Page 22 of Omega’s Fealty

And he is pretty. Even like this, with his hair plastered to his head with sweat and his eyes all glassy, and with the smell of sweat and puke, he is still the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen.

I am so screwed.

I hold him while he does it. I don’t decide to. My arm goes around his shoulders and my other hand gets his hair back off his face and I hold on, and he is so thin under my hands, a bird of a thing, and he is burning.

“Okay,” I say, to both of us. “Okay.”

I know heats. Dehydration is a risk. To be blunt, there are a lot of fluids involved. Sweat and slick to start with, but then there’s also the actual heat of it. Then the way the body just burns energy.

Omegas need to be hydrated even before the heat starts and I know what happens to one that goes into heat already dried out. They end up in a hospital with a line in their arm.

He’s about to go into heat and he has been throwing up.

There can be no hospital for him. There is me and a case of water.

So that is the job now. I grab a bottle of water, twisting off the cap and lifting it to his lips which are already cracked.

He drinks a little then grabs for it, trying to gulp it down but I pull it back. “Sips. You take it all at once, it comes straight back up and we start again. Sips.”

He glares at me over the jacket collar. Even now. Even like this. It’s the most alive thing on his face, then he stares at me blearily, then sinks back onto his back and closes his eyes.

I stare at him, thinking. The pallet and blankets that they have left for him aren’t enough. Not close.

He’s not going anywhere. Not like this. I leave the door open as I sprint back to my own bed, grabbing my blankets and pillow and pulling the thin mattress that barely covers the cot. It will have to do.

He’s still there when I get back down and I’m not sure if he even noticed that I left.

I make a bed as comfortable as I can get one for this kind of cage, then I get him up off the floor and onto it, tucking him in as best I can. He immediately kicks the blankets off.

Fine. His skin is still blisteringly hot. He needs to cool down.

I take the time between sips of water to clean out his cage, both the bucket and where he has thrown up. It doesn’t take long, but it’s better. He’ll heal faster in a clean room that doesn’t stink. I just wish I had something to warm the freezing air.

I’m not sure if that is helping or hindering the fever. He is still shaking so hard that it’s a wonder that the boat isn’t rocking.

Instinctively, my alpha knows what to do, even as the logical part of my brain says don’t start this.

I take off my canvas jacket and fold it, then tuck it against his pillow. He turns his face into the collar and breathes and some of the shaking stops.

By the time the light in the vent goes gray he has kept down a third of a bottle and he is not being sick anymore, only shaking, and the sour edge has gone out of his scent.

What is left is fever and sweat and, so faint I have to lean in to find it, the sweetness. The sweetness has gone way down.

The tablets worked, then. In their way.

I stopped his heat by poisoning him.

I watch him breathing into my jacket and I feel like something scraped off a boot. I did this. This was my fault.

When the sun is properly up I go and get what I need. I don’t bother locking the door. The pretty prince is going nowhere.

And if he did, his route out would be right past me in the galley where I am heating up water.

It takes me three trips to heat up enough and bring it down in a basin along with a rag, a block of soap and a towel that is more or less clean.

And I bring my duffel bag.

He is filthy. There’s no polite way to say it. He has been in that box for going on three days without a change of clothes and he has been sick down himself.