Sixty-Three
SIXTY-THREE
Emiel
I CAME BACK TO AWARENESS with Luca’s body wrapped around me like a barnacle, salty wetness drying on my cheeks. Small fingertips were stroking along my shaved scalp, soothing.
I wasn’t alone inside my head.
I wasn’t alone outside my head, either. There was Luca, of course. I also recognized Mia’s floral scent—she was the one petting me. But there were other people here, too. People whose scents I didn’t recognize. A growl rumbled up from my chest, completely involuntary. My muscles twitched hard as I made an aborted attempt to roll upright, stymied by Luca’s clinging grip and the softness of the mattress beneath me.
“Hey,” Mia said. “Hey, it’s all right, Emiel. You back with us?”
“I think it’s just the medical team,” Luca mumbled against my throat. His presence inside my thoughts felt exhausted, as though he’d been running for hours.
“That’s right, Mr. Hamilton. Mr. Doyle,” said a voice I vaguely recognized from before. It was the nurse—the one that had hooked us up to heart monitors and stuff earlier. “We’ve been on standby after your readings became concerning, shortly after the mating bite—but Ms. Dimitriadis asked us to hold back for a bit. Looks like it was the right call.”
“Can you talk to me, Emiel?” Mia asked. “How do you feel?”
I thought about it for a minute.
“Tired,” I decided, my voice sounding like it was being forced past gravel.
“We’re okay now,” Luca said. “Can we rest for a bit before we speak with Dr. Mushimba?”
“Certainly. I’ll inform her that you’ll be available for a video call in an hour,” the nurse said. “In the meantime, we’ll leave you alone unless you need additional assistance.”
“We don’t.” Luca snuggled even closer against me.
There was a bit of commotion around the door, and the unfamiliar scents faded. The tension bled out of my shoulders, but there was still something nagging at me. An uncomfortable ache, throbbing out of time with my heartbeat. I frowned, trying to pinpoint it and failing.
Mia nudged me. “Before you two drop off, can you help Luca with his bite wound, Emiel? It looks painful.”
“It’s fine,” Luca murmured, and all at once I understood what I was feeling.
A flush of guilt heated my face as I realized I hadn’t licked the wound closed like the alphas did in Mia’s romance novel.
“Stop that,” Luca said tiredly. “We had more important things to worry about.”
It occurred to me that he could feel my guilt, just like I could feel his pain.
“Sorry,” I said, shifting us around until I could reach the ugly red mark. It was still bleeding sluggishly.
I fought not to let the guilt creep back, because I didn’t want Luca to hurt when there was something I could do to fix it. Instinct propelled me to lick over the wound, fresh saliva filling my mouth at the idea of tasting Luca’s mating gland again.
Alpha saliva entering an omega’s bloodstream was the biological reason behind the mating bond. But alpha saliva also had healing properties, and that was why we were supposed to lick the bite afterward to soothe it.
I didn’t expect how much it would affect me when Luca shuddered beneath the slow swipes of my tongue. When he let out a little moan of relief, my dick chose the wrong moment to take an interest. I tried to subtly shift my hips away from Luca’s body.
He let out a weary chuckle, though—and I could feel his wry amusement inside my head.
“You do know I can still feel you getting horny, right?” he said.
I let go of Luca’s shoulder, shuffling away from him completely. “Sorry,” I said quickly. “I wouldn’t... it doesn’t mean—”
Crap, was I going to fuck this up before the first five minutes had passed?
“ Emiel ,” Luca said. “Look inside. I groaned because it felt good. We’re not going to have sex in a hospital room, but you’re allowed to think it feels good, too. Can we just nap for a bit until we have to talk to our shrink? I don’t care if your dick is hard. And I’m not upset at you, okay?”
I tried to reset my brain, with its old, ingrained patterns.
“This is gonna be a lot to get used to,” I said.
Luca snorted. “You think?”
“You two are going to be amazing at being mated,” Mia said. “I can tell already.”
“Mmph,” Luca said. He was already shimmying backward into me, making himself the small spoon.
Mia leaned over and pressed a kiss to his cheek, then to mine. “Get some rest. I’m going to go update the others.”
“Thanks, Mia,” I managed, exhaustion threatening to overcome me before she even made it out the door. Giving in, I let myself tumble into sleep with the hum of another mind tucked deep inside mine.
I was still groggy when the video consultation with Dr. Mushimba connected, but I woke up pretty damned fast when Luca started talking about what he’d experienced after I bit him.
“But... that’s not how it works ,” I blurted. “We can’t actually talk to each other inside our heads, can we?”
Luca whipped around to stare at me. I could feel his surprise through the bond.
“It was different for you?” he asked.
Dr. Mushimba’s light South African accent came through the screen before I could answer.
“It’s true that some bonds seem to be able to confer more detailed information than others. But, no, it’s not like talking on a telephone.” She gestured at the screen separating us. “Or a video call.”
“But...” Luca looked at me helplessly.
“Perhaps you could tell us how you experienced the mating, Emiel,” Dr. Mushimba said.
I tried to think back, putting words to the tangle of instincts and feelings. It took a few moments, but one of the things I liked about Dr. Mushimba was that she never tried to hurry me.
“It was dark,” I began. “You know when we’ve talked before about how I feel like there’s a monster living inside me?”
She nodded—even as I felt a small pulse of distress from Luca, who didn’t like it when I talked about that.
