Knot Playing Fair #2

One

ONE

Luca

I WAS UNRAVELING. COMING apart at the seams. The terrible déjà vu had descended like a choking cloud, even as familiar, rumbling voices spoke over and over about how I was safe, how everything was all right, and I shouldn’t worry.

“Bite me,” I sobbed, writhing and twisting to get the knot inside me even deeper. “Oh, god, bite me, mate me, please !”

A soothing hand stroked the sweaty hair away from my forehead. Another hand anchored my hips, keeping me from moving too much on the knot stretching me wide. Zalen? It was Zalen inside me right now, wasn’t it?

“Shh, Luca,” he said, sounding strained. “We can talk about it once your heat breaks, if you want to. You’re okay, I promise. We care for you so much. You know that, don’t you? We’ll never do anything to hurt you, or anything that you don’t expressly give us permission to do.”

The words spoke to the normal, rational part of my brain that was currently drowning in a sea of hormones, but they did nothing for the larger part that was desperate for someone to fill the aching black void that lived in the center of my chest. The gap that could never, ever be filled in, because as much as I might want a mated pack, pups, the white picket fence and the perfect omega life, I would never, ever have it.

I was broken, ruined, and no pack in their right minds would tie themselves to someone as useless and shattered as I was inside. It didn’t stop me from begging, even though I knew begging wouldn’t get me what I so desperately needed.

“Please... please ! Zalen! Byron, I’ll do anything! I’m sorry... I’m so sorry, I know I’m no good! I’ll—I’ll be better, I promise! I’ll do anything you want! Please bite me !”

Somewhere nearby, Mia was making little breathless, rhythmic cries as she was taken. A low alpha groan sounded, morphing into a growl that made shivers trail down my spine.

“God, I hate this part.” Byron’s voice was so low it was barely audible.

But I heard it. I heard . And I knew that my brokenness was to blame. Byron was fucking Mia even as he spoke, and my unreasonable demands still made him want to be anywhere except in my heat nest. More tears squeezed from the corners of my eyes.

“Byron, hush ,” Zalen said sharply, even as his hands tried to soothe this ugly, disfigured thing inside me that could never be soothed. “Luca, you are perfect. You deserve everything good in life. But what you want now isn’t necessarily going to be what you want after the hormones release their grip.”

I snarled, irrationally incensed.

“ Fucking bite me !” I shrieked like a maniac, hating myself just that little bit more when Mia whimpered in distress nearby.

“Shh, I’ve got you, Luca,” Zalen said. He was in control—always so enragingly in control—but he also sounded sad.

He shifted around behind me, tangling our legs together so I wouldn’t be able to buck my hips on his knot and hurt myself. I held my breath, trembling—knowing all too well what was coming next.

The hand that had been stroking back my hair moved down to the juncture of my shoulder. Zalen’s fingers closed over my mating gland, manicured nails curving to press on the skin where an alpha’s incisors might fall. Lightning-sharp tingles radiated outward, racing back and forth between my gland and the place where we were joined.

Zalen craned up and fastened his mouth over my other shoulder, where it didn’t fucking matter . He growled against the tender skin, but it was just for show. I wasn’t a good enough omega to make an alpha I wanted to mate lose control and bite my gland. Not really.

Zalen bit down hard enough to make my blood bead around his canines, at the same moment he dug his fingernails in, denting the skin over my mating gland but not breaking it. I howled, my body helpless beneath the stupid, useless playacting. Slick and semen squirted over my thighs, my belly, the cushions beneath me.

The climax was so strong it whited out my vision. Mia’s nearby scream of ecstasy sounded like it was coming from underwater—the sudden spike in pheromones sending her over the precipice after me. My passage rippled and pulsed around Zalen’s knot so hard it hurt, like maybe I’d strained some of the muscles down there. The sharp waves of pleasure-pain shuddered through me for long moments, distracting me at last from the desolate emptiness where my pack bonds should be.

I fell into the dreamless blackness of post-peak slumber with a low whine of relief... wishing, not for the first time, that I never had to wake up from that warm nothingness.

