Chapter 35 Remi
The heat hits like a collapsing star.
I wake up in the nest, and the cashmere beneath me isn't soft anymore. It's ash. My skin feels like a live coal, radiating a temperature I didn't know a human body could survive without burning from the inside out.
My ribs expand, pressing against my lungs, and every breath I pull in feels like a crack of fire against my skin.
I twist, my hands gripping the blankets, tangling in the fabric as a low, involuntary hiss escapes my throat.
“I need one knot,” I beg as a heavy, dragging gravity pulls every nerve ending tight. The room air is thick with the smell of bourbon, chocolate and orange.
The three notes of my pack, amplified by my body's desperation, wrapping around my throat and pulling me up from the mattress.
Steele is leaning against the doorframe, his dark eyes locked on my chest, watching the rapid rise and fall of my breathing.
Crew is sitting at the edge of the chair in the corner, his hands resting on his knees, perfectly still but carrying the tension of a coiled spring.
Knox is standing by the window, his sleeves rolled up, his posture rigid.
They're a circle I can't break, and I don't want to.
"You're burning," Steele says. His voice is a low rumble, more physical vibration than sound.
"I feel as if I'm dying." The words slide out of me. "Everything is too hot."
“I’ll call the doctor,” he replies and leaves the room.
The room is dim, the heavy curtains drawn tight against the morning light.
Knox and Crew wait and breathe the same air as me, waiting for the exact moment the fever breaks the surface.
Steele returns. “Dr. Avery said if her temperature stays at one zero two, she is going into a real heat.”
“She’s just asked to be knotted.”
Slick gushes. My scent spikes.
And then I hiss as I blink the sweat from my eyes.
“Ohh, she’s never made that noise before,” Crew says.
“Knot me.” I crawl across the nest to my alphas, looking at the three men as they wait.
Steele crosses the room in two strides. He doesn't hesitate, doesn't ask permission to breach the nest. He reaches down, his large hands sliding under my arms, and lifts me from the soaked blankets.
My legs are useless. Steele knows this and wraps my legs around his waist. I fall against his chest. His body is solid, cool against my fevered skin.
"Shower," he says to the room, though he's looking down at me. "I want to bring the surface temperature down before it peaks."
He carries me to the en-suite bathroom. I lean my head against his shoulder, my nose buried in the crook of his neck. Chocolate. Dark and bitter and grounding. I inhale the scent, my hands gripping his shirt, my knuckles white.
The bathroom is massive. Sleek slate and glass, a cold, clinical space that is more like a hotel, rather than a sanctuary.
Steele opens the shower door and turns the dial.
He doesn't wait for the water to warm. He steps in with me in his arms, fully clothed, holding me against his chest as the spray hits us.
Cold water hisses against my skin. I gasp, arching my back.
Steam curls up, filling the glass enclosure with a thick veil of vapor.
Steele's hands are firm, holding me steady under the spray. "Breathe," he orders. "Just breathe, Rem."
I try, but my breath comes in ragged, wet hitches. The water runs down my face, plastering my hair to my neck. It cools the outer layer of my skin, but the heat inside my core only tightens, winding itself into a hotter, tighter knot.
The glass door slides open. Crew steps in.
He's stripped off his shirt, the muscles of his chest and abdomen slick with the spray within seconds. He doesn't speak. He reaches for a bottle on the shelf and steps behind me.
Crew begins to wash my hair.
The sensation of his fingers massaging my scalp travels straight down my spine. The shampoo mixes with the bourbon-orange haze clinging to the tiles, and his thumbs press into the base of my skull in a firm, rhythmic pressure that grounds me in my body while the heat tries to tear me out of it.
"You're doing perfectly," Crew murmurs, his mouth close to my ear. His breath is warm over my wet skin. "Let the water take some of it."
Steele is still holding me from the front, his soaked shirt clinging to him, his hands tracing the line of my ribs, mapping the heat.
Crew is behind me, his fingers working through the tangles of my hair, washing away the sweat and the fear.
I'm surrounded by them, held up by them, and for the first time since the fever spiked, the panic starts to recede.
The heat is still there, a massive, demanding presence, but I'm not fighting it alone.
The water slows, then cuts off.
Knox is standing outside the glass door, a massive soft white towel in his hands. He looks at me, his eyes dark, his jaw tense.
The air in the bathroom is now thick with steam and the heavy musk of three alphas in a confined space with an omega in heat.
Steele helps my feet hit the ground, and Knox wraps the towel around my shoulders and lifts me completely out of the shower.
