Page 26 of Stream Heat (Omega Stream #1)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Ash

The basement was my sanctuary and it wasn't just for show.

Concrete walls, triple soundproofing, enough racks of technical equipment to run three esports teams and still have juice left for a NASA livestream.

Usually, the hum of the servers and the ozone tang of hot circuits settled me right down. Not today.

Not after what Quinn had just dropped on us.

Military-grade suppressants, three times the max. For eight fucking years.

I opened the spec sheet I’d been working on for Quinn’s rig. The numbers swam together, refusing to resolve into anything meaningful. My fingers twitched, the instinct to build, to patch, to tweak something until it behaved, gnawed at me. But this wasn’t a hardware problem.

I minimized the window and opened up a new browser tab. If I was going to help Quinn, I needed to know what we were actually up against. Research had always come easy; it was how I survived old problems when they came knocking.

Search: Omegablock XR-9 long-term effects.

Every result made my jaw clench tighter.

Veterans’ forums full of horror stories from blackout ops.

Medical journal case studies with enough rotating jargon to hide the worst of it: organ failure, chemical dependency, collapse of natural hormone patterns.

Internal pharma memos that read like an ethics committee's worst-case scenario, if you squinted.

Recommended dose? Three hundred milligrams, twice daily, for thirty days tops. Quinn had been swallowing down nine hundred milligrams, twice a day, for eight goddamn years.

I punched the numbers into a calculator. She’d taken enough of that shit to dose a full platoon for half a deployment. It wasn't just bad, or severe. By any logic, she shouldn't even be walking around right now.

“Son of a bitch.” I pushed back from my desk, heart pounding.

XR-9 was a chemical sledgehammer, not a maintenance med. It wasn’t about helping Quinn “manage her biology” so she could chase a dream. It was about obliterating anything Omega, erasing her from the inside out. The career was just the excuse.

My phone buzzed and a message from Reid popped up.

Everything okay down there?

I ignored it and dived deeper. What would it take for Quinn to actually recover? Was pack bonding the only chance?

Search: Alpha pheromone therapy Omega suppressant withdrawal.

Almost nothing, but what there was painted a single clear picture. If Omegas had consistent alpha presence during withdrawal, recovery improved by sixty percent or more. Familiar scents, trusted sources.

Packs. Not randoms. Not one-night stands.

I leaned back, staring at the mess of data. This wasn’t a “maybe it'll work.” It was clinical reality. Pack bonding wasn’t optional. Not if Quinn wanted a life that wasn’t constant agony.

Phone again. Reid, this time calling.

“Yeah.”

“You’ve been down there for two hours,” he barked. “What are you working on?”

I glanced at the monitor, where my tabs looked like a pharmaceutical horror movie. “Trying to understand what we're dealing with.”

“And?”

“It’s worse than she said. The suppressants, they weren’t just strong. They were toxic by design.”

Silence from his end for a moment before he asked, “Meaning?”

“Meaning, obliteration. Not management, not flexibility, not support. Someone wanted her entire biology gone. Total.” I had to steady my voice, staring at Quinn’s rig schematics for something solid.

“And the pack bonding thing isn't a cute solution, Reid. If she doesn’t do that, her recovery is fucked.”

Another pause. He sounded almost hoarse. “You sure?”

“Medical journals don’t lie.” I highlighted one of the more brutal studies and read a line out loud. “Alpha pheromone exposure reduces symptoms up to sixty percent. Established packs? Even better.”

“But?”

I knew what he was asking. What about the complications? This was a mess. Real feelings, real consequences. Not just a business arrangement anymore.

“But she needs it. She’s already responding to us. Been there since day one. Her scent spikes when we’re in the room. She’s been unconsciously mixing our stuff into her own space.”

He let out a slow breath. “You noticed that too.”

Of course I did. I noticed everything. The way she’d hidden one of my battered hoodies under her desk, how she rotated the kitchen chairs so they always smelled vaguely like whichever one of us she was fighting with least. Or how her stress signals bottomed out when we all sat down together, even if the room was silent.

“The real question,” I said, staring at the screens, “is whether any of us are actually prepared for what that means.”

“You?”

I glanced through the new specs on my monitor. Upgraded air filtration for scent hypersensitivity. Light controls for temporary migraine spikes. Audio dampening for crash periods. I’d started to build accommodations for Quinn before any of us admitted to ourselves how bad it was.

“I’ve been prepping for it since she moved in,” I said. “Just didn’t want to admit it.”

Reid’s humorless huff told me more than words could. “Join the club.”

After he hung up, I just sat there, surrounded by evidence of exactly how far in I already was.

The upgrades, the research, the string of pre-scheduled supply orders for things I’d never bought for any other housemate.

And underneath it all, a quiet, fierce certainty, we’d already bonded to her. All of us.

Maybe it had been real since her first heat crash. Maybe since the day she moved in. Didn’t matter. The only question now was whether Quinn could let her guard down enough to accept it.

I opened a new document and started laying out a plan.

If Quinn was going to survive this, it needed to be more than “just” pack bonding.

She’d need constant monitoring, environmental control, accommodations built into the bones of the house, not just to take the edge off withdrawal, but to give her a shot at a normal life.

And it all had to be integrated so she never once felt like an invalid.

Twenty minutes later, I had it all listed out: air purification, smart lighting she could tweak from her phone, audio filtration system layered under her gaming setup, custom chair options for chronic pain. None of it screamed “hospital.” None of it did anything but make her life easier.

Placed the orders, paid for rush. If she decided to stay, no way she was suffering through subpar conditions. If she left…she’d still have one less thing to fight against.

