The Mark Of Mine (Blood & Omega #3)

Chapter 1

Heat. The heat is spiking and it’s all consuming.

Atlas's arms.

Bane's palm on my mouth.

Zero in the doorway.

The front door is open downstairs.

"Boys? Max? We're back!"

Margot's voice. Warm, tired, a little loose—the tone she uses when she's had one glass of wine and the sunset was good and Richard is still holding her waist. Normal.

Domestic. One floor below me, on the other side of a hallway and a flight of stairs and a door that probably doesn't lock properly after Zero all but broke it down.

And I am up here in biology that's screaming so loud I can feel it in my teeth.

Bane's hand tightens over my mouth.

"Shh."

I can't. I can't shh. My spine is arched against Atlas's chest and his arm is a band across my stomach holding me up because my legs won't and there's slick soaking through my shorts and I can smell myself, I can smell exactly what this is, and Margot is fifty feet away and I'm a—

"Look at me."

Zero. Low, steady, cutting through the roar. Not a touch. Not coming closer. Just the voice, finding me through the fog.

I look at him.

He's leaning one shoulder against the doorframe.

All black. Hair still damp from the pool earlier.

His jaw is set in the specific way I've learned to read—the way that means he's already decided something and the rest of us are catching up.

His pupils are blown wide. His scent is thick in the small bathroom, stacked on top of Atlas's and Bane's, and my body reads all three of them as a pack arranging itself around me and the relief is obscene.

Every nerve in my back is pressed into Atlas's sternum and every breath I take has Bane's palm against my lips and Zero's gunpowder in the middle of it, and it should not be this—it should not be a comfort.

It shouldn't. And it is.

"I'm going down," Zero says. "Give me ten minutes."

Atlas's arm tightens across my stomach. I feel him want to argue before I hear it.

"Zero—"

"Trust me."

Two words.

The Zero who would have fought that thirty seconds ago isn't here right now. This one is looking at me instead of at his brother, at the way I'm shaking against Atlas's chest, at Bane's hand clamped over a sound I can't hold in. He's taking stock.

"She already thinks something's wrong." Bane. Quiet. His face pressed to my temple. "She saw him at dinner. If Max isn't there to say goodnight and none of us goes down, she comes up."

"I know." Zero. Flat. "That's why I go. I look the least fucked up. You two are wrecked. I grab her at the landing before she gets any ideas about checking on him."

Atlas does the still thing he does when he's running probabilities. I feel it in his body. The quick rebalance. The math.

"She reads you," Atlas says to Zero as I nod against Bane’s lips on my temple. "You can't be short with her."

"I won't be."

"If she asks about Max—"

"He went up with a migraine. He's asleep. I'll check on him in an hour if it makes her feel better, and then I'll lie about that too." His eyes are still on me. "I've got this."

Atlas exhales.

"Okay."

Zero doesn't move yet. His eyes have stayed on mine through the whole exchange, and now, just for a second, the Zero who said you belong to me in a dark hotel room surfaces underneath the operator. The part that costs him. The part he banks and holds anyway.

"Hey," he says. To me. Specifically. "You don't have to think about her. Not tonight. That's my job."

I nod against Bane's palm.

He gives me one short, clipped nod back—the operator confirming receipt—and then he's gone.

The doorway is empty. I hear his feet on the hallway carpet—quieter than they have any right to be, for a man his size—and then on the stairs, and then Margot downstairs, brightening the way her voice always does when one of us comes into a room:

"Oh—Zero. We thought maybe you'd all gone to bed. Did you see the sky tonight? It was—"

I strain to hear, my eyes fluttering shut as another wave of heat clenches my insides.

Richard's voice further off, easier. The clink of keys into the bowl by the front door. Something about the radio on the drive home.

Zero, low. Not warm—he doesn't do warm. Steady. Present enough to pass.

"Yeah. Saw it from the porch. Max went up with a headache half an hour ago. I was going to come find him in a bit."

"Oh no—is he okay?"

"He's fine. Said he was going to sleep it off. Probably dehydrated. Margot, come into the kitchen—I want to ask you about that wine Richard's been hoarding."

Redirect. Clean. He walks her past the foot of the stairs without stopping. I hear Margot's laugh—a small one, tired, the oh you laugh—and then their voices moving, fading into the kitchen, and some last guarded part of my chest unclenches.

He's handling it.

