Page 2 of Alpha Heat

Vale raised his palm. “What’s done is done. Now all that’s left is to deal with what’s happened.”

“You’ll have an abortion, obviously,” Xan said, nodding firmly and casting an approving glance toward Urho.

He’d been there when Urho had performed the surgery on Jason’s pater that had saved the man’s life four years earlier. He also knew that Urho was the doctor responsible for performing an abortion on Vale when he was a young unmatched omega.

There was no doubt what should happen now. Given Vale’s physical scars from that first abortion, he couldn’t sustain a pregnancy, nor survive one himself. Everyone knew that. It was part of what had nearly cost Jason and Vale their contract despite theirErosgapébond. Jason’s parents had wanted him to take on a surrogate omega instead so that he might have a child, since Vale had no hope of giving him one.

“No,” Vale whispered. “That’s not going to happen this time.”

“Excuse me?” Yosef asked, his white eyebrows shooting to his hairline. “What are you saying, Vale?”

Rosen straightened where he sat, gripping Yosef’s hand until his knuckles went white. Xan wished he’d taken a seat when he first entered. He felt a little woozy where he stood with Vale’s denial echoing in his ears.

“Please,” Jason whispered. “Please reconsider.”

Vale shook his head. “Urho’s examined me and he thinks—”

“I don’t care what he thinks!” Jason exclaimed, coming around to kneel at Vale’s feet. “I only want you. I don’t need this from you. I don’t even want a ch—”

Vale put a hand over his mouth. “Shush, before you say something you’ll regret.”

Jason’s blue eyes went wet and he ducked his head, resting his forehead on Vale’s knee. He shuddered as Vale ran his fingers through his blond hair soothingly, and Xan felt the echo of Jason’s trembling in his own knees.

“I don’t understand,” Yosef said again. “Vale can’t survive pregnancy. We all know that.”

“Historically, that was true,” Urho said. “Before Jason.”

“So you’re saying things have changed?” Rosen murmured, lifting his chin, dark with late afternoon stubble flecked with some blue paint he hadn’t entirely scrubbed free. In all likelihood, he’d been pulled away from his oil painting by a phone call similar to the one Xan received.

Urho said, “For reasons that are best kept private, it does seem that there is a new elasticity to Vale’s scar tissue and passage that wasn’t there before. I have several theories as to why that is, but the fact remains that it is, unexpectedly, true.”

“I can’t carry to full term, most likely,” Vale said so calmly that Xan wanted to punch him. Jason scooted closer, burying his face further in Vale’s lap, his body shaking as Vale went on. “So Urho will induce the labor early and we’ll hope the child survives.”

“That’s sick,” Xan spat. “You can’t do that. Not to Jason.” He nodded at Jason where he was curled by his omega’s feet. “Look at him. Think of what losing you would do to him.”

Vale’s green eyes softened. “I think of almost nothing else.”

“Could have fooled me.”

Vale seemed to barely restrain a flare of temper, but he held it back. “It hasn’t been an easy decision, but I trust Urho. He wouldn’t put the odds on me surviving if he didn’t believe it with his whole heart.”

Jason lifted his head then, his face blotchy with tears and his mouth wobbly. “He doesn’t put odds on you surviving, he puts odds on youprobablynot dying, and that’s not at all the same thing.”

“Darling, you can’t ask me to give this up. Unplanned as it was, as terrified as we both are, this is our only hope. This one, beautiful mistake that we’d never, ever make again.”

“Don’t get poetic on me,” Jason whispered fiercely. “You’re willing to risk destroying yourself—us,me—for something that, according to Urho, is just a bundle of cells with a tiny little heartbeat.”

“But he’s ours,” Vale said dreamily. “Our bodies knit together to make a new life. How can we choose to end it?”

“You sound like Pater.”

“No, your pater admitted he had no hope of living through the birth. I plan to follow all of Urho’s prescriptions to the letter. I intend to live to see our child born, to hold him, and raise him into a fine young man. To see you reflected in him, and myself too. I won’t be giving up so easily.”

“So why are we here?” Yosef asked gently, his hands still twined with Rosen’s and his expression grave.

“Because we’ll need your support,” Vale said. “Jason, especially.”

“No, you, especially,” Jason whispered. “You must be cared for every moment of every day.”