Chapter 3 Birds Of Prey #4
One arm beneath her thighs, the other supporting her back, lifting her against my chest in a motion so practiced it’s become second nature.
She’s light—lighter than she should be, the product of irregular meals and chronic physical expenditure and the particular kind of thinness that comes from a body that burns fuel faster than its owner remembers to replace it.
Her arms wrap around my neck automatically, fingers lacing behind my head, and the contact sends a fresh surge of heat through me that has nothing to do with the stove still warming at our backs.
I carry her to the kitchen table.
The wood is sturdy—I know this because I reinforced the legs myself six months ago, after an incident that tested the structural integrity of the original carpentry and found it wanting.
The surface is clear, the breakfast I was preparing temporarily deprioritized in favor of more pressing appetites.
I set her on the edge.
The bare skin of her thighs meets the cool wood, and she tenses briefly at the temperature difference—her body’s chronic sensitivity registering the cold surface with a sharp inhale that she converts into something steadier as she adjusts.
Her legs part to accommodate my position between them with the motion, and the scent that rises to meet me is—
Fuck.
Her arousal.
It cuts through the morning air like a blade through silk—cold iris and night rain and the hidden sweetness that her suppressants work so hard to bury, amplified now by desire, by need, by the biochemical cascade that her Omega biology has been building since the first press of my mouth to hers.
It infiltrates my nostrils, bypasses every rational circuit I possess, and communicates directly with the primitive core of my Alpha neurology in a language that predates speech.
It’s been a while.
My cock twitches against the thin cotton of my boxers—a sharp, insistent pulse that my body doesn’t bother disguising because disguise is pointless when you’re standing between an Omega’s open thighs and her scent is rewriting your brain chemistry in real time.
The feral part of me—that restless, caged thing that lives in the basement of my consciousness—strains against its restraints with a hunger that makes my grip on the table’s edge tighten until the wood groans.
“You like awakening a beast so early in the day.”
My voice is rougher now. Lower. The Alpha register bleeding through in ways I’m not entirely controlling, each word carrying a vibration that I can feel in my own chest and know she can feel in hers—that subsonic frequency that speaks to the Omega parts of her brain that no amount of suppressants can fully silence.
She looks up at me—those storm-gray eyes heavy-lidded, her lips still swollen from the kiss, her chest rising and falling with breaths that are faster than her pride wants them to be—and delivers her response with the flat, factual tone of someone correcting a minor clerical error.
“It’s afternoon.”
I smirk.
She’s right. She’s always right about things like this—the time, the weather, the direction of danger before it announces itself.
Victoria reads the world the way most people read books—absorbing data through every available channel, processing it with an efficiency that borders on preternatural.
She knows it’s afternoon because of the angle of light through the kitchen window, the position of the sun filtered through the forest canopy, the way the shadows fall across the floor in patterns she’s memorized through years of living in this same condemned sanctuary.
“How do you know?”
The question is unnecessary.
I know how she knows. She knows I know how she knows.
The question exists only to extend the moment—to keep her looking at me with those impossible eyes while the tension between us builds toward the inevitable tipping point that’s been approaching since she walked into this kitchen in that leather bodysuit with those bare legs and that half-asleep pout that undoes me more completely than any calculated seduction ever could.
She doesn’t answer.
She doesn’t have to.
We exist in the silence the way we always do—two people who have learned that the most important things between them are communicated in the spaces where words aren’t.
Her legs are warm around me now, the chronic coolness of her skin finally yielding to the heat I’m generating, and her hands have come to rest on my shoulders with a lightness that belies the strength in her fingers.
The bandages beneath her bodysuit are a reminder that I need to be careful, that the body I’m about to worship is still in the process of repairing itself.
I’ll be careful.
With the wound.
Everything else is fair game.
I look into her eyes.
Those storm-gray, cobalt-ringed, impossibly guarded eyes that have seen things no twenty-seven-year-old should have seen and processed them with a stoicism that most combat veterans would envy.
Eyes that go blank when the void takes her, that stare into distances that don’t exist, that occasionally—rarely, devastatingly—light up with something real when the world delivers an experience she hasn’t pre-emptively defended herself against.
I live for that light.
Would kill for it.
Have killed for less.
I lean close.
Close enough that my breath mingles with hers, that the tips of our noses nearly touch, that the entire world narrows to the space between our mouths and the charged air that occupies it.
“You’re going to be nice and loud for me?”
The words land on her lips like a match on gasoline.
She doesn’t answer.
I don’t need her to.
Because I know—with the certainty of a man who has spent three years learning this woman’s body the way a musician learns an instrument, memorizing every point of pleasure and every threshold of resistance, cataloguing every gasp and moan and bitten-back cry that she produces when the walls come down and the void retreats and Victoria Sinclair allows herself, for a few stolen minutes, to be something other than empty—
She’ll be screaming my name by the end of this.
That’s a promise to my feral self.