Daddy Alpha, I’m In Heat

I'm going to hell.

Not the dramatic, metaphorical kind of hell that people reference when they eat an entire pizza at midnight or forget to text back for three days. No. I mean the specific, custom-built, werewolf hell reserved for girls who spend the hour before a luxury yacht trip completely losing their minds over their best friend's father.

I lie flat on my back across the hotel bed, staring at the ceiling with the kind of hollow, post-crisis calm that only arrives after you've fully surrendered your dignity. The Barcelona afternoon light presses through the curtains in warm gold strips. My suitcase is half-packed. My hair is still damp from the shower I took to reset myself, which clearly did not work.

Alistair Vance.

I say his name inside my head the way someone presses a bruise , deliberately, to feel the sting of it. Alistair. It lands like a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples don't stop.

I've been obsessed with him for almost a year. I know exactly when it started , last July, at Sophia's family estate in the countryside, standing at the edge of the pool in my bikini while he climbed out of the water like something carved from mythology. He didn't even look at me. He toweled off, exchanged a few words with Marcus, and walked back inside without a single glance in my direction. And yet I stood there, eighteen years old and completely leveled, staring at the space he'd occupied as though the air still held the shape of him.

Broad shoulders. Silver eyes that catch light like a predator's. The kind of jaw that belongs on a Roman coin. A voice so low and unhurried it feels like a hand pressed flat against your sternum. He commands a room without trying , without even wanting to. That's the Alpha in him. That bone-deep authority that other wolves orbit like satellites, pulled in by gravity they can't explain.

I can explain it.

It's because Alistair Vance is the most catastrophically attractive man I've ever encountered in my eighteen years of existence. And he is also my best friend's father, which means whatever I'm feeling has a one-way ticket straight to the underworld, no layovers.

I press a hand over my face and groan into my palm.

This is the part where a sensible person backs out. Sends Sophia a message , so sorry, caught something, rain check on the Mediterranean yacht trip, have fun without me , and spends the next two weeks rewatching television and eating cereal in her childhood bedroom until the fever breaks.

I am not a sensible person.

I roll off the bed and drag myself toward the mirror.

My reflection stares back at me , dark eyes, waves of brown hair still going every direction, the flush in my cheeks that hasn't fully faded. Eighteen. Omega. Technically still in the category of problems Alistair Vance would never, ever allow himself to have.

'He will never touch you,' I tell my reflection, with the firm energy of a lecture. 'You are his daughter's best friend. You are a child to him. You are essentially a piece of furniture in his life , a small, inconsequential armchair that he has never once thought about.'

My reflection looks unconvinced.

I turn away from her and go back to my suitcase.

I packed for this trip the way a general packs for a siege. Every piece of clothing was selected with a specific, entirely inappropriate agenda , wrap dresses that require no effort to slide off one shoulder, swimwear in colors that photograph well in sunlight, linen that drapes. I am aware that this is absurd. I packed all of it anyway, folding each item with a kind of manic precision, because the alternative , going on a week-long yacht trip with Alistair Vance aboard and not trying , felt even more impossible.

I practice the casual lean against the counter in the kitchenette. I practice the way I'll drop something and pick it up , unhurried, unbothered , if he happens to be nearby. I practice the half-smile that reads as composed rather than unraveling.

'You are a well-adjusted young woman,' I tell myself quietly, trying the smile. 'You are going on a vacation with your best friend. There will be scenic coastlines and good food and absolutely normal social interactions.'

The smile in the mirror looks deranged.

I snap the suitcase shut just as my phone erupts from the bed.

Sophia flashes across the screen, followed by approximately forty-seven emojis.

"You are still at the hotel?" Sophia's voice comes through warm and delighted and completely without mercy. "Chloe. The yacht leaves in ninety minutes."

"I know,"

"I'm standing on the deck. The deck is beautiful. There is a hot tub, Chlo, an actual hot tub, which Rose says is, and I quote, very good for,"

"Sophia."

",activities." She dissolves into laughter. "Okay, okay. Just get here. Grab a cab."

"I'll be there in twenty minutes," I say, wedging the phone between my shoulder and ear as I zip a last few things. "Is everyone already aboard?"

"Liam and I, Mason, Hailey, Zara, Julian , yeah, everyone's here." A pause. "Oh, and Dad arrived this morning. He's the only actual grown-up on board so you know, try not to be weird about it."

My hand stills on the suitcase zipper.

"Right," I say carefully. "Sure."

"Also!" Sophia continues, utterly unaware that she is dismantling me. "Rose did the room assignments , she put you up on the upper deck, double suite. Which is honestly the best room on the boat, I'm slightly offended she didn't give it to me, but anyway." Her voice brightens into something almost guilty. "Heads up , Dad's in the master suite up there too. So you'll be neighbors."

The zipper tears all the way off.

Silence.

"Chloe?"

"Sorry." My voice is perfectly steady. I have no idea how. "Bad signal for a second."

"Okay, but neighbors," she stage-whispers, laughing. "Try to keep it polished, yeah? He's, like, extremely particular about noise."

I set the phone down on the bed for a moment. Just for a moment. I press both hands flat against the duvet and breathe.

Neighbors.

We will share a floor. A corridor of maybe fifteen feet of yacht. The same thin wall between his room and mine, every night, for an entire week on the Mediterranean.

I pick the phone back up.

"I'll be there soon," I say. "Save me something to drink."

"Obviously. Hurry up."

She hangs up. I stand very still in the center of the hotel room with my broken suitcase and my wrecked composure and the particular silence of someone who has just had their worst idea confirmed as a genuine, real-world situation.

I turn back to the mirror.

The girl looking back at me has made a decision , I can see it settling into her expression like a key turning in a lock. She is not sensible. She is not reasonable. She is eighteen and completely out of her depth and she is getting on that yacht anyway.

I grab the suitcase handle with both hands.

"Don't say I didn't warn you," I tell her.

Then I walk out the door.