Twenty-Four
TWENTY-FOUR
Mia
I AWOKE SOMETIME BEFORE Luca’s alarm went off. I was warm and comfortable, floating in a sea of cushions with a solid presence supporting me. A second presence lay fast asleep, draped half across my lap. The complex combination of three scents floating around us smelled divine.
For a brief, terrible moment, a little voice in my mind whispered a question that I couldn’t afford to answer. What if you could wake up like this every day for the rest of your life?
It was as though my brain had cheerfully ignored Emiel and Luca’s heartbreaking confession from earlier in the night. They couldn’t mate. Not ever. Or, at least... they didn’t think they could. Were they right?
I nuzzled further into Emiel’s side. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t moved an inch since I’d fallen asleep against him. His stroking thumb paused its travel over the skin of my shoulder when I stirred, then resumed its steady rhythm once I settled again.
What would it be like to have a psychic bond with someone who’d experienced such trauma in their life, truly? Alphomic mating bonds were one of the things which set us firmly apart from betas. Romanticized, they were the stuff of those novels I’d threatened to make Emiel read. But only someone truly na?ve would ignore the darker side of a psychic bond.
Blaze had never bitten Luca, but he could have. Luca could easily have been tied for life to an alpha he hated; a sadist who held him in utter contempt and considered him a mere possession.
Although it wasn’t remotely the same thing, I might have ended up mated to Emiel during my heat, if his self-control had slipped a little further than it had. I’d brushed off the near miss at the time, telling myself that he was probably exaggerating how close he’d come to biting me.
It happened sometimes, though—I knew it did. There had been high-profile legal cases surrounding nonconsensual mating bites. Monetary settlements. Sometimes omegas even had their mating glands surgically removed to break unwanted bondings after the fact.
What if Emiel had mated me? What would I have done?
It would have been instant grounds for divorce with Nat due to adultery, obviously. But Nat had already offered divorce if I wanted it. He’d assumed that I’d moved on from the marriage. He wasn’t even totally wrong about that.
If Emiel had bitten me, maybe I could have stopped him from running away to the cage fights and nearly getting himself killed. No matter how upset he’d been, I knew he would never have left me alone while I was still in heat.
Could I have soothed that old, remembered pain with my own thoughts and emotions? God, I’d wanted his bite so badly. I’d wanted all of their bites. It was easy to say that it had just been because of my rampaging hormones... that it was simply the way omegas were wired. But I’d practically been able to taste my pack-that-wasn’t. That was what I’d yearned for, beyond the wild physical pleasure of the heat nest. And I knew Luca had been feeling the same thing, begging just as hard for Byron and Zalen’s teeth on his neck.
Fuck . I couldn’t afford to think about this.
Mating a pack of dangerous, broken bad boys—well, bad boys plus Zalen —was the province of escapist fiction, not reality. Not least because none of the men in question had the first intention of mating anyone , despite what Luca seemed to believe. And if they did, they should mate him, not me. They were practically a pack already, in so many of the ways that counted.
If I could prove to them that acting like a pack in other ways wouldn’t kill them, then maybe I would have done a good deed. Maybe it would go some way toward repaying the generosity they’d shown in letting me stay here, in accepting me as one of them even though they’d barely known me.
But why did that idea hurt so much?
Luca stirred, taking a shuddering breath. The movement lifted my hand, which still rested loosely over his ribcage. I hummed reassuringly, rubbing a circle over his heart while he woke up enough to remember where he was and who he was with. His pulse sped up beneath my palm, but after a tense moment, it began to slow again.
There had been a period of time when I’d thought that maybe Luca and I could date each other, the way betas did. It would have felt safe... or so I’d believed. Watching movies together. The occasional dinner out. Having sex that was light and fun.
But Luca could not be extricated from his alphas. What he had with Byron was the most obvious manifestation of that, but it wasn’t the only manifestation. The connection extended to Zalen and Emiel, too. I remembered Zalen pulling Luca’s chair out for him, that very first night at the singles bar when we’d met. I’d been convinced the two of them were together after seeing them interact for less than thirty seconds.
And Luca had been so quick to go running after Emiel when he’d had a cage fight, despite the dangers of returning to gang territory. There was no planet where these four weren’t meant for each other.
While the adolescent omega that still lived inside me—brimming with her starry-eyed dreams and her illicit romance novels—might want to be a part of that, I was still a married career woman with a business to save and a husband to...
Well, okay, in reality I had no idea what I was supposed to do with the husband I still cared about, but could no longer trust as a romantic partner. One thing I couldn’t do, though, was ignore his existence.
Gah . I felt like my brain was running in circles, a spring coiling tighter and tighter.
“Alarm’s about to go off,” Emiel murmured. “You two awake?”
He already knew we were, but he allowed us the polite fiction. Luca gave an unhappy little grunt. I yawned and stretched.
“Yeah,” I said. “Mostly. Thanks for staying with us, Emiel. I think we both slept a lot better than we would have otherwise.”
