Callum

The intense warmth radiated from Santiago’s skin, leaving the sweat on his temples slick and feverish under my palm. Crossing the living room with him in my arms, I laid him out on the sofa, settled his head against the cushion, and pressed two fingers to the side of his throat, counting against the second hand beating in my skull.

His pulse came back too fast, slamming so hard against my fingertips that it echoed directly into my own wrist, and his breath came in shallow, ragged pulls that caught at the top and never finished.

Moving too quickly—far too quickly for someone who’d been merely falling for the past minute—I inhaled to steady myself and instead took in a lungful of him.

The apple and the spice flooded the back of my throat, the slick scent underneath dragging straight down my spine to sink hot and deep, leaving my mind unable to think past the want of it. My canines pressed against the inside of my mouth. The bear lifted his head and turned every ounce of his attention on the omega lying out and helpless on my sofa, and the part of me that had buried a mate and built a life out of refusing this fought to reclaim control of my own mind.

He’s dying, I told the bear. Look at him. He is dying on my couch and you want to mount him.

The bear offered no argument, his overwhelming need to claim the omega burning away under a sudden and absolute terror as he stared at the sofa. For the first time in six years, the animal and I wanted the same thing, and it was for this man to keep breathing.

Santiago’s eyes cracked open, a sliver of hazel gone glassy and unfocused, rolling toward me without quite landing.

“My bag.” The words came out cracked down the middle. He swallowed and tried again, and his hand lifted an inch off the cushion before it dropped. “My suppressants. I need… I need my bag.”

“Where is it?”

He didn’t answer. His lids slid shut and he was gone again, and I didn’t wait for the rest of it. I bolted out the screen door, took the steps in one drop, snatched the duffel off the gravel, and returned inside before the door finished swinging. I dropped to my knees in front of the sofa and dragged the zipper open.

T-shirts came out in fistfuls, shoved in and not folded, and I dropped them on the floor as I went. I pulled out a mason jar of something herbal alongside a battered box, setting the container aside more gently than the rest without letting myself think about why. A freezer bag shoved at the bottom held a thick stack of banded cash.

No bottles.

“Santiago.” I put a hand on his shoulder and shook him slightly. “The suppressants. Where?”

His head turned toward me. “Front.” A breath. “Front pocket.”

I tore open the front pocket and pulled out two amber bottles, popping the cap off the first one before I’d finished reading the label, only to find both containers completely empty.

I turned the first one to the window. The pharmacy label was dated Friday morning, with a 12-day prescription for two pills a day. Friday to now was barely past Sunday, and he’d taken the whole bottle, both bottles, a two-week supply of suppressant crammed into the space of two days. Enough to drop a regular human cold.

Fuck, he might die here on my sofa, in the house I’d kept empty for six years for this reason, because I already knew what I did to the people fate handed me, and I’d done it again. I’d stood on my own porch and ordered him off it. I’d turned my back on the one thing I was built to protect.

The guttural roar that tore from my throat carried absolutely no words. The bear and the man merged into a single furious bellow aimed at no one but myself, and it rattled the windows along the walls.

I was already moving by the time it died down. I pulled the medical case from the cabinet beside the range, throwing it open on the floor and digging through the top tray before my knees even registered the impact. Trauma shears, pressure bandages, and the stabilizer autoinjectors I kept for my ruts when the suppressants I took failed to hold the line. They weren’t built for an omega in heat, and they were the only thing in the house with a prayer of pulling him back.

I came back across the room and dropped to my knees in front of the sofa again with the injector in my fist.

I needed bare skin to deliver the dose. I caught the pen between my teeth and worked him out of the black hoodie as calmly as my hands would let me, easing one limp arm free, then the other, until he was down to a thin white t-shirt, gone gray with sweat. The cap of his shoulder sat bare where the collar had slipped, the muscle there thick enough to take the dose.

I took the pen out of my teeth, gripped his right forearm to hold it still, and drove the injector into the meat. He didn’t even flinch, and his eyes stayed closed, his lips parted, lost somewhere beyond my reach.

I held the pen down the full count, pulled it free, and dropped it onto the cushion. Then I took the rut suppressant from the kit and inserted it into my thigh through my denim. The sting of it settled my racing mind half a degree, which was enough to keep my hands his and not the bear’s.

I knelt there and watched him breathe.

After a while, the awful catch at the top of each breath began to ease, and the pulls came longer and deeper. His pulse, when I put my fingers back to his throat, had calmed, still fast but holding a steady count, no longer fighting the rest of him.

He was going to live. The relief of it nearly put me on the floor.

I reached out and swept the curls off his forehead, the dark waves plastered there with sweat, and I worked them back off his face one by one until his entire face came into clear view. The split lip, the bruise of exhaustion under each eye, the face from the photograph that Jonas had known would do this to me, scrubbed of every bit of the joy that had been in it.

I leaned down and set my forehead against his, allowing myself the one thing I had no right to.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t do this again. I can’t.”

The bear in my chest stopped his raging to grieve instead. He pressed against the inside of my ribs and made a broken sound that rolled through my bones before it ever reached my ears, because he understood what I was telling the unconscious omega under my hands, and what I was telling him. That I was going to do the one thing every instinct I owned was screaming at me not to do. I was going to let him go when he woke up.

The trouble was that the bear had already decided otherwise, and I had never once won that fight cleanly. I pulled back and went to find towels, a bowl, and clean water.

