Page 18 of Stream Heat (Omega Stream #1)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Jace

The audio spectrum on my monitor flatlined, dead as cold stone, and that’s when I knew something was seriously wrong.

I’d been deep in post production, chewing through the usual ASMR stuff for last night’s session.

Fine-tuning the keyboard sounds, fiddling with page turns, basically pumping out the digital bedtime stories insomniacs begged for.

Normal. Nothing out of place. Then Quinn’s audio feed bricked itself.

No fade, no digital hiccup like someone hit mute or had to bolt for a bathroom break.

Just absolute silence. The kind that means drop everything, something’s bad.

I peeled off my headphones, feeling the absence of their weight like a phantom limb.

The house was too quiet. Most people don’t pick up on things like that, but I make my living catching the spaces between sounds.

There should’ve been Quinn’s constant keyboard chatter through the wall.

There wasn’t. There was nothing but this electric tension, vibrating through the drywall, the sharp charge you only get when alpha pheromones start spiking.

Malik’s footsteps, deliberate, soft-padded, moving down the hall toward her wing.

I told myself to keep editing. Trust Malik to handle it. He’s supposed to be our emotional deadman’s switch, the only one on earth who could talk Reid down from a rut or convince Theo to sleep when he was spiraling out. If anyone could help an Omega melting down in withdrawal, it was Malik.

But then my sister's voice cut through my head, gravel-rough and raw as a throatful of salt. They don’t get it. How alone you are. How everything in you is clawing at the walls, begging to get out, but if you do, you’re just proving you’re exactly what they always said you were.

Couldn’t just sit there. I killed my editor and pulled up the house technical feeds.

Not to stalk, I’m not a creep, but because sometimes the data is the only way to know what’s actually going on.

Quinn’s streaming program said she’d thrown up her “tech difficulties” overlay twenty-three minutes ago.

PC was still running, lights flickering, but no inputs. No mouse, no keyboard. No Quinn.

That was wrong. Quinn would’ve been back in five, max, with a vicious meme about her own incompetence and a flawless headshot to rub it in.

There, a high noise barely audible from down the hall. Pain.

My chair shrieked against the floor as I got up.

Every protective instinct I’d spent twenty years hiding just broke surface, all teeth and adrenaline.

Why did it always have to be the Omegas who got left like this?

Couldn’t keep picking apart waveforms while someone was three doors away clawing through hell.

The hall felt twice as long as usual. Malik’s scent was everywhere, a wall of sandalwood and linen, spiked with the raw ozone snap of alpha nerves. Under that, tangled thin and sharp, was Quinn’s scent of honey gone acrid and burnt pepper.

I posted up outside her door, a few steps back, close enough to hear, not close enough to crowd them. Malik’s voice, low, careful, every word dialed to “comfort.” Quinn answering, voice cracked, all her barbs worn thin.

“Everything. Hurts... everywhere.”

It felt like a punch. I'd heard it before, from Emma, back when her crash nearly killed her. Military suppressants out of her system, body suddenly remembering everything it had been forced to forget. The years of denied heats, a chemical leash pulled tight until it snapped.

Emma had made it, barely. Only because I’d found her in time.

Quinn? She was making the same mistake. Same pride, same self-flagellation. Sure, support was dangerous. But alone, you die.

Malik stepped out twenty minutes later, moving like a bomb tech, every alpha instinct on edge. He started, then relaxed, seeing me there.

“How bad?” I kept my voice down. Quinn didn’t need an audience.

“Bad,” he said, running a hand through his hair. The cracks in his calm were obvious. “Breakthrough symptoms. Fever, pain, maybe pre-heat. She’s...” he stalled for a second. “She’s terrified, Jace. Of being seen as weak. Of us needing to see any of it.”

I nodded. Didn’t need to explain. I knew the drill.

“Call Dr. Patel?”

“She won’t have it,” Malik ground out. “Told me if I even mentioned medical help, I was out. She’d rather white-knuckle it than admit she’s exactly what the industry called Omegas.” His jaw was a livewire of anger. Or maybe hurt.

Fury burned up my chest, acid and sharp. I’d watched Emma damn near kill herself chasing that same impossible “tough enough” standard. Watched the system grind Omegas down to paste and spit them out convinced their suffering was some personal shame.

“She needs alpha support,” I said. Flat, not a question.

“I offered. She refused. Wouldn’t even let me stay.”