Just like he said.

Thank fuck.

Bane's palm eases off my mouth by degrees. Slow, careful, waiting to see if I'll stay quiet. The cool air hits my lips and my jaw trembles and I press my face into his neck and breathe. Amber. Sandalwood. Him. My hands are fisted so tight in the front of his shirt that I don't remember doing it.

"Breathe," Atlas murmurs against my hair.

I breathe.

Another wave hits and my knees buckle and Atlas catches me the way he's caught me before—the kitchen, the facility, every time I've tried to fall.

His arm under my arm. His chest a wall behind my back.

His cedar is everywhere and his hand spreads flat on my belly and I can feel his pulse through his shirt against my spine and it grounds me, it does, but my body is still burning and the burn is climbing and I make a sound into Bane's throat that I don't recognize.

"Bed," Atlas says.

Bane doesn't answer. Just moves. One arm under my knees, the other at my back, lifting me off my feet like I weigh nothing and pulling me from his brother’s hold.

I try to object—I can walk, I'm twenty years old, I don't need to be carried—but the protest dies somewhere between thought and mouth and I let my head fall into the crook of his neck instead.

My cock is so hard I think I’m going to die if I don’t touch it.

I don’t dare as we step out into the hallway.

Atlas goes ahead. Opens the door to the bedroom—my bedroom in this house, the one at the end of the hall with the wide windows and the cream sheets Margot said looked good against the dark wood.

He flips the lock before Bane even gets me through the door, and the soft click of it—the illusion of privacy, the sealed room—lets my body release a fraction.

Just a fraction. Enough that my teeth stop chattering.

The sheets are cool when Bane lays me down.

My skin feels like fever and copper. Atlas is already at the dresser, grabbing the water bottle Margot left there for me this morning, twisting the cap off as he turns.

Bane kneels by the edge of the bed and finds my face again with both hands, thumbs stroking across my cheekbones, grounding me.

"I'm here," he says.

"I know."

"Downstairs is handled." His thumb presses the hinge of my jaw. "Zero is a terror at a lot of things. He's also very, very good at lying."

The laugh that comes out of me is ugly and wet and it breaks into something else halfway through, and Bane catches my face tighter and holds on until I find the end of it.

Atlas is back beside me. He works my hoodie up over my head with one hand at my nape, gentle, careful of the angles.

Pulls my t-shirt off after it. I am bare to the waist, sweating, shaking.

He drags the t-shirt across the mouth of the water bottle until the cotton is soaked through, water running down his wrist, and then he wrings it out once over the empty floor and presses the cold wet bundle to the back of my neck.

It breaks something. I don't know what. Some last piece of the bracing I've been doing since I ran upstairs to be alone, since I sat down at that dinner table with my mother's hand on my arm, since I stepped into this house two days ago.

"Max." Atlas's voice beside me. Low. Final. "We've got you."

That's all. No plan, no walk-through, no list of what's about to happen. The room knows.

My body knows.

He knows.

Another wave hits and the sound that comes out of me isn't a word. It's animal—high and broken and please without the word for please—and the room moves before I finish making it.

Bane's shirt comes over his head one-handed.

Tossed into the dark somewhere I don't see.

He's already pulling his belt open with the other hand as he comes back down to my mouth, and at the foot of the bed Atlas's hands are at the waistband of my shorts, peeling them down my thighs in one rough drag.

The slick has soaked all the way through, a bit of it dripping down my legs.

The cold air on me is shock and relief at once.

I kick the shorts the rest of the way off myself.

"Easy, baby." Bane's voice at my mouth. "Easy. We've got you."

I shake my head. I don't want easy. I want him inside me, I want the burning to stop, I want—

Bane kisses me.

Deep. Open. His tongue dark and warm and slow against mine, and one hand cupping the side of my jaw like a man cradling something he's afraid to drop, and the kiss is not slow because he is slow—I can feel him shaking against my mouth, I can feel the leashed thing in him about to slip its collar—the kiss is slow because he is choosing it, choosing me, choosing the pace I need over the one his body is screaming for.

"There you go," he murmurs. Against my lips. "There you go. Listen to me. This is our time, Max. There's nowhere we have to be. We can go fast. We can go slow. We can do whatever your body needs us to do. Hear me?"

I nod against his palm. My hands are in his hair, fisted, pulling.

"Eyes up here. With me."