Fifty-Six
FIFTY-SIX
Zalen
FEW THINGS LEFT me feeling as torn as Luca’s heats. I hated the way his loss of control tortured him, both before and after the fact. Hated it. But when biology held its sway and finally brought down his barriers, it was the only glimpse I ever got of Luca as he might have been, if not for the cruelty of fate—and the gang that had hurt him.
Every time we did this, Luca began his heat by refusing any comfort once his body released our knots. After his passage unclamped, he would lie curled in a miserable fetal position among the cushions and blankets, flinching away from any attempt to hold him. Every single time, it broke my heart to see it.
But as the days wore on and his awareness of what was happening faded, he uncoiled by increments, until finally, during his last couple of peaks, he would accept our touch while he rested after knotting. It was a heady feeling—this fey, wild creature finally submitting to our care.
And I knew exactly why it unearthed those feelings within me. After losing Julie so unexpectedly... after feeling our mating bond snap in an instant while I was away on a business trip, leaving only a torn and bloody stump behind, I didn’t think I would ever have it in me to sign up for that kind of heartbreak again. But, here and now, there was an omega who needed me. Two omegas, at least for this brief interlude of a few short days.
It was enough. It had to be.
I knew it was harder for Byron. He had his own set of issues. They were different from mine. Different from Luca’s. Different from Emiel’s—not that Emiel had opened up to any of us about whatever it was that had driven him to the Hope Project... or to the cage fights.
Byron sometimes looked like a knife was twisting in his heart when Luca relaxed into his care. I’d never been able to tell if it was a good kind of pain or a bad kind of pain. And, interestingly enough, that tortured expression had been completely absent from his features as he’d held Mia earlier.
I wasn’t sure what that meant, or if it meant anything at all.
In my arms, Luca’s scent shifted. If I hadn’t been on dampeners, that shift would’ve signaled my alpha hindbrain to emerge from the rutting haze so I could care for my omega between peaks. As it was, it signaled Luca’s silky-hot passage releasing its death grip on my knot, which immediately started to subside as the pressure went away.
Normally, Luca wouldn’t have accepted my continued touch this early in his heat. But Mia’s presence had changed the dynamic somehow. I’d felt the shift, watching them cling to each other when Mia had first arrived in the nest. And now, rather than squirming away from me, Luca cautiously settled into my embrace as I eased us down to lie on our sides.
Equally cautious, I let a low purr vibrate up from my chest. Luca went rigid for a moment, but then his breath sighed out, taking all his tension with it.
The moment I closed my eyes in relief, the doorknob turned. Dampeners or no, instinct flared at the sudden intrusion to the nest. A ridiculous response on my part—it was only Byron, back from checking on Mia and Emiel after they’d been gone longer than I was comfortable with.
But Byron wasn’t carrying Mia back to the nest with him. He was alone, his scent bristling with something sharp that I couldn’t quite identify. My purr cut off abruptly.
Byron drew breath in a way that said whatever words were coming next would be angry ones—but his gray eyes snapped to the dozing omega in my arms, and he caught himself at the last moment.
When he did speak, the words were a low monotone. Not emotionless—because his emotions still came through loud and clear—but controlled, at least.
“You need to go sort out Emiel downstairs. He’s knot-deep in Mia, and I don’t trust him not to flip his shit and scare her before she releases him.”
Adrenaline shot through my veins.
“You’re sure?” I asked tightly, as if that wasn’t the single stupidest question on the planet. Of course he was sure.
Luca made an unhappy noise in my arms, wriggling restlessly. Byron raised a pointed eyebrow that clearly conveyed his disdain for the question. I took two slow, deep breaths, modulating my scent before Luca really started to get upset.
“Right. Okay. Can you get your reactions under control well enough to take my place with Luca?” I asked, keeping my voice low and calm.
“Probably,” Byron replied through gritted teeth.
“ Probably isn’t good enough.” I wanted to bark the words, but I didn’t.
Byron hesitated. His bare, tattooed chest rose and fell on a breath. “Yes.”
I stroked a hand through Luca’s sweaty hair, soothing him while Byron stripped off the track pants he’d been wearing and crouched down next to us.
“Hey, Luca,” I told him. “Byron’s subbing in for a bit. He’ll watch over you.”
Luca made a little distracted humming noise and burrowed deeper into the pillows. Taking that as assent, I swapped places with the other alpha, keeping a hand on Luca to steady him until Byron was settled behind him.
“Did Mia seem upset at all?” I asked, keeping my voice low enough that it hopefully wouldn’t penetrate Luca’s post-knotting haze.
“Well, she was climaxing like a freight train at the time, so I’m going with ‘no,’” Byron snarked. “I’m more worried about what’ll happen when Mr. Knot-for-Brains realizes what he just did. He’s on dampeners, but he sure as hell wasn’t acting like he was on dampeners.”
I nodded, not bothering with a reply before grabbing the joggers Byron had discarded and pulling them on. I closed the door of the nest carefully behind me and took the stairs two at a time, sending a prayer to the universe that whatever I was about to walk in on wouldn’t be too bad.