When I next opened my eyes, the ruthless compulsion of heat had subsided. It was replaced, as it always was, with a deep sense of disgust at myself.

Every muscle in my body felt like it had been individually placed on a medieval rack and stretched to the snapping point. Worse, my mind was a movie screen for the same horrifically humiliating flashes of memory that I always got, afterward.

I’ll be better, I promise!

I’ll do anything you want!

Bite me, mate me, please!

Bile rose in my throat.

I looked around the dimly lit nest, trying to take stock. Zalen and Byron were gone. They knew better than to be here when I woke up after my estrus subsided. They’d learned that lesson the hard way the first time they’d talked me into letting them help me through a natural heat.

I’d come back to myself with the same flashes of awareness I always got, knowing that I’d begged them for their knots—for their bites —like the pathetic, slutty little asshole I was, and I’d freaked the fuck out on them both. Ever since, they’d known better than to stick around once their dicks were no longer required.

Mia was fast asleep nearby. I took in a cautious sniff, but her heat had broken at the same time mine did. I was a bit surprised the others hadn’t carried her back to her own room, just to be safe. But, when I poked and prodded at the jagged edges of my own emotional dysfunction, there was no resentment at her presence.

With luck, she’d been too deeply mired in her own heat to take much notice of my degrading bout of pathos.

As though my thoughts had somehow reached her, she groaned and stretched, her jaw cracking on a yawn.

“Mia?” I rasped.

She blinked bleary eyes and made a humming noise in response, rolling over and elbow-crawling across the short distance separating us. I went still as she flopped half across my chest, snugging an arm around my torso to anchor herself. But the expected repulsion at the intimate touch never materialized.

I let out a slow breath, the tension flowing out of my muscles, and wrapped my arm around her shoulders as she nuzzled her face into my neck. The bruised bite mark flared beneath the touch of her cheek, but the ache that followed was worse inside than outside.

“Ugh,” she said, the sound muffled. “I forgot about the hangover that comes afterward. Why can’t I feel my arms or legs?”

Before I could try to rally some kind of teasing banter that I didn’t really feel, she went rigid.

“Oh, fuck,” she said, pulling away from me and rolling into a sitting position. “Oh, fuck ! The restaurant!”

I sat up as well, a jolt of adrenaline dragging me free of my self-hatred, at least for the moment.

“What about the restaurant?” I asked. “Did something happen?” Now that I was thinking past my own humiliation, I vaguely remembered how upset she’d been when she first showed up at the nest. And... wait. The timing here wasn’t right. My heat had been a couple of days late, it was true. But hers should still have lagged mine by... what? Three days or so?

Her hands came up to cover her mouth. For a moment, it looked like she wouldn’t be able to form words, but then she shook her head sharply and dropped her arms.

When she spoke, it was a whisper. “It’s closed. Maybe for good.”

My eyebrows shot up. “Why? What happened?”

She looked positively sick—and not just from the heat hangover. “There were... cockroaches . In the dining room during service. Thousands of them.”

Okay, so maybe my brain wasn’t working right yet. But that just didn’t make sense.

“Hang on,” I said slowly. “I know you. There’s no way your kitchen has roaches. And, even if you had an infestation and didn’t know about it, they wouldn’t just randomly crawl out of the woodwork in the dining area with the lights on!”

Mia started shaking her head again, more slowly this time. “But they did ! Customers were screaming. It’s going to be all over social media. The health department will be breathing down our necks...”

She trailed off. All the blood abruptly drained from her face. “Oh, no.”

“What?” I demanded, a bit hysterically.

She swallowed hard. “Um... I’m also pretty sure I had sex with Emiel.”

I stared at her. “No way.”

Her huge brown eyes met mine, wracked with guilt. “Nat came to check on me. I think... Emiel carried me down to the front door to see him. I must have—” She broke off and swallowed hard. “And then he must have—”

“Emiel doesn’t do that,” I said quickly. “Are you sure you’re not mixing up a fantasy with reality? Or maybe you dreamed it?”

