Forty-Five
FORTY-FIVE
Mia
MY BOYS WERE HOME SAFE , and I was having trouble trusting that it was finally okay to let go. I’d been so tense for so long... my omega nervous system had laid down tracks that were proving difficult to escape.
I’d find myself arriving at the restaurant to open it up for lunch, and having a moment of full-blown internal panic that we were about to lose the business. Then I’d remember that the reopening had been a smashing success, and money was rolling in night after night.
I’d send the employees home at the end of the shift, only to get hit with an adrenaline surge because Nat was missing... but Nat was hiding in the back office running payroll numbers, because he didn’t want people to see his bruised face.
I’d get back to the pack house, and my heart would start racing when I thought about Luca’s old gang trying to steal him back—but Blake Berlusconi was dead, his refrigerated body lying in a hospital morgue somewhere.
It took me too long to realize that my mind was running in familiar ruts as a way to avoid thinking about the future. Because all of the sudden, that nebulous future felt disturbingly imminent . It was awfully hard to procrastinate dealing with my ruptured marriage when my husband was living under the same roof as the various guys I’d been sleeping with. How on earth were the six of us supposed to mold this situation into something that wouldn’t become a total clusterfuck?
Emiel had picked Byron up from the hospital while I was at work this afternoon. Unsurprisingly, Byron was fast asleep in his room by the time Nat and I got home after closing the restaurant for the night.
“I told him the three of us needed to talk soon,” Nat said quietly. “Although, thinking about it, maybe it should be the four of us. It’s pretty clear he and Luca have something complicated going on.”
And at least now, I had a valid excuse for the way my pulse pounded fast and thready in my throat.
“Yeah,” I agreed breezily. “Sure. I suppose we should do that one of these days. When he’s, y’know, feeling better.”
I cringed internally at how pathetic and wishy-washy that had sounded. Before I could make things any worse by opening my mouth again, I darted forward and brushed a chaste kiss to the unbruised side of Nat’s face. Then I hurried off to the second-floor bathroom without giving him time to respond.
The addition of a sixth person had strained the capacity of even Zalen’s giant house. Nat had offered to crash on a sofa or even in the utilitarian basement, but I’d given him the guest bedroom instead. I was sleeping in Luca’s nest with him, since both of us needed the physical reassurance in the aftermath of the kidnapping.
When I changed into sleep clothes and slipped into Luca’s room, it was to find him still awake. That part wasn’t unusual—he’d always been prone to insomnia. But finding Emiel hanging out in the nest with him was .
“Hey,” Emiel said. “Sorry. Bit of a rough night. I’m just keepin’ him company.”
Luca made a wordless noise of agreement. He was curled up in one of his beanbag chairs looking pale and wan in the dim illumination from the fairy lights. His shoulder had improved enough to ditch the sling, but he still had good days and not-so-good days after what had almost been done to him in that warehouse.
I crossed the room and flopped on the floor next to him, tugging him down to sit leaning against the beanbag with me instead of on top of it. We snuggled into each other, Luca letting out a sigh of released tension.
“Did Nat drag you in to talk to Byron?” Emiel asked, not making a move to leave. “He said he was gonna, earlier.”
“Byron’s already asleep,” I said. “Fair warning, Luca—Nat’s threatening to drag you into this as well.”
Luca grunted in sleepy protest and nuzzled further into my shoulder.
“You know what you’re going to say to them?” Emiel asked, sounding genuinely curious.
“Not a clue,” I told him. “It’s just that... I don’t think I can have what I really want. It’s selfish, and I’m not sure how it would even work, anyway.”
“What do you really want?” Luca murmured against the skin of my neck.
I shivered, gooseflesh rising in the wake of the puff of warm breath.
“Everything.”
“What d’you mean by everything?” Emiel asked.
I sighed—a petulant noise. “I mean... well... everything ! I want you and Nat and Byron and Zalen. And you, Luca. I want a big fairytale pack where everyone loves each other, and no one has to feel like an outsider.”
Luca went still, but somewhat surprisingly, he didn’t pull away.
“So, why don’t you tell them that?” Emiel said.
Because I’m not allowed to want things that are complicated , I thought. Because saying it aloud feels like it will doom the idea before we can even try .
“Maybe they don’t want that kind of life,” I said aloud.
Emiel leaned back. “Maybe they do, though. Luca, do you want that?”
Luca was still frozen against me, statue-like. After a long moment of silence, a faint shudder went through his slender body.
“Do you think something like that could ever happen?” he asked, sounding heartbreakingly young.
“Dunno,” Emiel said. “Well, I mean... probably not, if we don’t at least talk about it first.”
As though his words had unlocked something inside me, a new thought threaded through my mind, dangerous and seductive.
You could ask them... and if the others said no, it wouldn’t be a worse outcome than if you’d never asked at all .
After planting that subversive little idea in my head, Emiel excused himself to get some sleep, leaving Luca and me to do the same. I slept so soundly that I didn’t even hear Luca get up and leave for work. Unfortunately, that also meant that Byron was able to sneak out, as well.
“He went to work the day after getting out of the hospital?” I asked in disbelief, cornering a bleary-eyed Nat in the kitchen. “ Seriously ?”
