Page 58 of Stream Heat
"I need some time to think."
Reid got up. "Take all the time you want. We’ll fix the schedule."
They all filtered out, leaving me on the couch, staring at the wall and grappling with the aftershocks. The idea of pack bonding, of letting go and giving control over to biology, was everything I’d fought against for eight years. That independent streak in me shrieked at the mere suggestion, but the Omega side, the one I’d been crushing into silence, just wanted what Dr. Levine had suggested. It wanted connection like it wanted oxygen.
"Quinn?" Jace’s voice was so soft I almost didn’t notice him. He’d come back, mug of tea in hand.
I took it. Let the heat scald my palms. "Thanks."
He hesitated, sitting beside me but not too close. "My sister," he started, "she was on military suppressants too. Special ops. She went through a similar withdrawal to yours."
That jolted me into focus. "Did she make it through?"
He nodded. "Almost didn’t, at first. Tried to tough it out. Nearly died. Eventually, she accepted help, from her old unit. Her pack, basically. Now she’s doing better. Still bad days, but…she’s good. She’s herself. Just, a version of herself that allows for being an Omega."
"She stayed in the military?"
He gave a half-smile. "Different role, but yeah. Still serving. Still a badass."
The implication was obvious. I could still be me. Still fierce, sharp, dangerous. I just had to face the damage instead of chasing the lie.
"I’m scared, Jace." I wasn’t planning to say it, but it came out before I could stop it.
He didn’t try to sugarcoat it. "I know. You should be. This is huge. But you don’t have to be alone, unless that’s what you want."
He got up after that, just as quietly as he’d come. "No matter what you decide about pack bonding, we’re your team. That doesn’t change."
I drank the tea. It was chamomile, perfect temperature, just-barely sweet. For a long time, I just sat there, sorting through the thousand things I didn’t have answers for. Could I compete as an openly Omega gamer? Could I build a new life out of chaos? Could I connect to these five Alphas in ways that were real and messy and terrifying?
I didn’t know yet. But as I sat there, surrounded by their scents (still lingering in the space, subtle but alive), somethingshifted. For the first time since that public heat crash burned my old life to the ground, I felt something like hope.
Not because the diagnosis had changed, it was still a total disaster. But because the disaster wasn't mine alone anymore.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ash
The basement was my sanctuary and it wasn't just for show. Concrete walls, triple soundproofing, enough racks of technical equipment to run three esports teams and still have juice left for a NASA livestream. Usually, the hum of the servers and the ozone tang of hot circuits settled me right down. Not today.
Not after what Quinn had just dropped on us.
Military-grade suppressants, three times the max. For eight fucking years.
I opened the spec sheet I’d been working on for Quinn’s rig. The numbers swam together, refusing to resolve into anything meaningful. My fingers twitched, the instinct to build, to patch, to tweak something until it behaved, gnawed at me. But this wasn’t a hardware problem.
I minimized the window and opened up a new browser tab. If I was going to help Quinn, I needed to know what we were actually up against. Research had always come easy; it was how I survived old problems when they came knocking.
Search: Omegablock XR-9 long-term effects.
Every result made my jaw clench tighter. Veterans’ forums full of horror stories from blackout ops. Medical journal casestudies with enough rotating jargon to hide the worst of it: organ failure, chemical dependency, collapse of natural hormone patterns. Internal pharma memos that read like an ethics committee's worst-case scenario, if you squinted.
Recommended dose? Three hundred milligrams, twice daily, for thirty days tops. Quinn had been swallowing down nine hundred milligrams, twice a day, for eight goddamn years.
I punched the numbers into a calculator. She’d taken enough of that shit to dose a full platoon for half a deployment. It wasn't just bad, or severe. By any logic, she shouldn't even be walking around right now.
“Son of a bitch.” I pushed back from my desk, heart pounding.
XR-9 was a chemical sledgehammer, not a maintenance med. It wasn’t about helping Quinn “manage her biology” so she could chase a dream. It was about obliterating anything Omega, erasing her from the inside out. The career was just the excuse.