It wasn’t hard to follow the scent to the scene of the proverbial crime.
“Emiel?” I called as I approached the TV room. There was no reply, but I could hear ragged breathing coming from within. “Emiel. Mia. I’m coming in. Everything’s fine, I’m just checking on you.”
My reassuring speech was met with a low snarl as I passed through the open doorway. Mia’s nervous whimper followed.
Okay, then .
“Everything’s fine,” I repeated, since that had worked so well the first time.
I took in the makeshift blanket-fort Emiel had tried to construct as a den. I kept speaking as I approached the opening where it draped from the couch seat to the floor.
“Hey, Emiel—you with me at all? I’m guessing this was a bit unexpected. Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked you to bring her down here on your own. No harm done, though... heats can get crazy. Can you talk to me, please?”
I settled cross-legged a few feet from the opening, trying to make visual sense of the shadows huddled within. The silence stretched for too long.
“ No ,” Emiel rasped, barely audible.
“Okay,” I said, putting everything I had into projecting calm control of the situation. What a joke . “How about I just sit here with you both for a bit. We’ll let Mia enjoy her knot.”
More silence, broken only by that terrible, ragged breathing. It dragged on even longer this time.
“I shouldn’t’ve.”
And, oh crap. I’d never heard Emiel’s voice shake before.
“I think your dampeners failed,” I said, not sure what approach might make the situation better rather than worse. “And I’m guessing she initiated, to put it mildly. Again, I’m sorry, Emiel. But I promise this is going to be all right, yeah?”
Another long pause, and when Emiel finally spoke this time, he sounded like he was choking on something.
“I nearly... her mating gland...”
I went very still, because idiot that I was, that hadn’t even occurred to me. But ‘nearly’ wasn’t a bite. Nothing irrevocable had happened.
“But you didn’t,” I said. “And you wouldn’t , because I know you, Emiel. So, you’re both okay. She had a birth control shot, and the only repercussion is that she’s likely to feel really bad about blowing past your boundaries. And that’s assuming she even remembers this happened.”
“ I raped her, Zalen .” It came out as a whisper, thick with intensity.
It was all I could do not to recoil from the self-hatred beneath that shaky tone. I hated the couple of seconds it took me to center myself and choose what I hoped were the right words.
“ Emiel . I have a feeling Mia’s going to disagree strongly with that interpretation, once she’s in a position to address it. But until then, you being upset is upsetting her.” I saw the shadows inside the makeshift den flinch. “Right now, she needs you to be calm. We’re going to do that box-breathing exercise we teach the kids. With me—in, two, three, four... hold, two, three, four... out, two, three, four... hold, two, three, four.”
I repeated the sequence, feeling like a bit of an idiot at first, but fresh out of other ideas. Eventually, the ragged breathing from inside the tent evened out, falling into the right rhythm. I kept it up, the minutes sliding past until Mia’s pheromones shifted.
“She’s going to release you now,” I said, striving to maintain that same calm. “I’ll take her back to the nest with the others, but then if you want to talk—”
The blanket heaved and fell away. Emiel was on his feet in an instant; out the door in the next. I sighed, letting him go in favor of tending to Mia, who was whining low in the back of her throat.
“Hey, sweetheart,” I said, gathering her in my arms. “You’re okay. I’ve got you.”
“ Emiel ,” she whimpered. No fear or pain marred her sweet summer scent. Only sadness and confusion.
“He’s okay, too.” The lie left a bitter taste as it slipped past my lips, but the truth was that none of us could help Emiel until Emiel let himself be helped. I still had no idea what old injury lay beneath his behavior, and without knowing more, I was stuck. “He has to go to work now, so let me carry you back up to the nest in a few minutes, all right? Luca and Byron are waiting for us.”
She burrowed into me unhappily, but she didn’t protest. I kept her warm body bundled close to mine for a bit longer, making sure that she wasn’t showing any signs of physical discomfort. When her breathing evened out into sleep with no indication of any problems, I sighed in relief and hauled her up in a bridal carry.
The stairs leading to the second floor reminded me how tired I’d been for the past few months. When the omegas were out of heat and recovered enough to look after themselves, my post-heat crash was going to be an ugly one this time around.
For now, though, biology meant that sleep wasn’t in the cards.
I gave a couple of light knocks on the door of the nest with my bare heel and called, “It’s just us, Byron. We’re coming in.”
Luca was out like a snuffed candle, with Byron still spooning him from behind.
The alpha raised his head as we entered.
“She doing all right?” he asked.
“Seems to be, yeah,” I said.
“ He doing all right?” Byron’s tone was grudging.
“No fucking clue, but signs point to no .” I carried Mia over and settled her in front of Luca, who immediately shuffled forward in his sleep and plastered himself against her.
I was just about to lower myself down next to her when the distinctive rumble of an eight-cylinder Detroit engine reached me from outside, followed by a squeal of tires. I hurried to the room’s single window and tweaked the heavy blackout curtains a couple of inches to the side—just in time to see a familiar gray classic Bronco peel out of the driveway and slew down the quiet residential road.
“Well, shit ,” I cursed, watching it go helplessly.