Chapter 36
THIRTY-SIX
There’s this song that I’ve always liked, with a low electronic beat and a breathy vocal backing track. It calms me down when I feel like there is too much happening all at once, because it makes me feel like my brain is filled with static electricity.
Sometimes, there is so much going on in my head that I feel paralyzed. How am I expected to dig through everything up there and know what I am supposed to be doing?
It’s why I like order so much. Everything has rules, ways they’re supposed to be done, and I’ve spent my life learning those rules.
But the world doesn’t always work that way.
Rules aren’t always followed. I’ve had to learn to roll with the punches.
To sort through the mess between my ears and find a way forward.
But sometimes after a rough day, I sit in my car, and I turn that song on. I won’t start driving, not immediately. I’ll let the beat wash over me, the pleasant static relaxing my body with the quiet and calm I crave.
My head feels like that right now.
All the noise is gone. My worries, always as ever-present as my inner voice, have fled.
Freshly fallen snow on pine trees hits my senses with all the force of a punch.
It’s the combination of my unusually silent brain and the overwhelmingly appealing scent that brings me into a moment of serenity unlike anything I’ve ever felt before.
Until there is a metallic taste on my tongue.
Until I blink several times and my vision falls on a bite mark, my bite mark, on Athena’s shoulder.
“Oh shit,” Sebastian whispers.
I still haven’t processed what I’ve done.
I bury my face in Athena’s neck, kissing the soft flesh there, only moments before someone wrenches her out of my arms.
The nest comes crashing into focus then.
Wyatt is holding back a snarling, furious Atlas, who looks like he wants to murder me.
Sebastian has Athena in his arms, and she’s crying, her body boneless as she tries to slip from his hold to the floor.
When I try to go to her, I’m restrained by a pair of powerful arms.
“Chuckie, buddy, you fucked up,” Harvey snarls in my ear. “You bonded her without permission.”
I did, didn’t I?
The buzz from sinking my teeth into her is fading, replaced by the sheer horror at what I’ve done.
“I…” I gulp, looking around at my furious pack and my quietly crying Omega. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“You bonded her!” Atlas shouts, fighting to get out of Wyatt’s arms. “How could you? What were you thinking?”
It appears the situation yanked at least one Omega into lucidity, at least for now.
“I wasn’t,” I whisper, looking at my feet.
Harvey’s arms loosen around me, but he still keeps a hold of my biceps.
“It was instinct. She’s my Omega, and I…
” I look at Athena, about to take a step forward, before I second-guess myself.
“Athena, I’m so sorry I bonded you without your consent.
It is such a breach of trust that I cannot express enough how terribly sorry I am.
I understand if… if you do not trust me as your Alpha. ”
Her deep green eyes, shiny with tears, pin me to the spot. “Did you not want to bond me?” she asks quietly.
I vehemently shake my head, shrugging off Harvey and crossing the nest to take her hands in mine.
“That is not what I am saying at all. I am all in with you, Athena Valentine. You are my Omega. You are strong, resilient, and gorgeous. Any Alpha would be lucky to have you. My only regret is that I didn’t talk to you about it, didn’t give our relationship more time to grow.
And now I have messed this up, and I would not blame you at all if you want to let the bond fade and remove me from your life. ”
Despite the four others in the room with us, it feels like Athena and I are on an island. She is all I hear, all I see. I know Atlas is ranting about something, but the words are going in one ear and out the other. Harvey and Sebastian seem content to watch us, standing on the edge of my vision.
It’s not a comfortable situation. Cum is drying on the inside of my pants from where I embarrassingly lost myself to pleasure while my Omegas fucked on my lap.
Everyone but me is nearly naked. Love bites and bruises from Atlas cover Athena’s creamy peach skin, and I can see the slick and cum drying on her inner thighs.
My Omega’s hair is a mess. Her face is splotchy with tear tracks down her cheeks, and she gnaws on her lower lip.
I don’t say anything.
I can’t.
What else is there to say?
I fucked up and potentially ruined any chance I had with her. I definitely torpedoed my newly formed relationship with Atlas. I’ve never seen an Omega so angry before.
Her fingers flex in mine. I wish I could tell what she was thinking right now.
All I can do is wait for her judgment.
Slowly, she turns my hand over, stroking my palm. “You know my history,” she says quietly. “How no pack ever picked me. I was always the second choice. You said it yourself that I have nest trauma.”
