Page 28 of Stream Heat
"Eventually." He didn't elaborate, which somehow said everything.
I took another sip of water, using it to mask my discomfort. "The setup looks good. Thank you."
"Like Ash said, it's functional, not optimal. He's already ordered some acoustic panels for the walls. Something about your voice frequencies bouncing wrong."
"He can tell that just by looking at the room?"
A ghost of a smile crossed Jace's face. "Ash notices things others don't. Especially technical things."
"And you? What do you notice?"
His eyes met mine again, this time holding my gaze. "Everything."
Something in his tone made me shiver. Before I could respond, he continued, "First stream is scheduled for noon tomorrow. Just a short announcement, like Reid said. Nothing strenuous."
“I’ll be ready,” I promised, not sure if I meant it.
He nodded once, then turned to go.
"Jace," I called after him. "Why are you all doing this? Really?"
He paused, considering the question with the same quiet intensity he brought to everything.
"Because what happened to you was wrong," he said finally. "And because none of us could live with ourselves if we didn't help."
He disappeared down the hallway before I could press further, leaving me with more questions than answers and the unsettling realization that these Alphas might actually care about me as a person, not just a content opportunity.
I shut the door gently and leaned against it, breathing in the scent-neutral air and trying to convince myself I could handle tomorrow. That I could walk out there and be Quinn again, confident, controlled, impossible to knock off balance. As I breathed I tried to process everything. The house. The alphas. The way my body responded to their presence despite my determination to remain detached.
Tomorrow we'd start the charade, the fake pack bond, the content creation, the carefully constructed narrative of enemies becoming packmates. I needed to be ready, to remember that this was business, not personal.
But as the medication began to take effect, dulling my hypersensitivity to their lingering scents, I couldn't help wondering if I was lying to myself. If maybe, just maybe, therewas something more happening here than a simple business arrangement.
Because business partners didn't sleep outside your door to monitor your breathing. They didn't research obscure medical journals to help with your recovery. They didn't carefully set up your equipment exactly the way you liked it.
And they certainly didn't make your Omega instincts practically vibrate with recognition at their scents, even through medication designed to suppress exactly that response.
I focused all my energy on tomorrow. How to make it look easy. How to pretend none of this had ever touched me.
But the house was alive with alpha energy, and my instincts weren’t going to make this easy, they were going to fight me, every step of the way. Every second, every breath, every time one of them got too close.
I’d survived worse. But if I was being honest, I wasn’t sure I was going to survive this.
CHAPTER TEN
Kara
I’d faced down professional tournaments with less anxiety than I felt staring at my own reflection in the glossy computer monitor. My palms were damp, and every time I adjusted my headset it just made me look more desperate, not less. The comeback stream was going live in less than ten minutes, and I was trying to pretend, at least to myself, that I didn’t almost die from suppressant withdrawal three days ago. But I didn't fool easily, especially not the guy who filled the entire doorway behind me like some kind of bouncer.
“You don’t have to do this,” Reid said, folding his arms and bracing his shoulder against the frame like he was trying to look casual and not concerned. “Not today. We can push it back.”
He should’ve known better. We’d already rehashed this a hundred times. He knew the answer.
I shoved a hand through my hair and then reached for my headset again, like maybe the fifth try would magically glue it to my skull. “The longer I stay offline, the wilder the speculation goes. If I don’t get out in front of it now, someone else is going to do it for me. And they’ll twist it into whatever gets them themost clicks.” There was a tremor in my voice, but I figured I had a right to be nervous. I wasn’t exactly at the top of my game.
He didn’t say anything, just watched me with those unreadable alpha eyes. The tension stretched out until I finally looked up.
“Two hours,” he said, like he was reading the stopwatch on my forehead. “That’s what Dr. Patel signed off on.”