Luca made another wordless noise, one that might have been grudging agreement.
“I... liked it,” Emiel said, characteristically hesitant. “Watching over the nest, I mean. Never really done that before.”
I felt a little pang at the idea of the World’s Most Protective Alpha Teddy Bear never having had the chance to guard omegas in a nest. It was a strange reaction, given how little experience I had with those same kinds of rituals and instincts. I’d slept alone in a beta-style bedroom for most of my life, and even after I was married, Nat hadn’t been big on cuddling. Much less staying up half the night to guard against threats that didn’t exist.
“It’s nice to do the things we’re meant to do,” I decided, snaking an arm around Emiel’s waist and squeezing.
Reluctantly, I straightened away, Luca rolling into a bleary-eyed sitting position next to me. And, god help me, I didn’t mean for my gaze to flicker over Emiel’s lap as I moved. But there it was—a massive hard-on tenting the gray sweat pants he’d been wearing when he rushed downstairs to see what was wrong last night.
I ripped my gaze away, trying and failing not to remember how that giant cock had felt when he was splitting me open with rough, wild thrusts. Saliva flooded my mouth. I swallowed it down convulsively and didn’t say anything. Neither did Emiel.
Luca, who couldn’t have failed to notice the change in our scents no matter how early it was, apparently didn’t feel the same need to adhere to our code of silence. He eyed the telltale tent and scooted back a bit, crossing his arms and dragging his knees up to his chest.
“I’m going to buy you something, Emiel,” he said, his tone carefully neutral. “And you can throw it in the trash, or stick it in the back of a closet, or whatever. But people like us? You should know that we don’t have to live like monks forever, just because some stuff has been ruined for us.”
“Dunno what you mean,” Emiel muttered, not meeting Luca’s eyes.
“Yeah, you do,” Luca shot back, without vitriol. “But like I said, it’s up to you what you do with it. You won’t hurt my feelings. Right now, though, I need to take the world’s longest hot shower and get ready for work.”
“Okay,” Emiel said, climbing to his feet. He hesitated. “Um... if you need someone to watch over your nest again, you can just tell me. If you want, I mean. Picking locks is a pain in the ass.”
My heart swelled until it ached. “And if you’re having a bad night, Emiel, you can tell us, too,” I offered. “Not only is picking locks a pain, but it’s probably not great for the doorknob, either.”
“Maybe,” Emiel said, after a long moment.
Yeah... maybe,” Luca echoed softly.
It was probably pushing my luck, but I pressed a kiss to Luca’s temple, and another to Emiel’s, before I left for my own shower.
Neither of them protested.
Zalen was waiting in the kitchen when I came in to grab a bite to eat.
“How are they?” he asked quietly
I drew breath, considering the best way to put it. “I think they’re both doing okay, all things considered.”
He nodded and got up to pour me a cup of coffee.
“I worry,” he admitted, handing me the mug.
“That’s because you’re a good alpha,” I told him, taking a careful sip. The brew was steaming, but not scalding—hitting my tastebuds with the sweet, sweet promise of caffeine.
“Not, as it turns out, that good,” he said ruefully.
I wasn’t sure if he was thinking of Julie, or the fact that he hadn’t been the one to comfort Luca. Either way, I wanted to protest... but I didn’t think it would really help him to hear it right now.
“It’s hard facing difficult things head-on,” I replied instead. “At least, it always has been for me. And that’s what they’re both doing right now.”
He sighed. “Too true. What about you, Mia? Are you doing okay?”
Warmth flowed up the length of my spine, spreading through my chest in a comforting wave.
“I am,” I assured him. “All things considered.”
After downing a quick breakfast, I drove over to Soulard for another frustrating day of trying to figure out how to tackle the restaurant reopening. Nat and Shani had beaten me there, and I was a bit surprised to see Shani’s niece, Maleeka Jones, already there, as well.
“Morning,” I greeted. “It’s good to see you, Maleeka. Here to get a little bit of early training in? I’m afraid we’re not stocked in the kitchen yet.”
“Good morning, chef,” the young alpha replied. “I’m happy to train or help out however I can today, but that’s not why I came in this morning.”
“Oh?” I asked, darting a gaze between Nat and Shani in hopes of an explanation.
Nat looked pale. Shani looked, if I was any judge, more than a little smug.
Nat cleared his throat. “The restaurant appears to have gained two hundred fifty thousand new social media followers in the last twenty-four hours.” His voice was hoarse. “And counting.”
I blinked at him. “Excuse me?”
Maleeka smiled a predator’s smile. “Yeah, about that. I might’ve had a post go a bit viral yesterday. Turns out, people love a little drama with their high-end cuisine.”
I stared at her, uncomprehending, and then turned to stare at Shani.
Shani’s smile was just as sharp-edged as her niece’s. “Told you she was good. And now, I think it’s time we started planning a grand reopening date, chef. Don’t you?”