“Apparently, he’s extremely motivated not to discuss what happened between the three of us.” Nat still looked uncomfortable about the subject, but there was a wry twist of self-deprecating humor to his tone.
I shook my head in disbelief. “I’m trying not to be offended that we apparently rate as being worse to deal with than a half-healed knife wound.”
Nat huffed a rueful laugh before sobering. “Well, regardless, I just want to express how sorry I am that all of this happened the way it did. And to make it clear that if I’d had any idea whatsoever that Byron would become important to you, I never would have come within ten miles of him.”
It was strange how little the idea of Nat and Byron together bothered me now, given how upset I’d been when I first found out.
“I’m not mad,” I said, echoing what I’d told him in the hospital. “And I guess I can see why you both wanted to keep it quiet. It must have seemed like something that would never go anywhere, so why upset me by telling me?”
Nat took a moment to digest that. “It’s true... I don’t think either of us expected to end up as the buddies in a bad action movie. Or to end up living together. Somehow, we seem to be a lot more tangled up with each other than I thought we would be.”
I screwed up my courage in both hands. “I’m kind of sorry I missed your hookups, to be honest. I bet it was some smoking hot sex.”
Nat blinked, his expression going completely blank in a sort of ‘ brain rebooting, please stand by’ reaction.
“Wh... what?” he asked.
“Gay sex between two good-looking men?” I offered. “Totally hot, right?”
Nat continued to stare at me.
Crap, had I just broken my husband’s brain?
“Umm,” he said, his cheeks going bright red in a way which definitely didn’t complement his fading brownish-yellow bruising. “Well, I guess the fact that I went crawling back to him three times probably tells you all you need to know.”
“He’s really good in bed,” I agreed, despite the utter strangeness of having this conversation. “Like, really good.”
“I cannot believe we’re talking about this,” Nat muttered, still blushing like a schoolboy.
“I thought you were the one who wanted to talk about this,” I shot back, unrepentant. “But, uh, maybe we shouldn’t tell Byron how good we think he is at sex. He’ll get a swelled head.”
“I... will... keep that in mind,” Nat said, before becoming extremely interested in his coffee.
That night, Byron pulled the same trick of being sound asleep in his room when we got home. Or maybe it wasn’t a trick. Not everyone was an insomniac, and he was still recovering. Nat let out the kind of sigh that said he was only going to let this situation continue for so long.
After he wished me a good night and headed to bed, I went back to Luca’s nest. He, at least, was still up—lying on a pile of blankets and cushions, turning a cardboard box over and over in his hands.
“Hi,” I said. “Looks like Byron dodged us again. What’ve you got there?”
Luca sat up. “Heya. It’s the gift I got for Emiel. I was going to take it up to him, but I got caught up in my own head.”
“The gift?” I began, before a memory popped into my head. The night Luca had woken up screaming from nightmares of Blaze and SSG. Emiel had stayed with us to watch over the nest, and Luca had promised to buy him something when we woke up the following morning, tangled together in a haze of pheromones. “What did you get him?”
“It’s a knotting sleeve,” he said. “You fill the outside with hot water, and an alpha can stick his dick in it after he comes, so his knot stays warm and snug until it goes down.”
That... wasn’t what I’d been expecting, to put it mildly.
“You think he’d use it?” I couldn’t help asking.
Most alphas hated orgasming outside of a warm body. By all accounts, popping an unseated knot was a miserable experience—one that could last for up to an hour.
Luca shrugged. “No idea. But I don’t think it’s the kind of thing he’d buy for himself, and he should have the choice. Like I told him, just because other people fucked us up when we were young, it doesn’t mean we have to live like monks for the rest of our lives.”
The thoughtfulness of the gift, combined with Luca’s fearlessness in getting it for Emiel, made something warm swell in my chest.
“Would it be all right if I took it up to him?” I asked impulsively. “I’ll tell him it’s from you, obviously.”
A faint smile played at the corners of Luca’s mouth. “Only if I get to give him whatever cheeseball alphomic romance novel you pick out for him.”
I stifled a snort. “Deal. Just be aware that I’m going to get the raunchiest one I can find.”
“Well, yeah ... what would be the point otherwise?” He sobered, holding my gaze. “Mia, I know I’ve been... holding myself back, with everything else that’s been going on. But you need to know that I do still want you. I miss the kind of sex we had before—with Byron, and just between ourselves. I think I’m nearly ready to, um, do that kind of thing again. If you’re still interested, I mean.”
I thought about Nat downstairs in the guest bedroom. I thought of my revelation from earlier—I could ask them for what I wanted, and the worst that would happen is they’d say no.
“I would love that,” I told him. “You just say the word when you feel ready.”
The tension flowed out of his shoulders. “I will. I was also thinking, we should go out and do something fun. All of us, I mean. Like, I dunno, going dancing or something.”
I thought about the constant stress and lurching from crisis to crisis that had been my life for longer than I cared to think about.
“You know,” I said, “that actually sounds amazing. We are so totally doing that, even if we have to drag the others along by force.”
Luca looked like someone screwing up his courage. “Terrific. It’s a date.”
A pack date .
I crouched down to kiss him, slow and sweet, then straightened with the box in my hands and grinned at him. “I look forward to it. But right now, I’m going to go give Emiel his present, and see if it’ll make him blush.”