Chapter 21 #3
“I’m tired,” she announces with the exaggerated solemnity of the thoroughly intoxicated. Her hair fans across my chest as she nuzzles against me, one hand lazily tracing patterns on my chest as her eyes drift closed.
I stroke her back, feeling her heartbeat gradually slow against mine. I should carry her to Logan’s room. He’ll be returning from his bloody spectacle soon, and finding her here, smelling of me and my spend, will send him into a rage that might endanger us both.
But I can’t bring myself to move her. Not when she feels so right against me, her small body perfectly fitted to mine as if we were designed as complementary pieces.
“You’ll hate me in the morning for this,” I whisper into her hair, not sure if she’s still awake.
“Mmm,” she murmurs, already half-asleep. “Can’t. Even if I wanted to.”
I reach over and extinguish the light, plunging the room into darkness. In the quiet, I wonder how much of tonight she’ll remember when the blush wears off. How much she’ll regret. Whether any of her desire was real or just chemical manipulation.
And whether any of that matters at all, when I get to have her like this.
I wake with a start, momentarily disoriented by the warm weight of Maya still pressed against me, her back to my front. The room is dark except for a sliver of moonlight cutting through a gap in the curtains.
Something shifts on the bed behind me. My muscles tense instantly.
“Make room for me,” Logan’s voice murmurs, so close to my ear that I feel his breath.
I turn my head slightly, making out his silhouette in the darkness. He’s already crawling onto the narrow mattress, the frame creaking under our combined weight.
But I’m frozen in both shock and a sick sort of awareness that always rises when he’s nearby.
The bed dips as Logan settles himself along my back, his chest pressed against my spine. His arm drapes over my waist, fingers splaying possessively across my abdomen.
“You’re not allowed to be in here,” I whisper, wishing I had the nerve to shout it. “We agreed on it a long time ago.”
His shrug is a squeak of the mattress springs behind me. “Maya’s here.”
This space is supposed to be my refuge, with everyone forbidden access but myself. I should have guessed that Logan would use my weakness for Maya as an excuse to change the rules.
“I’ll leave if you tell me to,” he says, but there’s something in his tone that suggests he knows I won’t.
I open my mouth to do just that when his lips brush against the claiming mark on my shoulder. Whatever words I might have said dissolve into a gasp of surprise. Heat flares from the point of contact, spreading through my body like wildfire.
“That’s not fair,” I manage, my voice betraying me with its breathlessness.
Logan chuckles, the sound rumbling against my back. “When have I ever played fair, Cillian?”
His teeth graze the mark next, sending a shudder through me that I can’t suppress. My body responds to him instinctively, despite everything—despite my anger, despite Maya sleeping beside me, despite my determination to resist him.
“Maya sleeps like a baby when she’s with you,” Logan whispers, his lips moving against my bare shoulder in a way that makes me suppress a shudder.
My gaze automatically moves to her face, still relaxed in sleep. “The blush has her knocked out.”
“It isn’t just that.” The barest edge of his teeth against my skin before he soothes the momentary shock of pain with a gentle kiss. “She feels safe with you.”
I release a shaky breath. “It’s just the bond.”
“Is it?” A chuckle, edged with darkness. “Does that mean you feel safe with me?”
Logan has made me feel all manner of things and he knows it. Safety has rarely been one of them.
“You saved my life.”
“I did.” His fingers tease at the taut skin of my lower belly, mere inches from the tip of my jumping cock. “And I would do so much more than that if you let me.”
“Except acknowledge me in public.”
His exhale shivers across the back of my neck, making me shudder. “Things will be different once I become king.”
Two unexpected heats and an accidental bond don’t make a relationship. I need more than he can offer me. This is just the first time it’s occurred to me to admit it.
“Maybe that’s not good enough.”
He tenses behind me. His anger is a flash of heat through the bond before he suppresses it, letting out a rueful laugh. “You’ve gotten bold. That’s Maya’s influence, I assume.”
It both is and isn’t. The twin bonds are like opposing poles of a magnet, pushing and pulling me into a confusing morass. I’m caught between them—literally and figuratively—trapped in a web of desire and resistance.
I want Logan desperately, just like I always have.
But I also want to hold him accountable. I refuse to go back to the life of silent desperation that I led before Maya arrived.
I can love that she makes me want something more for myself.
And also hate that she had to blow my entire life to smithereens to do it.
I bite my tongue on the accusations I’ve lobbed at him a hundred times before. Keeping my designation and our bond a secret even from our pack brothers isn’t about keeping us safe.
