Chapter 40 Beth
Beth
The nest is warm, wrecked and perfect.
Blanket walls are half-collapsed on one side where someone rolled into them, and the air is so thick with layered scent that breathing feels like drinking an aphrodisiac.
Mason is behind me, one arm heavy across my waist, his breath slow and even against the back of my neck.
Knox is on my other side, face half-buried in a pillow, one hand loosely curled around my wrist. Arthur is at my feet, lying on his stomach with his cheek against the wool blanket and one hand resting on my ankle.
They're asleep. All three of them.
And I am lucid.
Not the desperate, drowning lucidity of someone surfacing between waves. This is different. This is a clearing. The heat is still there but my mind is mine. My thoughts are in order. I know my name and what day it is and who won the last season of Hell's Kitchen.
I also know exactly what I want.
I've known since before the heat. Maybe since that night back at the clearing.
I've known.
My hand finds Mason's arm. I squeeze, gently.
He wakes up like someone flipping a switch. Alert, scanning, his arm tightening around me before his brain catches up with his body.
"Beth?" His voice is rough with sleep. "You okay? Heat coming back?"
"I'm okay. I'm lucid." I turn in his arms so I can see his face. "Really lucid."
I reach across me and touches Knox's shoulder. Knox wakes up faster than a person should, eyes sharp and focused in under a second.
"What's wrong?" Knox says.
"Nothing's wrong," I say. "I need to talk to all of you."
Arthur stirs at the foot of the nest. He lifts his head, blinks twice, and his gaze finds mine with eyes so warm my pulse stutters.
"I'm here," he says.
They rearrange. Sitting up, facing me, three sets of eyes in the dim. Mason's hand finds my knee. Knox's fingers are still loosely circling my wrist. Arthur leans against the remaining blanket wall.
"I want to be claimed," I say.
The words land in the nest like a stone in a still pond. Nobody breathes.
"All three of you." My voice doesn't waver. I've been rehearsing this sentence in my head since before I knew I was rehearsing it. "Bonding bites. I want it."
Mason's hand tightens on my knee.
Knox goes very still.
Arthur's expression doesn't change, but something shifts behind his eyes.
"Beth," Knox says carefully. "You're in heat."
"I know I'm in heat. I'm also lucid. Test me."
Knox's brow furrows. "Test you how?"
"Ask me something. Anything. Quiz me. I'll prove I'm thinking clearly."
"That's not—" Knox starts.
"What's the interest rate on my business loan?
" I say. "Seven point two five percent variable.
The square footage of Wildflower and Vine?
Twelve hundred and forty, including the back office.
Arthur's middle name? James. Mason's birthday?
March ninth. Your coffee order? Black, no sugar, because you're an undiagnosed psychopath. "
Knox's mouth does the thing where it almost smiles but he won't let it.
"She's lucid," Arthur says quietly.
"I'm more than lucid." I sit up straighter.
The blanket falls to my waist and I don't fix it because I am having this conversation as an adult woman who just had sex with three men in a blanket fort and I have moved beyond modesty as a concept.
"This isn't the heat deciding. The heat decided a lot of things tonight and I'm not sorry about any of them, but this—this has been building since before any of that. "
I look at each of them.
"I know what a bonding bite means. I know it's permanent, irreversible and it ties our nervous systems together.
I know it means if one of us hurts, we all feel it.
I know it means I'll feel your emotions and you'll feel mine, which, honestly, seems like a bad deal for all of you because my emotional range on any given Tuesday goes from 'mildly feral' to 'crying at a cat food commercial,' but that's what I'm offering. "
Mason makes a sound that might be a laugh or might be something trying very hard not to be a sob.
"I also know we have things to talk about," I say, and I feel Knox tense beside me. "Hard things. Things that might be harder after a bond than before one. And I'm choosing this anyway. Because I don't want a bond that only exists when everything's easy. I want the kind that holds when it's not."
Silence.
Then Mason says, "Can I go first?"
Knox and Arthur both look at him.