“Well,” I continued, “it was there in the dark. But so was Luca. I was so upset and, y’know... scared ... that I didn’t recognize him at first. I just knew I had to protect him from the monster.”
“Yes?” Dr. Mushimba prompted. “Go on. What happened next?”
“He kept trying to protect me ,” I said. “Even though I was the danger.”
I remembered having a strong flash of memory while it was happening. Luca at the cage fight, months ago—pulling a cosh out of his hoodie and cold-cocking one of the alphas I’d been trying to fight off, even though he’d been terrified and outmatched.
“Emiel,” Luca said. “You’re not the danger.”
Dr. Mushimba tapped her pen on her notepad. “It sounds like you did experience roughly the same sequence of events. Luca, your mind may have filled in more details to help you make sense of the experience. Whereas you, Emiel, remember it more as a series of emotions.”
Luca was still watching me closely. “As long as we agree on what happened in the end,” he said.
I thought about the way the monster had seemed to disappear as soon as we were both trying to stop it. About the relief I’d felt, knowing we could beat it together.
“We can stop the darkness from getting us, now that we’re together,” I said, feeling the reality of the words settle into place.
“We don’t have to fight alone,” Luca whispered. Then, louder, “Please promise me you’ll remember that whenever things get hard.”
I stared at him, still in awe at the feeling of his emotions tucked inside of me. “Will you?” I asked.
“I’ll damn well try,” Luca said.
We’d agreed beforehand about how things would go down after the mating. Or, it might be more truthful to say that I’d insisted on it. No matter how many times the others told me that I didn’t need to worry about my alpha instincts getting out of control, I knew I still needed to be careful. Luca and Mia were too important to put at risk.
So, it was Nat who came in to visit us first, after the video consultation ended. He was my friend. A beta. Someone I could be pretty sure wouldn’t register in my instincts as a threat.
With Mia watching from the door of the room, he came in and wrapped me up in a hug.
“We need to stop doing this in hospital rooms,” he said. “Congratulations, you great lump. Now, I’m going to hug your mate, and you’re going to be fine with it, okay?”
And, it turned out, I was .
Luca’s happiness at being hugged by someone he trusted and cared for flooded through the bond, sending a warm flush outward from my chest.
Next was Zalen. An alpha. My pack alpha. And still, no territorial killing rage rose up inside me. Luca was going to mate Zalen, too. So was Mia. But not because Zalen wanted to take anything away from me.
Zalen always wanted to protect people. Even me ; god alone knew why. Having more alphas to protect the omegas was a good thing—especially a good, strong alpha like him.
“Congratulations,” he said, in that kind, reserved voice he always seemed to use with us. “I’m so happy for you both.” A glint of humor entered his gaze. “Now get a good night’s sleep and come back to work tomorrow. Heaven help me, I’ve left Byron in charge of the place.”
And... Byron .
Because... yeah. Byron was another thing entirely.
I wasn’t sure if he’d taken the reins at the Hope Project today because Zalen asked him to, or because he didn’t want to support my mating with Luca by being here at the clinic. It wasn’t until we’d all driven back to the house that evening that he finally acknowledged it, with a brittle smile and congratulations delivered in a monotone.
Luca’s uncertainty stabbed at me like a knife, but he didn’t press the issue—just gave his own brittle smile in return and excused himself for a shower. I went up to my room to get changed, and it wasn’t a huge surprise when Byron followed me up. I turned, waiting to see how bad this confrontation would be.
“Well,” Byron said, venom creeping into his tone. “I didn’t realize until too late that you and I were in a competition for him, but congratulations on winning it, I guess.”
“You got something to say, go ahead and say it plain,” I told him.
Byron bared his teeth. I doubted he even realized he was doing it, because it was so far from his usual cool mask of indifference.
“Are you planning on barring him from my bedroom, now that you’ve put your mark on him?” he demanded.
God, I’d wanted to do this so many times over the years, and I’d never let myself before. I pushed into Byron’s space, backing him up against the wall with my greater bulk and dominance. It felt way too good to see the spark of alarm in his gray eyes.
“The omegas in this pack do whatever the fuck they want,” I told him, not raising my voice. “You want to make Luca feel good? Great, knock yourself out. You want to make Luca feel bad for mating me first, instead of you?” I put a hand around Byron’s throat, not squeezing, but feeling his pulse thrumming rabbit-fast beneath my fingers. “Then you and I are gonna have a problem . And I’ll know if he’s upset. Don’t think I won’t.”
Byron swallowed hard. I let him go.
“If you think I want to see Luca hurt, you don’t know me at all,” he growled.
That night, Luca slept with me in my room. The next night, I slept in his nest with him and Mia and Nat, when she got off work at the restaurant.
The third night, Luca took me aside.
“I want to try something,” he said. “Will you let Mia handcuff you to the bed tonight, while I go spend time with Byron, and maybe Nat? Because I’m worried that Byron thinks I don’t want him anymore.”
I’d known this would be coming eventually. For some reason, it wasn’t as hard as I’d thought it might be. I drew breath to say yes, but Luca wasn’t finished yet.
“Also, there’s the small matter that we’ll be able to feel each other getting off now. Could be fun, right?”
I pictured Mia riding my cock while Luca was having sex with someone else, each of us able to feel every moment of what the other was doing. My breath caught.
“Yeah,” I managed.
It turned out, Byron wanted to make Luca feel really, really good. Not just once, but four times. Almost five. None of us got much sleep that night... but hey, that was what coffee was for, right?