Of course. Quinn had built herself out of steel plate and sarcasm. Out of self-negation. Admitting she needed help from an alpha, even a safe one like Malik, that was nuclear. She’d torch herself first.

But she was on thin ice. I’d read everything there was to read after Emma. When withdrawal gets bad enough, the brain can seize, the body can spiral out. She wouldn’t risk pride for survival, but maybe I could game the system for her.

“I’ll monitor from my room,” I said. “Audio only. Not invasive. If you see anything weird, or every hour, check in. If she drops below baseline…”

“We override and call Patel,” Malik cut in. “Got it.”

He headed off, probably to keep Reid and Theo from busting down Quinn’s door with too much concern and even worse timing. I went back to my setup, brain already cataloging technical options.

My editing rig wasn’t just for fun; it was half the house’s control center, low-key. Security. Audio monitoring. Network health. Fifteen minutes and I’d built a listener that would ping me if distress spiked, but wouldn’t actually record. Quinn would hate that. I’d hate that.

The real problem was waiting. I tried to work, but the soft babble of ASMR editing felt wrong, off, pointless compared to the quiet hell in Quinn’s room. I shoved that aside and reopened my old research from Emma’s crash. Forums, case reports, the worst-case scenarios.

The science broke it down, military suppressants didn’t just numb Omegas, they rewrote them. Tearing off that chemical straightjacket? Months of agony. Sometimes years. Quinn had been on the stuff eight years. Eight years of telling her body “you’re nothing.” Now it was finally allowed to scream.

An alert chimed. Heart rate spike. Breathing uneven. She was awake, and it was getting worse.

I listened. Waited. What came next wasn’t noise. It was silence. The kind that means someone’s holding their own mouth shut to keep from asking for help.

Emma had made that choice, too. Had nearly died for it.

I wasn’t going to let Quinn die on her own sword, pride be damned. I just had to make it look like she chose help.

I dug a water bottle out of my mini-fridge, a protein bar from the drawer, and scribbled a note.

Your stream setup is monitoring heartbeat through your gaming chair sensors. Drink something. –J

Not strictly true, but it gave her an out. Made it about data, not pity.

I set the tray outside her door, knocked once, and ghosted back to my room.

A minute later the door cracked open and the tray disappeared. Silence again.

Twenty minutes, and the mic picked up plastic wrapper noise. Protein bar, finally. Small victories. I’d take them.

Next, I yanked up the stream calendar. Quinn would be out of commission for a while, which meant the rest of us needed to cover. I could shift my own content windows, maybe tweak the house schedule so she’d get more buffer time for recovery. Not that she’d thank me for it.

For now, I just watched. Listened. Waited for the crash.

Because you can only white-knuckle it so long before biology takes the wheel. I’d seen the point where Emma finally went from “I can do this” to “I need somebody to catch me.”

Quinn was going to hit that wall soon. The question was whether she’d let any of us catch her.

Another ping, harder this time. Movement, then nothing. Stillness. The bad kind.

I was in the hall before my brain finished putting the math together. Didn’t run. Didn’t need to.

Outside her room, and this time the breathing was shallow, irregular, the pattern I’d trained myself to notice.

“Quinn?” I called, soft as I could. “You okay?”

A pause then her paper-thin voice came as she replied, “Fine.”

She was lying. But at least she was conscious.

“Need anything? Water, meds, different room temp?”

“I’m fine, Jace.” Stronger. More bite, a little more like herself. “Just tired.”

She was never going to make admitting defeat easy. It was the one thing she still owned.

“Okay. I’ll be working. You know where to find me.”

Didn’t say the rest. I’d be on her audio feed, ready to act fast if she actually tanked.

As I walked back, I heard the tiniest sound from her room. Not pain. Something else.

Relief. She wanted someone close, even if she couldn't say it.

I settled back into my chair, opened the monitor. Her stats were all trending rough but not fatal. For now.

With no other way to calm myself and the protective instincts that demanded I run to Kara, I opened a blank message to Dr. Patel. Not a consult, Quinn would never forgive me if I did that, but this was more like an insurance policy.

I couched my question in information from the articles I’d read back when I was helping Emma and was theoretically just wondering how things had changed between then and now If an Omega was withdrawing from suppressants after military-grade dose.

Was the protocol still the same? How common were things like break through heats? And was there anything that could help?

Quinn would probably get worse. With stubborn people like her, it always did.

But we’d be here when she finally let go. All of us. Ready to catch her. I just hoped she’d finally let us.