"You don't have to negotiate an order," I say with a chuckle. "This isn't a deli counter."
"I know." He shifts closer. His hands find both of mine. "But I want to go first because I need to say something, and if I wait any longer I'm going to lose the ability to form words."
"Okay."
He looks down at our hands. Swallows. When he looks back up, his eyes are full in a way that makes my chest ache.
"I've spent my whole life being careful with my emotions," he says. "And I brought that into everything. Every relationship I've had, I held something in reserve. Insurance, in case it fell apart. So I'd still have something left."
His thumbs stroke across my knuckles.
"With you, there's nothing in reserve. I'm ready to give you all of it. You just—you walked into this apartment with your oolong tea and I was done. I was done and I didn't even know it yet."
My throat is closing.
"I don't have a safety net with you, Beth." His voice cracks on my name. "And for the first time in my life, I don't want one."
"Mason—"
"I'm going to claim you now," he says, "if that's okay."
"It's very okay," I whisper.
He leans in. His lips brush the curve where my neck meets my left shoulder. I feel his breath, warm and unsteady, and his hands cradle the back of my head.
"I love you," he says against my skin. So quiet I almost miss it. The first time any of them have said it.
His teeth sink in.
The pain is bright and immediate and it lasts exactly one second before it becomes something else entirely. Something snaps and Mason floods in.
Steady. That's the first thing I feel. A steadiness so deep it's geological, tectonic plates that have never shifted.
But underneath that there's a tremor. Constant, low-frequency, barely perceptible.
The fear of a man who has held himself together so carefully for so long that the prospect of letting go feels like freefall.
And he's falling. Right now. For me. The terror and the joy of it braided together so tightly they're indistinguishable.
I feel his love like a hand pressed flat against my sternum.
When he pulls back, there's a mark on my neck that burns like a brand, and his eyes are wet.
"Oh," I say. Because I can feel him. Not just his hands on me or his scent in the air. I feel his heartbeat in my own chest, his relief flooding my nervous system like warm water.
"Yeah," he says, voice thick. "Oh."
I touch the mark. It's tender, warm and mine.
Knox is watching us with an expression I've never seen on him before. His jaw is tight..
"Knox," I say. I reach for him.
He takes my hand. Holds it. Doesn't move.
"How can you want me to claim you when I caused you so much trouble?" he asks. And as I look at his face, I see something I've never seen there before.
He's terrified.
"You want to know what actually happened because of what you did?" I say. "The buyout expired. And I realized I didn't want to sell. I never wanted to sell. I was just scared, and scared looked a lot like practical from the inside."
A heavy muscle works along his jaw as he stares down at our hands.
"And as for Beaumont Patisserie?" I step a fraction closer, forcing him to look at me.
"You got my foot in the door, Knox. But I'm the one who's going to kick it wide open.
I emailed them myself from the side of the highway.
You didn't take my choices away, you just gave me the exact push I needed to finally start fighting for what's mine. "
"So, Knox," I murmur, pulling gently on his hand. "Come here."
"Beth, you don't have to—"
"I know I don't have to. I want to. That's what I've been saying this entire time. I want this. I want you."
His eyes close. Something in his expression fractures.
"I am choosing you," I say.
When he opens his eyes, they're bright and unguarded in a way I've never seen. He leans forward. His hand slides into my hair, cradling the back of my head, and his mouth finds the right side of my neck, mirroring Mason's mark, his lips warm against my pulse.
"I'm going to spend a very long time earning this," he murmurs.
Then his teeth break skin and the bond detonates.
Knox crashes into me like a wave hitting a seawall.
I feel his mind: sharp, fast, always running, always calculating three moves ahead.
I feel the architecture of his thoughts, clean lines and contingencies and escape routes mapped for every scenario.
But underneath all of it, underneath the control and the strategy and the five-year plans I always tease him about, there's a hollow.
A space shaped like loneliness.
The kind that comes from being surrounded by people and convinced that none of them would stay if they saw the scaffolding. The kind that builds walls and calls it efficiency.
