Page 43 of Stream Heat
Not strictly true, but it gave her an out. Made it about data, not pity.
I set the tray outside her door, knocked once, and ghosted back to my room.
A minute later the door cracked open and the tray disappeared. Silence again.
Twenty minutes, and the mic picked up plastic wrapper noise. Protein bar, finally. Small victories. I’d take them.
Next, I yanked up the stream calendar. Quinn would be out of commission for a while, which meant the rest of us needed to cover. I could shift my own content windows, maybe tweak the house schedule so she’d get more buffer time for recovery. Not that she’d thank me for it.
For now, I just watched. Listened. Waited for the crash.
Because you can only white-knuckle it so long before biology takes the wheel. I’d seen the point where Emma finally went from “I can do this” to “I need somebody to catch me.”
Quinn was going to hit that wall soon. The question was whether she’d let any of us catch her.
Another ping, harder this time. Movement, then nothing. Stillness. The bad kind.
I was in the hall before my brain finished putting the math together. Didn’t run. Didn’t need to.
Outside her room, and this time the breathing was shallow, irregular, the pattern I’d trained myself to notice.
“Quinn?” I called, soft as I could. “You okay?”
A pause then her paper-thin voice came as she replied, “Fine.”
She was lying. But at least she was conscious.
“Need anything? Water, meds, different room temp?”
“I’m fine, Jace.” Stronger. More bite, a little more like herself. “Just tired.”
She was never going to make admitting defeat easy. It was the one thing she still owned.
“Okay. I’ll be working. You know where to find me.”
Didn’t say the rest. I’d be on her audio feed, ready to act fast if she actually tanked.
As I walked back, I heard the tiniest sound from her room. Not pain. Something else.
Relief. She wanted someone close, even if she couldn't say it.
I settled back into my chair, opened the monitor. Her stats were all trending rough but not fatal. For now.
With no other way to calm myself and the protective instincts that demanded I run to Kara, I opened a blank message to Dr. Patel. Not a consult, Quinn would never forgive me if I did that, but this was more like an insurance policy.
I couched my question in information from the articles I’d read back when I was helping Emma and was theoretically just wondering how things had changed between then and now If an Omega was withdrawing from suppressants after military-gradedose. Was the protocol still the same? How common were things like break through heats? And was there anything that could help?
Quinn would probably get worse. With stubborn people like her, it always did.
But we’d be here when she finally let go. All of us. Ready to catch her. I just hoped she’d finally let us.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Kara
“Three, two, one, go live!” Theo’s voice echoed off the ceiling panels, way too loud considering our streaming room wasn’t built for six people at once. Maybe for four. Five if we all sat perfectly still and didn’t breathe. But five full-grown Alphas, all at arms-length and crowding around a table someone probably designed as a joke? That was another breed of claustrophobia.
They insisted that it would be better if we did a full group stream so here we were, with me wedged between Jace and Malik. Reid and Theo were across from me, and Ash was off to the side at the tech station. The cameras were everywhere, multiple angles, lights set up so nothing in the frame looked like a cave, which honestly just made my headache worse. The proximity of five Alphas at once should have been overwhelming, but Dr. Patel's new medication regimen had helped stabilize my system even after yesterday's episode.
