Malik’s scent was everywhere, a wall of sandalwood and linen, spiked with the raw ozone snap of alpha nerves. Under that, tangled thin and sharp, was Quinn’s scent of honey gone acrid and burnt pepper.
I posted up outside her door, a few steps back, close enough to hear, not close enough to crowd them. Malik’s voice, low,careful, every word dialed to “comfort.” Quinn answering, voice cracked, all her barbs worn thin.
“Everything. Hurts... everywhere.”
It felt like a punch. I'd heard it before, from Emma, back when her crash nearly killed her. Military suppressants out of her system, body suddenly remembering everything it had been forced to forget. The years of denied heats, a chemical leash pulled tight until it snapped.
Emma had made it, barely. Only because I’d found her in time.
Quinn? She was making the same mistake. Same pride, same self-flagellation. Sure, support was dangerous. But alone, you die.
Malik stepped out twenty minutes later, moving like a bomb tech, every alpha instinct on edge. He started, then relaxed, seeing me there.
“How bad?” I kept my voice down. Quinn didn’t need an audience.
“Bad,” he said, running a hand through his hair. The cracks in his calm were obvious. “Breakthrough symptoms. Fever, pain, maybe pre-heat. She’s...” he stalled for a second. “She’s terrified, Jace. Of being seen as weak. Of us needing to see any of it.”
I nodded. Didn’t need to explain. I knew the drill.
“Call Dr. Patel?”
“She won’t have it,” Malik ground out. “Told me if I even mentioned medical help, I was out. She’d rather white-knuckle it than admit she’s exactly what the industry called Omegas.” His jaw was a livewire of anger. Or maybe hurt.
Fury burned up my chest, acid and sharp. I’d watched Emma damn near kill herself chasing that same impossible “tough enough” standard. Watched the system grind Omegas down to paste and spit them out convinced their suffering was some personal shame.
“She needs alpha support,” I said. Flat, not a question.
“I offered. She refused. Wouldn’t even let me stay.”
Of course. Quinn had built herself out of steel plate and sarcasm. Out of self-negation. Admitting she needed help from an alpha, even a safe one like Malik, that was nuclear. She’d torch herself first.
But she was on thin ice. I’d read everything there was to read after Emma. When withdrawal gets bad enough, the brain can seize, the body can spiral out. She wouldn’t risk pride for survival, but maybe I could game the system for her.
“I’ll monitor from my room,” I said. “Audio only. Not invasive. If you see anything weird, or every hour, check in. If she drops below baseline…”
“We override and call Patel,” Malik cut in. “Got it.”
He headed off, probably to keep Reid and Theo from busting down Quinn’s door with too much concern and even worse timing. I went back to my setup, brain already cataloging technical options.
My editing rig wasn’t just for fun; it was half the house’s control center, low-key. Security. Audio monitoring. Network health. Fifteen minutes and I’d built a listener that would ping me if distress spiked, but wouldn’t actually record. Quinn would hate that. I’d hate that.
The real problem was waiting. I tried to work, but the soft babble of ASMR editing felt wrong, off, pointless compared to the quiet hell in Quinn’s room. I shoved that aside and reopened my old research from Emma’s crash. Forums, case reports, the worst-case scenarios.
The science broke it down, military suppressants didn’t just numb Omegas, they rewrote them. Tearing off that chemical straightjacket? Months of agony. Sometimes years. Quinn had been on the stuff eight years. Eight years of telling her body “you’re nothing.” Now it was finally allowed to scream.
An alert chimed. Heart rate spike. Breathing uneven. She was awake, and it was getting worse.
I listened. Waited. What came next wasn’t noise. It was silence. The kind that means someone’s holding their own mouth shut to keep from asking for help.
Emma had made that choice, too. Had nearly died for it.
I wasn’t going to let Quinn die on her own sword, pride be damned. I just had to make it look like she chose help.
I dug a water bottle out of my mini-fridge, a protein bar from the drawer, and scribbled a note.
Your stream setup is monitoring heartbeat through your gaming chair sensors. Drink something. –J