“I’m so sorry I contributed to it.” I duck my head, keeping my sight on my feet. What I did was unacceptable, and I deserve whatever is coming my way from any of them.
“I’m still burning up,” she whispers. “Atlas, are you?”
“Yeah,” he grunts, clearly a bit more subdued now. “But I’m aware enough to know how pissed I am at Chuckie.”
“We have no idea how long we will stay lucid,” she remarks, stroking her fingers across my palm.
I still don’t look up. “I imagine our heats are going to be different from natural-born Omegas,” she continues.
“Who knows in what ways? Longer, shorter, more intense, less severe. Will I be more likely to conceive? Will Atlas be more likely to impregnate? All sorts of unknown variables.”
She’s rambling a little and reminding me of her brother in a way. Her mind is jumping all over, and she’s processing it out loud for the sake of the pack.
“I have a birth control implant, by the way, no need to worry about that part of things.” Atlas exhales sharply.
Clearly, that wasn’t something that he had considered until now.
“There’s so much we don’t know about what being an Omega is going to look like, in the long term, for me and Atlas. But I know one thing.”
Her fingers tighten around my hand, and she lifts it. Before I have the chance to blink, her teeth are digging into the thin skin of my wrist.
Pleasure, pain, and joy flood my system before lying heavily behind my heart with a purr of contentment.
“I know I can bond,” she finishes, kissing and licking the wound on my hand. “And you chose me, Charles. All the times I wasn’t, the way I was rejected and pushed away, wore on my soul. I was sure no one would ever choose me. And you, your Alpha, chose me. So I choose you, too.”
“Athena!” Atlas shouts, finally wrenching himself out of Wyatt’s arms. “Why would you do that? You didn’t have to decide! It would have faded!”
“I know I didn’t,” she responds, weaving her fingers with mine. “But I wanted to. When you and I bonded, it was driven entirely by instinct, and I wouldn’t change it for anything. I’m learning that our instincts are pretty damn good, and I’m going to trust that voice inside me.”
I cannot keep my distance from her any longer, and I wrap my arm around her waist, pulling her to my chest. She is burning up.
“The virus that made us was made using Ethel’s DNA,” she says quietly, still looking at Atlas.
I’m not sure who Ethel is to them, other than another Omega subject to the experiments, but I don’t want to interrupt their moment.
“And Ethel would tell me to follow my instincts and embrace this. Even if it’s fucked up, I’m going to believe that little Omega voice is hers, guiding me toward the happiness she promised me I would have. ”
“Are you sure?” Atlas whispers, taking a step closer to her, nearly sandwiching her between us. “This means forever with them.”
“We all still have a lot to learn about each other,” she responds, stroking his face. “But yeah. I’m sure. Can’t you feel how right this is, the six of us?”
He watches her face, as if he’s waiting for her to change her mind, to rip herself from my arms and throw herself to the other side of the nest.
She doesn’t do that.
She sinks deeper into my embrace, purring softly.
Something profound flashes across his face, and he nods tightly, as if in conversation with himself.
“Yeah,” he says definitively. “Yeah, I can. Okay.”
Before I can register what is happening, Atlas is grabbing my hand from where it rests wrapped around Athena and burying his teeth into my arm right above her mark.
My stomach flips.
I wasn’t sure if he wouldn’t want a bond with me, since our relationship is not romantic or sexual.
And yet he chose me first.
Probably only because Athena did.
But somehow, that wound has healed some inside of me, the worry that I am not enough for him, for either of them.
When he presses his forearm to my mouth, I don’t hesitate to return the bite. When the copper flashes over my tongue, an unruly, almost grumpy bond unfolds in my chest, next to the cool, tranquil one I know is Athena.
“Huh,” Athena says quietly. “Honey.”
“Orange blossom,” Atlas breathes at the same time.
My chest cracks. “You… honey? Orange blossom?”
“My mom loved tea,” Athena whispers, stroking a hand down my forearm that remains wrapped around her waist. “I’d get to lick the spoon after she stirred her honey in.”
“My grandparents had an orange grove,” Atlas says, face slack with wonder. “Orange blossoms always remind me of them. Of family.”
Tears run down my face, the realization that they can scent me, that the scent match we have is real, is almost too much, and I think I would collapse to the floor of the nest if I weren’t propping Athena up.
The two bonds twist in my chest, their wintery scents wrap around me, and static fills my brain.