Hours had passed since the door locked behind Alaric and the silence that followed had been complete and indifferent in the way that palace walls are indifferent. They absorbed everything and gave nothing back. Silas had spent the first hour mapping the room again with fresh eyes, checking every surface and every fixture.
He checked every possible weakness in the window frame with the methodical focus of someone who refused to accept that no exit existed simply because the obvious ones had been removed. He found nothing new. He sat with that for a while and then lay down on the floor with his forehead pressed against the cool stone.
He focused on keeping the world from spinning. The head injury from the fountain was still present underneath everything else, a dull persistent pressure that sharpened whenever he moved too fast or thought too hard. He had been managing it and ignoring it and working around it since he woke up in that silk bed.
He could keep doing that. What was happening to him now was something he could not manage or ignore or work around. He felt it start the way it always started, not suddenly but like a tide coming in.
A warmth with no external source spread outward from his core and settled into his skin, changing the quality of the air in the room. It shifted from something neutral into something pressing and specific. He recognized it immediately and the recognition made it worse.
Because recognition meant it was real. And real meant it was happening right now in a locked room inside a palace with no suppressants and no way out. His Heat had started weeks early.
It had been triggered by the fight and the pinning and the weight of Alaric's body and the full force of an Alpha's scent unleashed in a small room. There was no ventilation and nowhere for it to go except directly into him. His biology had already decided the Alpha had been dominant.
The response was not something his training or discipline had any authority over. The air thickened around him and he could smell himself now. That was always the clearest sign that it had fully started.
Dark chocolate and sea salt rose off his skin, rich and warm and completely beyond his control. It filled the room, broadcasting a signal he had spent years suppressing. His shirt was damp against his back and his breath came shorter than it should have been.
It was louder than he wanted it to be in the silence of the locked room. He pressed his fingers harder against the stone floor and tried to think past it. His mission came first.
The drive. Jax in the North Tower. His father across the border. The names on that drive and the people those names belonged to.
What would happen to them if the information surfaced too early. These were real things, concrete and important. Worth fighting through anything.
He lined them up in his mind one after another and held them there. His body dismantled them with complete disinterest. The ache started deep and spread outward.
It was not subtle and not something he could redirect. It had a shape. That shape had gray eyes, golden hair, and a grip that had locked around his wrists without effort.
A grip that had held him down on a mattress while the room filled with a scent his Omega biology had decided to respond to. He hated Alaric. That was simple and real.
He hated the palace and the locked door. The rope that had been shot away. His brother's voice cutting off in the dark.
He hated that his father had run and left him. He hated everything about how this had happened. All of it was real and present.
And underneath it his body asked one question with relentless persistence. Where is he. Silas tried to get up.
He tried to reach the bathroom where cold water might slow this down. His muscles refused. His legs gave him half the distance and then failed him completely.
He went down slowly and stayed there, his cheek against the stone and his fingers pressing into the rug. His breathing came in short, ragged pulls. The sound echoed in the empty room.
He was thirty years old and had survived things that destroyed others. He had sat across from men who broke stronger people and had given them nothing. He had been shaped into something that did not break.
Now he was being broken by biology. By a twenty-five-year-old Prince's pheromones. Even without Alaric in the room, his body held onto the memory.
It stored it like something valuable and turned it against him. If Alaric walked through that door right now, Silas would not reach for a weapon. He knew that.
And he hated it. He would reach for Alaric. That truth settled in him like something sharp.
The worst part was knowing Alaric probably expected this. Had planned for it. Had locked the door and walked away knowing exactly what would happen next.
Silas pressed his forehead back against the stone and closed his eyes. He held onto the mission, the names, and his brother's face with everything he had left. And listened to his body counting down the moment he would lose control.