am I going to do?" Aric said, mostly to himself.
"Not sure, brother," Zeke said sympathetically. "I've never heard of anything like it."
Samson abruptly got up from the stump he was sitting on, one of several he and Zeke had carried up to serve as temporary seating. "I might know someone who can help."
In moments, he returned with his beta mate.
"Hey," Cassidy said in her eternally cheery voice, souring Aric's mood further. "What's up?"
"I don't need her help," Aric grumbled, glaring across the room.
"Yes, you do," Samson assured him.
"She's a damned beta," Aric snapped, his temper getting the best of him. "If none of us can come up with an answer, what the hell is she going to know?"
The expression on Samson's face darkened. "She's my damned mate, so watch your mouth. She's compiled more research on life in the Boundarylands than anyone else. If you want answers, Aric, then you want her."
Fuck. Samson was right.
As much as Aric hated to admit it—and as much as he hated the thought of sharing his problems with a beta woman, of all people—Cassidy was the only scholar who had ever spent any real time with the alphas and omegas of the Boundarylands. She didn't just know everyone; she knew their histories, their stories, their backgrounds.
"What's going on?" she asked, staying close to Samson's side.
Aric listened miserably, embarrassed by both his rudeness and the awful revelation as Samson quickly explained the situation. Cassidy listened carefully, frowning with concentration.
"Well, I've never heard of another alpha losing his senses like that," she said when Samson finished, "but honestly, I'm not totally surprised it happened."
"Why?" Aric demanded, grateful that her tone betrayed no pity. Aric didn't think he could take that from anyone, least of all a beta.
"Jocelyn mentioned that you chased this John guy off halfway through her heat, but then stayed out of bed for the last two days."
"I couldn't go back with her while he was out there," Aric said defensively. "I needed to be alert. If he'd come back while I was rutting, I might have missed the signs again."
"Exactly," Cassidy said. "Some of your senses were dulled because of your body's natural focus on your omega. Now, her heat cycle takes four days, rain or shine. But your rut is different. It runs off of hormone levels. During a normal heat, you would deplete your hormone stores on the last day of her cycle. But if you stopped halfway through—"
"He'd still have half a rut's worth of hormones left in his system," Zeke finished the thought, sounding impressed with her conclusion.
"And my guess is they're blocking out a lot of other sensory input," she said.
"So, what can he do to fix it?" Samson asked.
Cassidy's gaze fell to the floor, a pink blush creeping over her cheeks. Aric was reminded that she wasn't just some doctor despite her clinical tone—she was a woman, and an alpha's mate. "Um…do I really have to say it?"
Samson laughed and threw his arm around his mate as if to physically shield her from her embarrassment. "What you're saying is that the only way for Aric to get better is to go back to screwing his omega for two straight days."
"Yeah," Cassidy said. "That's my best guess, anyway."
"Well," Zeke said with a rare smile of amusement, "it could be a lot worse."
That was certainly true. Aric gave Cassidy a nod of respect. He might be on edge, but he still felt like an ass for how he'd treated her. The woman knew her stuff.
"Thank you," he said gruffly.
"My pleasure," Cassidy replied. "And I promise that we'll get out of your hair just as soon as you all take care of your little pest problem."
They couldn't leave soon enough, Aric thought. Because even if Cassidy had reached the wrong conclusion, the idea of working out all his frustration in bed with his mate for two days straight sounded too damn good to resist.
"So, you're saying this happens all the time?" Jocelyn asked with a shudder.
"Okay, maybe not all the time," Darcy conceded. "But more often than you'd think. Definitely more than back in the beta world. For some reason, trouble seems to find its way here."
Jocelyn pressed her lips together, eyes on the bullet-ridden front door. All three alphas had left moments before to take down a trained killer, a man who had ended the lives of countless souls.
And for some baffling reason, the women in her living room were acting like this was no big deal, like it