The last suppressant wore off at midnight.
Isadora knew the exact moment because her body told her, not gradually, not with the slow creeping warmth of the previous days, but all at once, like a door blown open by wind that had been building pressure on the other side for too long.
One moment, she was lying in the dark trying to sleep.
The next moment, sleep was not a concept that applied to her situation anymore.
She sat up.
The room was warm.
Too warm.
She had banked the fire low before bed and it had burned down to almost nothing and the room was still too warm because the warmth was not coming from the fireplace.
It was coming from her.
Her skin felt tight.
Her blood felt like it was moving faster than it should, like something had turned a dial inside her that she did not have access to from the outside.
She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead the way she had done four nights ago when this was still manageable.
It was not manageable anymore.
“Esther,” she said.
Esther was awake.
Of course Esther was awake, she had been sleeping in the adjoining room with the door open for the past three nights in anticipation of exactly this.
She appeared in the doorway within seconds, already dressed, already holding the small clay pot of the cooling salve the physician had prepared.
She took one look at Isadora and set the pot down on the nightstand and sat on the edge of the bed and said nothing for a moment.
“How bad,” she said.
“It just started.” Isadora pressed her palms flat against the mattress.
The sheets felt too much, too textured, too present against her skin, everything heightened to a degree that was deeply inconvenient.
“The suppressant ran out.”
“I know. I counted.” Esther looked at her with the steady, careful look she had for moments that required steadiness and care.
“Isadora. We talked about this. Your body needs—”
“I know what my body needs.” She said it more sharply than she intended.
Felt the sharpness and set it aside.
“I know. I am…. working up to it.”
“The longer you wait…..”
“I know, Esther.” She closed her eyes.
Breathed.
The air tasted different than it had an hour ago, she could smell the palace around her, the stone and the candle wax and the roses from the garden, and underneath all of it, faint and distant but absolutely present, his scent from somewhere on the other side of the building.
Her alpha.
Her scent match.
Her body knew exactly where he was and was making its preferences on the subject extremely clear.
She had known this was coming.
She had had days to prepare for this.
She had been as rational and considered and deliberate about this as it was possible to be.
It turned out that rational and considered and deliberate were daytime qualities and this was midnight and the heat did not care about her daytime qualities at all.
“Send for him,” she said.
✦ ✦ ✦
She had ten minutes while Esther went.
She used them to change out of her sleeping clothes into something that was not her sleeping clothes, which felt like a reasonable thing to do, and to sit on the edge of the bed and have a very direct conversation with herself about what was about to happen and how she was going to conduct herself.
The conversation went approximately as follows.
She was about to share her heat with a man she had known for five days.
This was not ideal in terms of timing.
It was, however, not negotiable in terms of biology, and she had always respected biology as something that operated on its own schedule regardless of her preferences, which were many and specific.
She was going to maintain her dignity.
She was going to be, she stopped at that point because the heat chose that moment to send a wave of warmth through her that started at the base of her spine and moved upward and her dignity took a brief leave of absence.
She gripped the edge of the bed.
The scent of him was getting stronger.
He was closer.
Esther had found him quickly which meant he had not been sleeping either, which meant he had been awake on his side of the palace waiting, and she did not have the capacity right now to feel whatever that information wanted her to feel so she set it aside.
The door opened.
He came in.
✦ ✦ ✦
He stopped just inside the door.
She could see him taking in the room, the low fire, the candle on the nightstand, her sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands gripping the mattress and her composure held together by what was, at this point, pure stubbornness.
He was still dressed.
He had clearly not been sleeping.
His grey hair was slightly undone from whatever it had been in at dinner, and his eyes found her immediately and stayed.
The scent of him hit her fully now that he was in the room and her body made a sound of pure relief that she was extremely grateful had stayed inside.
“Isadora,” he said.
“I am going to say something,” she said, “and I need you to let me finish before you respond.”
He stayed where he was.
Waiting.
“I have never done this before,” she said.
“Any of it. The heat, the, sharing it. Any of it.” She looked at him directly because she was not going to look away from something just because it was difficult.
“I am telling you that not because I need you to be gentle with me. I am telling you because I do not know exactly what I am going to be like and I want you to know that whatever happens in this room tonight is, not the version of me that I am in daylight. And I would like you to know the difference.”
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he crossed the room.
He did not rush it.
