Page 50 of Omega's Formula

He nods once, jerkily, and moves toward the bedroom. At the door he pauses, looking back at me with those dark, desperate eyes.

“Thank you,” he says. “For not—”

“Go, Nolan.”

He goes. The door closes behind him.

I stand alone in the kitchen, surrounded by the wreckage of dinner and the lingering sweetness of his scent, and try to remember how to breathe.

The compliance ping comes at 9:23.

I knock on the bedroom door, keep my eyes averted when he opens it. We take the photo quickly, efficiently, not touching. He’s worse than before—skin damp with sweat, scent so thick I can taste it—but he manages to hold himself together long enough to get the verification done.

“Goodnight,” he says when it’s over.

“Goodnight.”

The door closes. I lie down on the couch and stare at the ceiling, listening to him move around the bedroom, listening to the small sounds that filter through the wall.

I don’t sleep.

I can’t sleep. Not with his scent wrapped around me, not with the knowledge of what’s happening on the other side of that door. Every instinct I have is clawing at me, demanding that I go to him, that I take care of him the way an alpha is supposed to take care of an omega in heat.

But he asked me to stay away. So I will.

Even if it kills me.

The night stretches on, endless and excruciating. I lie in the dark and listen to Nolan’s restless movements, his occasional soft sounds of distress, and I think about the woods. About the kiss. About the way he looked at me like I was the answer to a question he didn’t want to ask.

Two weeks of cohabitation. Two weeks of forced proximity. And now this.

Somewhere around 3am, the sounds from the bedroom change. Become more urgent. More desperate.

I press my palms against my eyes and try to think about anything else.

It doesn’t work.

13. Nolan

The heat is a wildfire under my skin and I’m burning alive.

I’ve had heats before. Plenty of them. I know how this works—the fever, the need, the desperate aching emptiness that demands to be filled. I’ve always managed them alone, locked in my room with toys and cold showers and sheer stubborn willpower.

This is different.

This is Erik’s scent seeping under the door, wrapping around me, making everything worse. This is my body recognizing its match and screaming for him with every cell, every nerve, every breath. This is want so intense it’s become pain, throbbing between my legs, pooling hot and slick where I need him most.

I’ve been fighting it for hours. I’ve tried the cold shower. It helped for maybe ten minutes before the heat surged back worse than before. I’ve tried to sleep—impossible, my skin too sensitive, every brush of the sheets sending sparks through my nerve endings. I’ve tried to take care of it myself but my own hand felt wrong, inadequate, my body rejecting anything that wasn’thim.

Through the wall, I can hear Erik moving. He’s awake and restless.

He’s suffering too. I can smell it: his arousal bleeding through the door, mixing with my heat-scent until the air is thick with wanting. He’s out there, trying to trying to respect my wishes,and I’m in here falling apart. I don’t know Erik Nilsson, not really. Until the last few days, I would have said that he was one cold fish, but that’s not the whole of it. For Erik, it’s all about control, that much is clear. He needs to be in charge of everything. He takes great pride in only doing what he wants, when he wants it and of having control over his so-called baser urges.

I think if he gives in and comes in here when I told him no, it’ll destroy him in ways that the vengeful part of me loves the thought of.

But I said no. I told him to stay away.

Maybe I was an idiot.