Chapter 42 – Bells #2
Raf lies beside us, his callused hand stroking my hair as he grips my hand in his other one, watching with dark eyes that burn. Rex is on my other side, his hand wrapped around my wrist in a tight grip. Between them and Phoenix's body pinning me to the nest, I'm not going anywhere.
Not that I want to.
This is the best night of my fucking life.
Phoenix's rhythm builds. Each thrust drives me deeper into the nest and further from rational thought, until there's nothing left but the pressure building at the base of my spine and the weight of him above me and the sounds he's making against my throat.
Low sounds. Desperate sounds. Not the gentle, golden-retriever Phoenix the world gets to see. He's more like a lion right now, blond mane and all.
His hips stutter.
His body locks against mine and a snarl tears out of him that doesn't even sound like him. It's guttural and animal and gorgeous, his face buried in the curve of my neck, his breath scalding against the crescent scar.
His teeth sink in.
The pain is bright and clean. Nothing like the violation that put the scar there in the first place.
This is a question asked with the body, and my body answers before my brain catches up.
A flare of heat blooms from the mark outward, flooding my nervous system, rewriting the neural pathways that have been coded to wrong wrong fucking wrong for years.
I feel Phoenix inside me, and not just his knot.
The bond thread that's been warm and solid between us for so long ignites into a permanent brand. Phoenix locks into place in my chest like a deadbolt sliding home, and tears spill down my face before I can stop them.
Phoenix's hips jerk twice more and he comes with a groan that vibrates through the mark, and I come so hard my back bows off the mattress and I scream into his shoulder, clawing at his strong back.
He holds me through it, both hands cradling my skull, his forehead against mine, breathing hard. His eyes are wet.
"Hi," I whisper.
"Hi," he chokes out. He kisses me, slow and tender, until his knot finally goes down. Then he pulls back and carefully separates from me.
I'm already writhing and pleading for more.
Raf is behind me before Phoenix has fully pulled away, his hands turning my hips, his mouth already on the fresh mark Phoenix left. His tongue traces the edges of the bite and it stings and tingles in the best way. I jolt and grab the nearest thing, which turns out to be Rex's forearm.
Rex doesn't pull away, even when I dig my nails in.
Raf enters me from behind with a smooth, decisive thrust that makes my vision white out. He's thick and relentless, one hand splayed across my lower belly, the other gripping my hip hard enough to bruise.
"This okay?" he murmurs against my shoulder.
"Stop fucking checking on me," I pant.
He gives a dark, breathy laugh and obliges.
His rhythm is different from Phoenix's. Harder. More insistent and aggressive. Where Phoenix was depth and tenderness, Raf drives into me with the same relentless timing he brings to his bass lines, and every thrust pushes a sound out of me that I can't control.
Rex is in front of me now, kneeling.
His sweats are gone, revealing the scarring on his cock I remember from the tower, the raised ridge spiraling from base to shaft.
He's watching me get fucked by Raf with his jaw tight and his one working eye burning, the other hidden by his hair. His cock is half-hard just from the sight of what Raf and Phoenix are doing to me, which for Rex is a victory against his own body.
I reach for him. "Come here."
He hesitates. That split second of self-hatred flashes across his face again, and it happens every time I want to touch him.
But he comes closer.
I take him in my mouth, already working the shaft with my tongue, pressing against the scar gently. He hisses and his thighs shake. His hand finds the back of my skull, fingers threading through my hair, and the grip tightens involuntarily when I hollow my cheeks.
"Fuck," he grits out.
Behind me, Raf's thrusts slow and deepen. The base of his cock is already swelling and the stretch makes me moan around Rex. The vibration makes Rex's hips jerk forward.
Raf's knot locks inside me and his teeth find my neck. His bite is sharper, more aggressive, a claiming that matches the man. The bond ignites and Raf slots into place beside Phoenix in my chest.
My vision goes black around the edges and I would collapse if Raf's knot wasn't holding me upright, his arm banding across my torso.
Rex pulls back. His cock is hard now, fully hard. He's tense, but he's not going soft.
My hand finds his hip. I look up at him through a haze of tears and endorphins, my lips swollen and my neck bleeding from two fresh marks, and I grin.