He crossed the distance between the door and the bed with the same unhurried quality he brought to everything, and he stopped in front of her and looked down at her and said, “I know the difference.”
She looked up at him.
“I’ve known the difference since the balcony,” he said.
Something broke open in her chest.
She reached up and took the front of his shirt in her hands and pulled him down and kissed him and the heat rose to meet it like it had been waiting for exactly this, like her body had been building toward this specific moment since the night on the balcony when his scent had arrived through the cold air and her instincts had said, there.
That one.
Him.
He kissed her back with the same focused completeness he brought to everything, no hesitation, no tentativeness, just present and certain and entirely there, his hands coming up to her face and then into her hair and the pins scattering somewhere that was not her problem right now.
Her problem right now was that the heat was rising fast and her hands were shaking slightly and she was not accustomed to her hands shaking.
He pulled back just enough to look at her.
His eyes were dark, the blue of them almost entirely eclipsed, and his scent was thick in the room now and wrapping around her like something physical and her omega instincts were making extremely strong recommendations that she was about to follow.
“Still with me?” he said.
“Do not ask me that again,” she said, and pulled him back down.
✦ ✦ ✦
The heat was nothing like she had expected.
She had expected, she was not sure.
Something that felt like losing herself.
Something that felt like being taken over, overwritten, the careful architecture of who she was dismantled and replaced by something purely instinctual that she would not recognise in the morning.
It was not like that.
It was more like, being herself, but without the distance she usually kept between herself and everything.
Without the glass.
Without the performance layer and the management layer and the layer that was always assessing and cataloguing and maintaining control.
All of those things were still there but they had been set aside, temporarily, by something that had decided they were not necessary right now.
What was necessary right now was him.
His hands on her skin were warm, warmer than they should have been, or perhaps she was the warm one, she could not tell anymore where the heat was coming from because it was coming from everywhere at once.
She had stopped thinking in anything that resembled organised language.
There was only sensation and scent and the specific gravity of him and the way he said her name when she made a sound she had not planned to make, low and certain, like her name in his mouth was something he had been carrying for a while and was finally allowed to say out loud.
She said his name back.
She said it more than once.
She said it in ways that would have been embarrassing in daylight and were not embarrassing now because the heat had taken embarrassment and put it somewhere she could not currently access.
He was patient with her in the way she had not known she needed, not slow, not withholding, just attentive in the specific way of someone who was paying full attention and adjusting accordingly.
She had not known that was a thing.
She had not known that being paid full attention felt like this.
She made another sound she had not planned and he responded to it and she stopped planning sounds altogether.
The heat peaked sometime in the hours after midnight.
She was aware, distantly, of time passing.
Of the candle burning lower.
Of the fire going out entirely and neither of them noticing or caring because warmth was not a problem they currently had.
Of his voice, low in the dark, saying things that were not sentences but were communication.
Of her own voice answering.
At one point she said, with what remained of her daylight self surfacing briefly through the fever, “I did not know it was going to be like this.”
He was quiet for a moment.
Then, against her hair: “Neither did I.”
She believed him.
He did not say things he did not mean.
She pulled him closer and the daylight self went back under and the heat took over again and that was fine.
That was completely fine.
The daylight self could have its opinions in the morning.
✦ ✦ ✦
The heat did not break until near dawn.
She felt it go, gradually this time, unlike the way it had arrived.
The fever cooling degree by degree, the urgency receding, the world coming back into focus the way a room came into focus when your eyes adjusted to the light.
The scent of him around her was softer now.
Still present, still, hers, some part of her noted with a possessiveness she was not going to examine right now, but quieter.
She was lying on her side facing the window.
The sky beyond the glass was the deep blue of the hour before sunrise, the last of the night before the day decided to start.
The room was dark and quiet.
He was behind her.
She could feel the warmth of him, the slow steady rhythm of his breathing.
He was asleep.
She did not know when that had happened.
She lay still and looked at the window and let herself feel, for a moment, the full weight of what the last several hours had been.
She felt, not what she had expected to feel.
She had expected discomfort.
The particular vulnerability hangover of having been that open with someone, that unguarded, that out of control.
She had expected to want distance.
She did not want distance.
She lay in the dark and listened to him breathe and felt, underneath everything, something that was quiet and warm and completely without name and she decided, because it was not yet dawn and the daylight self was still only partially online, to simply let it be there without doing anything about it.
She closed her eyes.
She did not sleep.
But she let herself rest.
That was enough for now.