Logan is ashamed of me, and I refuse to keep living as his dirty little secret.
And if the warmth of her presence through the bond, the core of strength that gives her a spine of steel under that veneer of Omega softness, then so be it.
“This isn’t about her,” I say finally.
“I disagree. You’re connected to her in a way I’ll never be.” His mouth returns to my claiming mark, pressing a kiss there that makes me bite my lip to stay silent. “Just like you’re connected to me in ways she’ll never understand.”
Unwilling desire burns deep in my belly. My hands fist at my sides as I fight the urge to reach for him.
He presses his teeth into the indent of my claiming bite, just hard enough to make my muscles clench without breaking the skin.
“Logan,” I breathe out, because I can’t manage the words to insist that he stop.
“You let her have you, blissed out from blush and all. I could smell your fucking cum from the hallway.” he murmurs.
The note of jealousy in his voice is impossible to miss, and I thrill at it despite myself.
His hand moves below my waist, and he grips me hard in his hand.
“Do you think she’ll wake up angry or just desperate for more? ”
A few strokes of his hand have my cock rock hard, rising to the occasion from muscle memory alone.
Logan grinds himself against my back, his voice a low growl as his lips press against ear. “Tell me you haven’t missed this, and I won’t believe you. You’re already slick for me, Omega.”
The truth of it is so shameful that I can’t acknowledge it until he says the words. My dick gets hard all the time. I’m still a man, after all. But producing slick is a purely Omega response. It hasn’t ever happened to me before outside of the throes of heat.
A trickle of wetness sliding down the cleft of my ass to pool between my thighs becomes impossible to ignore. Need pulses in my blood, surging faster and harder than ever before.
I swear, shaking with the effort it takes not to grind back against him. “What the fuck…”
“It’s because of her,” Logan soothes, licking my neck. “Don’t fight it. This is exactly what we need. She is exactly what we need.”
The bare skin of his thighs meets the back of mine as he presses against me. I could fight him off if I wanted to. Logan might be bigger and stronger than I am, but we’ve sparred enough times that I know the weakness in his technique.
When he pushes inside me, the teeth he still has clamped down at the bend of my neck to hold me in place are unnecessary.
The pleasure is sudden and mind-bending.
Almost immediately, I’m already close to releasing into the hand he is still using to slowly jack me off in a matching rhythm to his gentle thrusts.
I’d let myself forget the way this feels, if just to save my own sanity. Because I can’t miss something that I don’t allow myself to remember. But I do miss it. Desperately.
Logan stays gentle, spinning me up slowly as the pleasure builds. He whispers unintelligibly in my ear, sweet nothings and promises that I know he won’t be able to keep.
Even if I want to believe it.
“Good morning, darling,” he croons.
It takes me a second to hear the change of tone in his voice. I force open eyes that I barely realized were squeezed shut.
Maya is awake and staring straight at me, pupils still blown wide from blush and second-hand arousal.
The urge to pull her under me is immediate, and I fight it off with extreme effort. She can’t be a part of this, not when she’s still under the influence of a drug she never should have taken. I don’t need to give her more reasons to hate us.
Then she reaches for me, just a gentle brush of her fingers against the flushed and overheated skin of my cheek.
“Cillian,” she whimpers.
“Touch her,” Logan urges as he shifts his hips to push deeper inside me. “She wants you to.”
There isn’t a trace of Alpha command in his voice, but that doesn’t stop me from stroking a hand up her trembling thigh. My fingers just barely graze her drenched slit, and she arches into me with a low moan, thumb making soft swirls on her clit.
Logan stroking my cock while he buries himself inside me. My hand buried between Maya’s thighs, while she bucks against the shallow thrust of my fingers.
It’s a dream that will only become a nightmare once we come to our senses.
She grips my wrist hard as she comes, throwing her head back and arching off of the bed in a full-body spasm. The look of pleasure on her face, the way she completely abandons herself to it, is enough to compel my own release.
Logan lets out a satisfied grunt behind me as I spill across the sheets, continuing to stroke my oversensitive flesh until I have to slap his hand away. He shifts to grip my hips with a bruising grip, pushing me down until I’m face down on the bed as he thrusts inside me.
Maya takes it all in, her gaze hazy from orgasm and the lingering effects of the drug. I watch her as she watches us, cheek pressed to the pillow as Logan comes with a low groan.
I don’t take my gaze off her face, wondering what bits of reality are filtering in past the haze.
Because I desperately hope that she won’t remember this come the morning.
Almost as much as I hope that every detail stays imprinted on her mind forever.
Just the same as it will mine.