"Your turn."
His expression softens with the slightest hint of reverence if Rex were capable of reverence, which according to him he's not, but Rex has been wrong about himself for a long time.
Raf's knot softens and he pulls out slowly, his lips pressed to the mark he left, murmuring something I don't catch. But it sounds sweet. He eases me forward onto the mattress and rolls to the side, spent, his bronze chest heaving.
Rex takes his place.
He moves over me, bracing himself on one arm, and the other hand finds my jaw and tilts my face up. The fairy lights reflect slightly off his scars and I reach up and trace the edge of his jaw with my thumb.
He flinches.
Then he doesn't.
He enters me slowly. The scarred ridge of his cock drags against my oversensitized walls and the sound I make is barely human, more like a pathetic whimper. If I had the capacity for embarrassment around these alphas anymore, it would embarrass the fuck out of me.
Rex's rhythm is careful at first, like he's terrified of hurting me, which is insane given that Raf just knotted me with the subtlety of a battering ram and Rex fucked me relentlessly on the rooftop of the studio.
I wrap my legs around his waist and pull him deeper, and his control snaps.
His hips slam forward and I arch into it. The pace becomes brutal, desperate, years of isolation and touch starvation and loneliness pouring out of him in savage thrusts that drive me up the mattress until Phoenix braces his hand against my head to keep me from hitting the wall.
Rex's knot swells. His whole body shakes as he locks inside me. A snarl that lacks all the usual anger and rage rips out of him and his mouth finds my neck, the side where the original crescent scar sits beneath Phoenix and Raf's marks.
His teeth press against the old scar.
He hesitates.
One heartbeat. Two. Then three. Like he's asking for permission from the girl who was bitten without consent by the man she stabbed in the fucking eye, then neck, which is still something I'm choosing not to think about because it doesn't bother me half as much as it should.
The weird apathy actually bothers me slightly more than the violence itself.
I thread my fingers into his dark hair and pull him closer.
"Do it," I whisper.
His teeth sink into the exact place where the crescent scar began. Rex's bond crashes through me and I feel the pack bonds braid together, thumping in time with my pounding heart like a bassline.
Rex collapses over me, panting, his face pressed into my throat, his damaged cheek against the fresh marks. Phoenix's hand finds my hair and Raf's fingers lace through mine.
Eventually, Rex's knot softens and he rolls off me with a grunt that might be the least elegant sound I've ever heard from him. He lands on his back beside me, chest heaving, one arm flung over his eyes.
I'm a fucking wreck.
A glorious, annihilated, thrice-knotted, freshly marked wreck sprawled in the center of a nest that smells like all four of us combined.
Phoenix pulls a blanket over my body because he's Phoenix and he can't not take care of me. Raf curls against my right side, his nose in my hair, his arm draped across my stomach. Rex somehow ends up on my other side, nuzzling into my hair.
We breathe together, staring up at the twinkling fairy lights.
Fucking magical.
"I'm going to tell them," I hear myself saying suddenly.
Phoenix's hand stills in my hair and Raf lifts his head. Rex lets out a soft questioning growl that rustles my hair, but he doesn't move.
"The omega thing," I clarify. "I'm going to tell the world I'm an omega."
Silence.
"Not because Carmine wants a press strategy, or because some journalist is going to dig it up anyway and I should get ahead of it. And not because it's smart or strategic or… or whatever the fuck label people would want to call it."
I stare at the ceiling and feel the decision crystalizing as I speak the words.
"I'm doing it on stage. On my terms, before it inevitably gets out anyway. If the world has a problem with an omega fronting a band like ours, they can kiss my entire fucking ass."
Raf grins and presses his face against my neck. "That's my girl."
Phoenix pulls me against his chest and his laugh rumbles through us both. "Carmine's going to have a stroke."
"Carmine's rash is going to get a rash," I agree.
Rex doesn't say anything. But he reaches up and tucks a strand of singed white hair behind my ear, the pad of his thumb brushing the edge of the triple mark on my neck.
His lips press against my temple.
I close my eyes and lean into him.
Into all of them.