And right now, flooding through that hollow space, filling every corner of it: me. My presence in his bond like light finding a dark room. I feel his shock at it. His disbelief.
I'm real, I think, even though I don't know if he can hear me yet. I'm staying.
When he pulls back, his forehead drops to mine and he doesn't say anything for a long time. His breath is ragged. Through the bond, I feel something I can only describe as a man putting down something he's been carrying for years.
"Beth," he says.
"I know."
"You can feel—"
"All of it."
He makes a sound. Not quite a laugh, not quite a sob. Somewhere in the territory between.
I turn my head, the two newly forged bonds inside my chest humming, actively aching for the final piece to snap into place. "Arthur," I breathe.
He has been quiet through all of it. Through his pack brothers' confessions and both bonds snapping into place. He's been sitting against the headboard with his arms resting on his knees, watching.
He unfolds slowly. Moves toward me. Settles in front of me, close enough that I can see the pulse in his throat.
"I don't have a confession," he says. "And I don't have a speech."
"That's okay too," I chuckle.
He smiles. "Tell me where."
I tilt my head back. Bare my throat. Right over the pulse, where the skin is thinnest and the mark will sit between the two already there.
"Here," I say. "Where everyone can see."
His hand curves around the back of my neck. His thumb strokes once along my jaw. He leans in, and his lips press against the spot first, soft, reverent, before his teeth find their place.
The bond opens like a door to a room with every light on.
Warmth. That's what hits me first. The warmth of a man who walks into a room and immediately checks if everyone's glass is full. Who remembers how you take your coffee and asks about the thing you mentioned in passing three weeks ago.
I move deeper and the warmth only thickens. I feel how much of he gives. The relentless, generous, inexhaustible outpouring of himself into everyone around him.
And underneath all of it, the fear that warmth is all he is. That charming and fun and good time are the ceiling, not the floor. That people love having him around only as long as he can entertain.
I feel it and my heart cracks open.
You are enough, I think fiercely into the bond, and his hands tremble against my neck.
When he pulls back, his eyes are wet. He's smiling and it's the most honest version of his face I've ever seen.
"Well," he says, voice rough. "That's a hell of a thing."
"Yeah," I whisper. "It is."
Three bonds. Three presences in my chest that weren't there before.
And underneath all three, a thread I didn't expect.
They're connected to each other too. Not just to me.
I can feel Mason's steadiness grounding Knox's spiraling thoughts, Arthur's warmth filling the spaces where Mason holds himself too tight, Knox's attention catching the things Arthur glosses over.
A web. Each of them the thing the others need.
A pack. And not just because they live together.
"Holy shit," I breathe.
"What?" Three voices. Three levels of concern.
"I can feel all of you. Like, all of you. At the same time. Mason, Arthur, you're hungry."
Mason blinks. "I— actually, yeah."
"What the hell," Arthur whispers.
"Knox, your left shoulder hurts."
Knox rotates it, startled. Then laughs.
"This is insane," I say. "This is—do you feel me too?"
Mason presses a hand to his own chest. "Yeah. You're—"
The purr answers before he can finish. It rises up from somewhere behind my ribs, low and steady and completely beyond my control.
Mason grins. Knox's mouth does the almost-smile. Arthur's eyes are soft in a way that makes me want to crawl back on top of him and stay there for a week.
"I love you," Mason says, steady. A man planting a flag in the ground.
Knox doesn't say it. He pulls my hand to his mouth and presses his lips to my knuckles, and through the bond I feel the words so loud they might as well be shouted from the roof.
"I love you, Beth," Arthur murmurs against my hair. Simple as breathing. Like it's a fact of the universe he's just confirming for the record.
"I love you," I say, and the bond carries it in three directions at once, so they don't just hear, they feel it.
Mason's arms tighten around me. Knox exhales something shaky against my knuckles. Arthur laughs softly and presses closer.
Meanwhile, I can't stop purring because for the first time in my life, my home is a heartbeat. Three of them. Beating in time with mine.