Knox carries me back to the bedroom. The nest has been smoothed, the ruined cashmere replaced with fresh, cool sheets. Cushions and blankets arranged around the bed.
Each man has left a piece of clothing on the nest. A worn practice jersey from Steele. Crew's gray hoodie. Knox's thick wool sweater. They're still warm from their bodies — a network of heat, scent markers that tell my omega I'm surrounded, claimed, and safe.
The clothing helps my heat to progress from wanting to get this over with to needing this to happen.
My slick flows.
Knox sets me down gently, his hands lingering on my waist as he rubs the towel over my arms, my back, drying the cold water from my skin. His touch is methodical, precise, keeping himself controlled even when I can smell the spike of his own arousal, thick and heavily bourbon-laced.
His lightweight dark gray shirt sits at the edge of the bed. Knox picks it up and pulls it over my head. The fabric is impossibly soft, breathable, and it smells of him. Cool against my skin rather than trapping the fire.
I sit in the center of the bed, the oversized shirt falling to my mid-thigh. My hair is damp, my skin still humming, the fever pulsing in my veins in a steady, inescapable rhythm.
"How is your knee?"
My hand instinctively goes to it, then pulls back. The throbbing is duller in the heat.
"Fine," I say. "It's fine."
Knox kneels by the edge of the bed. Steele walks in a moment later, having stripped off his wet clothes, now wearing dark sweatpants, his chest bare. Crew follows, running a towel through his wet hair.
They form a perimeter around the bed. Three men who have rearranged their lives, their ideas of pack, to stand in this room with me.
Knox is watching me for any sign of fear.
Steele is ready to absorb whatever I throw at him.
Crew is, as always, listening to my heart rate.
"I want this," I say. My voice isn't a whisper. It's raw, as if hot coals have been scraped over my throat, but it doesn't shake. "I want all of you."
Knox's eyes darken but he smiles.
"Are you sure?" Steele asks, his voice thick. The final check. The last moment before the line is crossed.
"I need you," I say, the heat forcing the absolute truth out of me. "I need every one of you now."
The pack nods. The decision is made, not by biology alone, but by a choice.
My choice. They refused to listen when I asked to be knotted. They knew I needed to be pulled back a little to allow them to hear my consent.
God, I consent. But I understand why. I’m an omega who was always scared to say what she wanted. Now I want to shout it from the rooftop.
Steele shifts behind me, drawing me upright against his chest, his arms bracketing my waist so I'm sitting supported between his thick thighs.
"Your fire drives me, Remi," he says, his thumb brushing the curve of my hip, dipping under the hem of the shirt.
Knox leans forward, his hands cupping my face. "Omega," he murmurs, his voice low.
"Alpha," I whisper.
"I feel you burning." Crew kneels beside me at the edge of bed, his hands sliding over my body, his touch a grounding wire for the electricity snapping under my skin.
Knox drops to his knees between my legs, his hands sliding up the insides of my thighs with deliberate pressure, and spreading me open.
The gray shirt rides up. I'm already swollen, glistening, slick running in slow trails down my inner thighs.
"Look at you," Knox rasps, voice wrecked. "So fucking wet already. Dripping for your alphas before we've even touched you properly." His thumbs part my folds, exposing me completely. "This is mine to taste first."
He doesn't tease. His mouth descends in one long, hungry lick from entrance to clit, flattening his tongue to collect every drop.
I arch hard, a broken cry tearing out of me. He groans against me as if I'm the best thing he's ever had. This time he sounds more like an animal, and he is vibrating through my core.
"Open wide for me, Remi," Crew murmurs, voice low and velvet. "Let me feel that pretty mouth around me while Knox eats you."
I turn my head, lips parting.
Crew's cock is thick, flushed dark, already leaking at the tip. He strokes himself once, slow, eyes locked on my face before he guides himself in, slow at first, letting me adjust to the stretch as the salty taste of him floods my tongue.
I moan around him, the vibration making his hips jerk. His hand cups the back of my head, not forcing but steadying.
"That's it," he breathes. "Just like that. Take what you need."
Knox sucks my clit into his mouth at the same moment, hard and rhythmic. Two fingers slide inside me, thick, curling, and my vision whites out.
“Oh my—”
My legs shake as slick gushes around his knuckles.
“Good girl.” He drinks it down without pause. "Fuck, you taste like heaven and sin," he mutters between licks. "So sweet. So goddamn needy. Come on my face, omega. Drench me. I want to wear you."