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He asked whether I needed anything, and when I told him I was perfectly capable of taking care of myself, he said, "I never suggested otherwise," and went out.

He came back a minute later with the horse blanket off the gelding, shaken out and beaten clean. He set it on the end of the bed without a word about it.

I put it in the nest after he’d gone outside again.

By afternoon I wasn’t well.

What I had expected from a heat was the thing the Crown's pamphlets described.

Mindless need.

What I got was considerably worse and far more humiliating. My skin hurt. The light through the shutters were too bright and the wool against my wrists was too rough and my own heartbeat was too loud. And underneath all of it ran a low pulling ache that had nothing to do with wanting and everything to do with being alone in a room.

Guy went out to see to the horse, and I lasted perhaps four minutes before the ache turned into something closer to panic.

When he came back I snapped at him for letting the fire go down, which was a lie. When he suggested I lie down for a while I turned on him properly.

"Don't manage me."

"I'm not."

"You are. You've been doing it all day, the blankets and the water and the careful voice. I’m not one of your villages, Bisbane, I don't need a relief order."

He didn’t rise to it. He didn’t use his size, or his voice, or the thing his designation would have let him do to an Omega two days off her heat with no suppressants in her. I was aware every second of exactly how much he was choosing not to.

"Would you like me to go outside?" he said.

"No." It came out of me too fast, and we both heard it. "Yes. I don't know."

"Then I'll be at the table, and you may tell me either way."

He sat at the table and mended a strap, and I sat in my pile of stolen wool and hated myself for twenty minutes, and then I said, "I'm sorry."

"There's no need."

"There is. You've been nothing but" I stopped and started again. "I am frightened, and I’ve been taking it out on the only person up here. It’s cowardly, and my grandmother would have had something to say about it."

He set the strap down.

"What are you frightened of?"

I nearly gave him something clever. I could feel the shape of it arriving, and I let it go past.

"I don't want to belong to anyone," I whispered.

He studied me for a moment. "Then don't."

I frowned. "You're an Alpha."

"An observation I was already aware of."

"You're supposed to want to claim me."

"I do."

My breath caught. He came as far as the end of the bed and stopped there, which was close enough that I could smell him and far enough that it was still mine to close.

"But wanting something does not give me the right to take it."