I came back with all three. I set the bowl on the floor beside the sofa, wrung the first towel out warm, and leaned in over him.

He’d sweated through everything he had on. The t-shirt was the easy part, peeled up and off one arm at a time, and I ran the warm cloth down his throat and across his collarbones and under each arm, working the salt off his skin in slow passes. This was a job. I’d done worse for men I’d liked less, in worse rooms than this one, and I held to that thought like a rail.

The jeans came next. I worked them down off his hips and his legs and dropped them in the pile, and his briefs underneath were soaked clean through, no help to him at all. I got them off him the same way I’d done the rest, and then I kept my eyes on the cloth and the bowl and the next patch of skin and nowhere else, because the man on the sofa hadn’t agreed to anything and I wasn’t going to take so much as a look he hadn’t given me.

I cleaned him head to foot like that, refreshing the water twice, and by the end of it, the worst of the fever sweat was off him, and his breathing had eased another degree.

The pinch between his brows smoothed, and his mouth came soft, and he turned his cheek into the cushion.

I pulled my flannel off my own shoulders and worked his arms into it one at a time and drew it closed over his chest. He was a smaller man than me and the thing swallowed him, the cuffs hanging past his hands. My scent was all through it. He’d breathe it in, and his body would ease, take the comfort of it even with no one there to give it. I had no right to do that to him. I shouldn’t have done it. I did it anyway, because the only other choice was leaving him to ride this out with nothing, and I couldn’t.

I slid a folded towel under him, drew the throw blanket from the sofa up over the flannel, and left him to rest.

Then I stood up in the middle of my own living room, and the bear came for me in earnest.

He wanted out. The rut suppressant held him by a thread and no more, and the thread was singing. He wanted to come up through my skin and break the door off its hinges and put four paws on the cold ground and run the whole perimeter of the property until he’d found every road and every track that led to this house. He wanted to hunt. Whatever had run that man to the edge of dying on my sofa, whatever he’d been driving from, the bear wanted to find it and open it from throat to belly and leave it in the trees for the rest of them to find first. He wanted to kill everything between here and the county line and then sit down on the porch and dare the rest of the world to try.

My eyes went long, the room pulling wide and bright at the edges. The canines were already down, and my hands weren’t quite hands anymore.

I turned and went up the stairs faster than I’d gone up them in years, pulling my t-shirt over my head as I climbed and working my jeans open, getting out of them on the landing before the change could tear them off me. I crossed my bedroom into the bathroom, got a hand on the shower, cranked it hard to the cold side, and stepped under the freezing stream before the tile had a chance to warm.

The cold hit me like a fist, and the bear grunted about it, and I stood there and took it.

I braced both arms against the wall in front of me and let my head hang between them, and the water came down across the back of my neck and shoulders in a sheet. Eyes shut. Breathing like I’d run the property line twice. It was supposed to kill the want and it wasn’t doing a thing, because I was hard enough to drive nails and I hadn’t laid a hand on myself, hadn’t so much as thought a clean thought, and still my cock hung heavy and aching between my braced arms with nothing to blame but the apple and the spice that had followed me up the stairs and into my own lungs.

Anger tore through me, and I drove my fist through the tile. The crack shot up my arm, and a fresh fracture split beneath my knuckles before I pulled back. Blood ran off my hand and down the drain. It didn’t help. Nothing helped.

The man a single floor of want away from me was unconscious on my sofa in my flannel and could not have agreed to a single thought I was having, and I would not touch myself to the thought of him. I held that line as long as I had it in me to hold.

It wasn’t long.

I gave out against the wall and got my bleeding fist around my own length because there was no other way down off the edge I was on, and the shame of it sat in my throat the whole time. The shame existed not just for the physical want, but for the sheer unworthiness rotting inside me. I was a broken asset retired by the Bureau, a man with too much blood on his hands to ever be a safe harbor for someone this pure. I had already buried one mate, failing the single most important duty a Primordial Alpha carried.

Touching myself to the thought of the green apple and spice clinging to the man downstairs betrayed the protection I was supposed to offer.

The knot was already swelling at the base, useless, nothing to lock around, and I worked my hand over it anyway in hard, rough pulls that had nothing tender in them. I groused into my own forearm. I tried to think of nothing. I tried to scrub the crisp green bite of him out of my nose and off the back of my tongue, tried to put a blank wall up behind my eyes, and every blank I reached for filled itself back in with him, the line of his throat, the give of his skin under the warm cloth, the soft his mouth had gone when the fever let him loose, and each one made it worse instead of better.

I kept at it. The room went long again at the edges, bright and wide, the change crowding up under my skin the same as it had downstairs, and the man in me started to give out under the animal, the seam between the two of us thinning to nothing. I lost the battle over who was actually driving the hand wrapped around my cock right as the climax ripped through me. I came with my forehead against the cracked tile and a roar torn out of my chest that belonged entirely to the bear, my knees buckling under the absolute force of it.

I stayed where I was, hand braced and chest heaving, and the guilt arrived right on schedule, sour and complete. I’d told that man an hour ago, my forehead on his, that I’d let him go when he woke. Then I had stripped him down, washed the sweat from his body, and wrapped him so entirely in my scent that he belonged to me before he even opened his eyes, finally coming apart in the cold water with his face branded into my brain.

I shut the water off and stood in the dripping quiet, a ruined man staring down the terrifying reality that I was already losing the battle to let him walk away.