Phone again. Jace this time.

“Heard you’ve been researching,” he said, not even bothering with hello.

“House grapevine's running hot, yeah.”

“Lot of nervous alphas upstairs.” He didn’t sound cheery about it. “What’d you find?”

I summarized the poison they’d pumped into Quinn, along with the odds, and how critical it was that we play this out as a unified pack. Jace just listened, sharp as ever, asking for details only when something didn’t add up.

“So it's not just about helping her through detox,” he said at last. “It’s about stepping up and being her primary medical team for the foreseeable.”

“Right.”

“And we can’t half-ass it. Months. Could be years.”

“Yeah.” My jaw was tight. “If she lets us.”

Jace went quiet. “You know what that means for the content arrangement? Contracts, whole ‘temporary housemate’ premise?”

“Pack bonding isn’t business,” I replied flatly. “We stopped being fake the instant we all started circling her without admitting it.”

He actually laughed, if you could call it that. “Makes sense.” Then he asked, “What are you building down there?”

I eyed the screens, now awash in product SKUs and prototype layouts. “Everything I can.”

“Good,” he said. “Reid’s stress-pacing. Theo’s making enough food for an army. Malik’s got incense burning in every room. Glad someone’s working the problem.”

After Jace hung up, I went all in. Every accommodation I could design, every mitigation for symptoms I might not have even seen yet.

If she got unpredictable heats, I’d wire up the rooms for discrete tracking.

If she was going hypersensitive, I’d make scent-neutral zones.

If she needed support, the house would physically mold to make it happen.

Three hours deep into drawing up a proprietary air-handling system, footsteps rattled on the stairs. Quinn, at the bottom, dwarfed by one of Reid’s hoodies, looking about ten years younger and five times more vulnerable than usual.

“Hey,” she said, hovering on the bottom step like a cat ready to bolt. “Sorry to interrupt. I just…needed somewhere quiet.”

“You’re not interrupting,” I said. Killed all the desktop windows so she wasn’t looking at her own private medical file. “How are you feeling?”

Shrug, half-miserable. “Like my body is trying to kill me for fun.”

“Withdrawal?”

“And everything else.” She inched closer, gaze skating over the wall of monitors and desktop builds. “What are you working on?”

Honesty seemed like the only card left. “Upgrades. Medical stuff. For you.”

Que the instant defensive posture. “I didn’t ask for–”

“No,” I cut in. “You don’t have to ask for basics. Not when you’re coming off a decade of chemical trauma.”

She blinked. Processing.

“The sensory spikes Dr. Levine mentioned? Light, sound, scent. They're technical issues with technical solutions.”

I showed her the plans, all of it. Light settings that auto-adapted for eye strain. Noise filters you could dial down with a finger flick. Air systems that could kill scent trails on demand.

She just stared. “You built all this today?”

“Already had the blueprints. Just tweaked for your specifics.”

Her attention drilled into the specs. “You know this costs a fortune.”

“Pack Wrecked LLC picks up the tab. It’s business. Consider it a workplace accommodation.”

Her lips twitched, half a smile. “Sure. Business.”

I closed the documents, turned the chair. “Can I ask you something?”

She nodded, wary.

“What do you want? Not what you’re supposed to want. Not what looks smart. What do you actually want?”

She curled up in the spare chair, voice so quiet that I almost missed it. “I want to stop hurting. I want my body back. I want to compete without worrying about collapsing on stream.”

“And the pack bonding?”

Her scent shifted, honey-amber smoothing out the spikes. “I want to stop running from what's right just because it terrifies me.”

There it was. The true answer. Naked and unadorned.

“For what it’s worth,” I said, and my voice came out a little rougher than I meant it to, “we’re not exactly fighting it either.”

She glanced up, startled. “What does that mean?”

“It means I redesigned the house for your comfort. It means Reid modulates his voice to help you calm down. Jace tracks your sleep by audio triggers, Theo paces his energy so it doesn’t overwhelm you, and Malik’s fine-tuning your entire diet by smell alone.

” I let it settle in. “We’ve been acting like a pack since you walked through the door, Quinn.

The only thing stopping us from making it official is the asking. ”

She was silent for a long time. Finally, she dropped the thing we all knew but didn’t want to talk about. “I’m scared of needing you.”

I didn’t push closer, just leaned in enough to offer what she needed if she decided to take it. “Needing isn’t weakness. Biology doesn’t know what pride is. Or logic, or strategy, or content calendars.”

She almost smiled, exhaling a half-laugh. “Dr. Levine said something like that. About adapting to survive.”

“Smart doctor.”

“Absolute bastard, but yeah.” She studied the upgrades. “Would this stuff help even if I…if we don’t…?”

“It helps regardless,” I promised. “Pack just makes it easier.”

She nodded. Slow, heavy. “I should let you get back to work.”

At the stairwell, I stopped her. “We’re here. Whatever you pick. Not going anywhere.”

She gave me a real smile, even if it was tiny. “Thanks, Ash. For…everything.”

After she left, my focus came back, sharper than before. I finalized the environmental systems, double-checked every medical accommodation, every comfort built into the infrastructure. Because whether or not Quinn chose the pack, she deserved to recover without the world fighting her every step.

And if she did choose us? I wanted to hit the ground running.

I added rush to every supply order. Made a new checklist, every item circled three times as I triple checked to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. If Quinn was going to heal, I was going to make damn sure nothing stood in her way.

That was pack. We solved problems. We adapted. We protected our own.

Even if our own was still deciding whether to call us hers.