A floor to ceiling window made out of this stuff must have cost a fortune. And I know that wasn’t in the original budget. Damianos must have hypnotized a few people on the construction project to make this happen—
A chill runs down my back as another thought, even more disturbing than that one suddenly drops down into my mind.
This house was renovated over six months ago. What the hell? Exactly how long had Damianos been planning to kidnap me?
The answer drops to my head just as unpleasantly as the previous realization.
Since I helped Xenon and Fensa escape from his lair.
I’d been wrong about this being about revenge against my fathers. It’s about revenge against me.
I sit with that thought. But not for too long. Less than five minutes, probably—though I can’t say for sure since, thanks to the biocollar, I no longer have access to my internal timer.
Weapons!
If I can’t get out of this room, I need to make a weapon for the next time that fire-breathing asshole comes in.
Okay, what can I use?
I pull the bar down from the closet, dumping all the nightgowns. This will do ‘er.
Instead of feeling sorry for myself, I dip my chin and start to go through the many self-defense drills Papa Olafr taught me. He tried to teach Fensa, too, but after a certain age, she was always so caught up in reading Aunt Alicia’s books about ancient wolf civilizations, that he could never convince her to come down to his gym.
But I showed up every morning. And now there’s another voice in my head.
You’re a warrior born, Ola, the father I was named after tells me. As long as you’re fighting, you can never be defeated.
I didn’t fight smart earlier because Damianos had pissed me off. But I won’t make the same mistake again. I start drilling everything Papa taught me about fighting with a stick. Dip my chin low, swing both ends at my invisible but easily imagined seven-foot plus opponent.
Fuck food, I tell my grumbling stomach after hours of practicing. Fuck rest, I tell my sore, only recently healed body. I don’t need to eat. I don’t need to sleep.
All I need to do is fight.
“The next time he enters this room only one of us is coming out alive,” I growl out loud. “Eye of the fucking tiger emoji—”
The fever hits me in a pulsing wave, so sudden and intense I drop the stick. It hits the floor with a noisy clatter as I double over.
What the…?
My muscles turn to jelly and I break out into a sweat, suddenly hotter than I ever felt before. In an instant, clothes become a thing my skin can no longer bear. I tear at the old-fashioned nightgown until I’m naked as the day I was born.
What the hell is happening to me? Did he inject me with something while I slept? Some kind of poison maybe? Panic claws at my mind as I try to figure out what the hell is going on with me.
Is this a fever? Am I sick?
Those last two questions stop me in my mental tracks, as yet another remembered conversation downloads into my head.
“No offense to Alisha, Chloe, and mom, but why does it always take them so long to realize they’re in heat in these books?” I once complained to Fensa, after doing all the assigned reading for my Modern She-Wolf History class at my university’s top-secret Lupin Studies program. “None of them have ever been sick a day in their lives, because they’re freaking wolves, right? But in their books, they’re always like, oh no, I must be sick! Maybe I’ve got a fever! None of them ever seem to get they’re in heat.”
I’d laughed derisively before telling my sister, “If I wasn’t so loyal, I’d be telling the whole class how dumb they were at the next lecture.”
Fensa had laughed and commiserated.
But now I get it.
As my own dawning horror sinks in, I realize why the she-wolves who came before me would be eager to blame this feeling on something else. Sickness… a too hot temperature setting…a weird moon…because I too was desperate for this sudden fever to be anything—and I do mean anything but what it obviously was.
Heat.
I’m in heat.
But no…no…I can’t be. The denial instinct swoops back in, along with a desperate reason why this can’t be what it feels like. I get my heat control shot on the regular. Never missed an appointment at either the Michigan or North Dakota clinics. It has to be something else. Maybe this time, it really is some exotic sickness I’ve never heard of—
As if to confirm that I am currently living my worst nightmare, viscous liquid releases between my legs and a new, unfathomable smell reaches my nose. Sweet and filthy at the same time, and so, so, wrong. I recognize the scent immediately even though I’ve only ever heard tale of it. But I’m still surprised when it unleashes a powerful lust inside of me.