A faint meow sounded from beyond the closed door of the nest. We both turned to look at it. A moment later, it was followed by the sound of claws scratching against wood. We exchanged a confused look.

Since there didn’t seem to be any other logical response, I dragged on a pair of joggers that had been left neatly folded on my dresser, then tossed Mia the oversized T-shirt that had been lying next to them. When she was covered up, I crossed the room and cautiously opened the door.

“ Mreow ,” said the slender gray cat waiting outside, looking up at me with wide, yellow-green eyes. Princess trotted into the nest and immediately started winding around my ankles. After a few moments of this, she chirped in distress and wended her way through the pillows to Mia, who stared in shock as the cat climbed into her lap and rubbed her face against Mia’s chin.

“What?” she said, bewildered. “She doesn’t even like me!”

“Why is she in here, and not with Emiel?” I asked, a sick pit of irrational worry opening up in my stomach.

Mia looked up at me helplessly for a couple of seconds. Then her expression hardened, and she scooped Princess up in one arm. Stifling a groan, she clambered to unsteady feet.

“I need to talk to Zalen,” she said, and headed into the hallway on shaky legs—heedless of her lack of pants or underwear.

I stood frozen for the space of a heartbeat, then I lunged for a drawer and dragged out an old turtleneck, pulling it over my head to cover myself and hide the bite mark on the side of my neck. Gritting my teeth against the pain of overused muscles, I hurried after her.

We found Zalen in the kitchen, talking in hushed, serious tones to someone on the phone. He glanced up as we approached, and my queasy feeling increased as I took in the dark circles forming under his dark circles. After several days in a heat nest with two omegas, he should have been fast asleep in his room, recovering. Instead, he looked like he hadn’t so much as closed his eyes for a solid week.

He held up a finger as we entered the room, a request for a moment’s patience.

“Okay, thanks Jen,” he said into the phone. “Please give me a call if he shows up, or if you hear from him.”

Princess gave an unhappy meow and struggled out of Mia’s hold, leaping lightly onto the countertop as Zalen disconnected the call. The unpleasant dip in my stomach turned into a barrel roll.

“Zalen, where’s Emiel?” Mia asked, fear audible beneath her words.

Zalen closed his eyes for a moment. “That’s a little complicated,” he said quietly. “Are you two all right?”

Mia glanced at me briefly before nodding. “Yes, just tired and sore.” She paused, rolling her lower lip between her teeth. “I, uh, think I may have done something terrible.”

But Zalen shook his head. “No. Mia, no . All you did was go into heat. So, you remember what happened with Emiel, then?”

She nodded, looking ill. “Not everything, but enough.”

Zalen blew out a breath. “Okay. Look... you probably know that Emiel has some issues around sex and heats. He was concerned that you might consider what he did with you to be nonconsensual. I told him I didn’t think that was the case, but he was still upset. He left the house, and I wasn’t in a position to try to follow him at the time.”

Because he and Byron had been stuck here tending to the two of us , I thought.

“Oh, no,” Mia breathed. “Zalen, where is he? I need to talk to him!”

“That’s the thing.” Zalen scrubbed a hand over his face, pulling at the skin. “I’m not sure.”

The awful sense of wrongness threatened to swallow me whole.

“What day is it?” I asked.

“It’s Tuesday morning,” Zalen said.

“And when did Nat come here?” Mia demanded.

“Friday morning,” Zalen replied, sounding defeated.

“And Emiel’s been gone this whole time?” I whispered.

Zalen nodded. “He left Princess with an entire bag of cat food in the self-feeder, four huge bowls of water, and half a dozen makeshift boxes full of cat litter. He hasn’t been to the Hope Project, and he isn’t answering his phone.”

A terrible, sick certainty settled in my chest like lead.

“I know where he is,” I rasped. Two sets of eyes landed on me as my hands started to shake.

“Where, Luca?” Zalen asked. “Where would he have gone?”

“The fights.” My lips felt numb as I struggled to form the words. “He’ll have gone to wherever they’re holding the cage fights this month.”