Page 39 of Shadowed

I don't drop picks. I've never dropped a pick. Not when coppers kicked down the door in Bridgemire, not when Marcus fell through a rotten floor in Blackmill and I had to finish the Chubb one-handed while holding his wrist with the other. My hands are the part that holds. My hands do not betray me.

My hands are shaking.

The shadow-ward hums against the archive door—nine tumblers, seven of them mapped, two remaining—and I cannot feel them anymore because my fingers have gone stupid with heat and my nipples have gone hard against my shirt and mythighs are clenching around nothing and every inch of my skin is prickling like I've been dipped in hot water and held there.

I know what this is.

I have watched it from outside. In the rookeries, heat was a thing that happened to other girls—the ones whose omega markers came in at thirteen, fourteen, the ones whose bodies announced themselves to every alpha within half a mile.

I watched Sarah Beckett go into heat at fifteen in the room above ours and I heard her through the walls for three days. The sounds she made were not sounds a person makes when they're in control of their own body.

I watched the Fae patrols take Maggie Oakes from her mother's arms on a Tuesday morning, heat-flushed and glassy-eyed and reaching for them, reaching for the males who were taking her, and her mother screaming and Maggie not screaming because Maggie's body had decided that the taking was what she wanted.

I swore. On my mother's grave, on Da's memory, on every lock I'd ever picked. I swore that would not be me.

My omega markers never came in. Twenty years old, no heat, no cycle, no pull. Safe. Dormant. The kind of omega who slips through the cracks because her blood never woke up.

My blood is awake now.

The heat rolls through me in a second wave, harder than the first, and I grip the edge of the archive shelf and my knuckles go white and my vision blurs. Between my legs I am—God, I am soaked. Not the slow treacherous wet of the training floor, not the reluctant slick that shows up when he's close and my body decides to be embarrassing about it.

This is a flood.

Slick pouring out of me as if a dam has broken, hot and thick, soaking through the seam of my trousers, and I can smell it—sweet, ripe, shameless, my heat broadcasting itself to everythingin this court with ears. Every shadow in this building is going to carry it straight to him.

My hips want to tilt. My spine wants to curve. Some deep animal part of me wants to drop to the floor, wants to put my hands and knees on the cold stone and lift and offer, and it takes everything I have to stay upright.

"No." I say it out loud. To the archive. To the lock. To my own traitorous cunt that is clenching around nothing and wanting something I refuse to name. "Absolutely not. Not happening. I am picking this lock and I am going to my room and this is not —"

Third wave.

My knees buckle. I catch myself on the shelf and a scroll tumbles to the floor and the archive breathes cold air over my skin and the cold makes it worse because the contrast is unbearable—cold stone, cold air, cold court, and me burning alive from the inside.

My pick is on the floor. I stare at it. Three inches of good steel, my oldest, the one I've had since I was ten. It sits there on the black stone and it does not care that my body has decided to dismantle itself.

"Right," I tell the pick. "Right. Fine."

I leave the pick. I can't bend down. Bending down would mean putting my head lower than my hips and some animal part of my brain is screaming that if I do that I will present and I am not presenting on an archive floor.

I am not presenting anywhere.

I am going to my room.

The corridors cooperate. The palace—the sentient, cheating, eavesdropping palace that has been watching me for a month—lays out the shortest route from archive to east wing. The shadow-lamps dim as I pass. I would be grateful if I could spare the attention for gratitude, but every scrap of it is on my legsbecause my legs want to stop and my hips want to drop and my body wants to sink to the floor and arch my back and —

Walk. Just walk.

By the time I reach the east wing my slick is running down the inside of my thigh. I'm panting. The cold air of the corridors isn't touching me anymore—my skin is too far gone, burning through whatever the court throws at it, and every breath I take carries the scent of stone and shadow and him and makes it worse.

My room. Door. I slam it shut and lock it—three locks, my own, installed over the first week because I trust my locks and I don't trust sentient architecture. Chubb, lever, and a sliding bolt I forged in the training room from scrap metal.

Three mechanisms between me and the corridor.

Three mechanisms between me and him.

I sit on the floor with my back against the door.

The stone is cool. The only cool thing left in the world. I press my spine against it and the relief lasts two seconds before the heat swallows it. I pull my knees up and wrap my arms around them and I shake.