Fuck.
Fuck.
I’d been in such a rush this morning, I hadn’t taken the suppressant. And I’d spent the last week sleeping in my Alpha’s beds. Scent-sympathetic Alphas, which made Omega’s instincts go crazy.
And in the dressing room alone, with no one else’s scent to push against mine, I hadn’t even noticed.
This wasn’t nerves, and it wasn’t me getting sick.
I was going into heat.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” My face dropped into my hands.
Claire’s face went slack with shock. “Oh, no. We need to call Skylar.” The next cohort.
“No.”
“No?” She looked at me like I was crazy. “What are you going to do? Dance until you’re presenting on the stage?”
Straightening my spine, I continued my makeup. “There are scent cancellers in the shoe room. I’ll borrow a spray and keep it going whenever I go on stage and come off.”
“Sloane.”
“Don’t, Claire.”
She watched me as I continued my makeup, staring at me in the mirror. “Are you sure?”
“I am.”
When my first heat hit I thought I was sick too. I should have fucking known. Luckily my heats since hadn’t felt like this, but it didn’t surprise me with the intensity of the connection between my Alphas and me.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll go get that canceller for you then.”
“Thank you.”
I finished my makeup for act one. It would be different for act two. Paler and more like the ghost creature I was supposed to be.
Claire came back with a bottle of the scent canceller the costume shop used and didn’t even ask before she started spraying down my costume with it.
“You probably think I’m crazy,” I said.
“No, I think that the entire company got swindled into working with a jealous and petty man who, for whatever reason, has it out for all of us. You specifically.”
“It’s that noticeable?”
She snorted inelegantly. “Sloane.”
“Other than being late to that first meeting, I don’t know what I’ve done wrong.”
“Sometimes you don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes you never know. I worked with a professor who hated my guts at the ballet school I went to. I never did anything to her, but she still treated me the way Ian treats you. Gabriel needs to do something about it.”
“And that won’t make it worse?” I asked. “I’m already walking a tightrope with three of my pack working here. I don’t think anyone in the company cares, and we haven’t exactly hidden it.” If these rehearsals hadn’t been twelve hours a day and turning my Alphas feral, we might have had a shot at keeping it quiet.
Considering Ash had barely been able to keep his hands off me any time we weren’t dancing, that ship had sailed. No one had said anything or even mentioned it so far.
“I don’t know if it will make it worse,” she said. “But I know that this company won’t be here next year if he’s completely unchecked.”
Claire finished with the spray and set it down beside me and quickly began to work on her own hair and makeup. She didn’t perform until act two, so she had time. But her role was difficult as well.