The heavy oak door opened and the draft of cool air that came with it felt like something the room had not deserved. Silas heard the creak of it from the floor where he was still lying with his cheek against the stone and his fingers pressed into the rug. Every part of him had been reduced to the singular consuming fact of what his body was doing to him without his permission.
He did not need to look up to know who had walked in. The scent arrived before the footsteps did. Cedarwood and something darker underneath it, expensive and specific and the exact thing his biology had been cataloguing and storing and using against him for the past several hours.
It hit the room and hit him at the same moment and the response was immediate and involuntary and humiliating in the precise way that things are humiliating when they happen in front of the person you least want to witness them. Silas pressed his jaw tight and did not make a sound. Alaric walked slowly.
His boots clicked against the marble in an unhurried rhythm that said he was in no danger and felt no urgency and had all the time available to him that this situation required. He crossed the room and stopped. Then he crouched down beside Silas and the proximity of him made everything significantly worse.
Silas's body registered it as relief while his mind registered it as a threat, and the conflict between those two responses was enough to make his hands shake slightly against the floor. Alaric did not touch him. He simply let his scent settle into the space between them.
It spread like something deliberate, thick and warm and pressing in from every direction, wrapping around the chocolate and sea salt already filling the room. The two of them layered into something Silas's Omega instincts read as complete. His rational mind read it as a cage.
"You look like you're in real pain," Alaric said. His voice had dropped into something lower than his usual register. Not soft, but satisfied in the specific way of someone watching a long calculation finally resolve.
His gray eyes had gone almost black, the pupils wide and dark and predatory in a way he was not attempting to conceal. "I could smell it from the corridor. Probably from further than that."
Silas said nothing. He was using everything available to him to maintain the silence. Every piece of training, every cold memory, every reason he had built up over hours on this floor.
He held onto who he was and what he was doing in this palace and what mattered past the immediate screaming fact of his Heat. "Help me," Silas said. The words came out before the decision to say them finished forming.
They scraped out of his throat like something that had forced its way through a door he had been holding shut with both hands. He felt them leave him and hated the sound of them. He hated that they were true.
He hated most of all that Alaric was right there to hear them land. He was the Ghost. He was a Vane.
He had said nothing in rooms designed specifically to make him say things and walked out of them with everything intact. He was being undone on a palace floor by his own body. There was nothing in his training that had prepared him for this kind of surrender.
Alaric reached out. His fingers touched Silas's cheek, cool against the heat of his skin. The contact sent something electric and immediate through every nerve Silas had.
A sound escaped him before he could stop it. Small and involuntary. Honest in a way he had not been since he climbed through the study window three nights ago.
Alaric leaned in close. His mouth came near Silas's ear and his voice dropped to something that existed only in the space between them. "I will help you," he said.
"I will give you everything your body is asking for right now. All of it." A pause that carried weight and intention. "But I need something first."
"The drive you took from my father's safe. Where did you put it before you fell."
Silas closed his eyes. The Heat pressed in from every direction with the force of something that had been building for hours. It had run completely out of patience.
His skin felt like it was being held too close to a flame with no external source. The ache at his core had long since passed the point of being manageable. It was now simply the loudest thing in the room.
He shook his head. Small. Slow. The last piece of something he was holding onto by the edge of his fingers.
"I cannot," he said. His voice came out rough and stripped. "I cannot tell you that."
Alaric was quiet for a moment. Then he began to straighten up. Rising from the crouch beside Silas with the unhurried ease of someone who had made a decision and was comfortable with it.
"Then stay here," he said. His voice had returned to something cooler and more even. The satisfaction was still there, but no longer the dominant note.
"I can smell exactly what this is doing to you. I know what an untreated Heat costs an Omega physically. You have perhaps four hours before your body stops asking and starts taking that cost out of you."
He stood fully. Looked down at Silas without cruelty but without softness. "Call for me when you change your mind."
"I will be close enough to hear it."
He turned toward the door. His scent moved with him. The loss of proximity hit Silas like something physical being pulled away.
His hand moved against the floor without him deciding to move it. His body already reaching toward the warmth that was walking away from him. He pressed his forehead back against the stone.
Four hours. He had four hours to hold onto the mission. The drive. The name Ghost.
Everything that name had cost him to earn. He had four hours to stay who he was. He was already not sure it was enough.