18. Bo #2
It was impossible not to.
“I see you,” she said.
I had to close my eyes. Couldn’t help it. I pressed my forehead against hers and kept moving, kept the rhythm, kept the long deep strokes that were taking us both somewhere I hadn’t allowed myself in a decade.
“I see you too,” I managed.
“I know.”
She was close. I could feel it. The way her body had started to tighten around me. The way her breathing had gone shallow. The way her thighs were trembling against my sides. I shifted my angle, dropped to one elbow, slid my other hand down between us to find her where we joined.
She gasped. Sharp. Shocked.
“Bo, I can't, I'm going to...”
“Yeah you can, baby. Yeah you can. I want to see every second of pleasure move across your face as you come on my cock.”
She groaned at the words. As the alpha inside me rose up and whispered the filth I knew she needed to hear.
I felt it start. The pressure building. The thickening at the base.
I had thought, when I let myself think about this at all in the past seven years, that I might be broken for knotting.
That Ellis had taken that from me too. She had not.
I felt the swell coming and I had to gasp into Noa's mouth.
This is what I was born to do. I was an alpha and the thought of tying this perfect creature to me just made the knot swell faster.
“Do you want my knot, omega?” I whispered and she shuddered beneath me.
“Yes.”
“It's coming.”
“Yes. Oh god, yes.”
Then the knot caught and locked. I drove deep one last time and felt the seal take.
She arched up under me and came with my name in her mouth, her body clenched around me, drawing me out of myself in long shaking pulses I couldn’t stop.
I felt the heat of her grip and the slick wet welcome of her and the way she pulled at me, took me, kept me.
My own climax rolled through me in waves that didn’t stop, that the lock of my knot drew out and out until I lost track of how long it had been going on.
She came again somewhere in the middle of it. Smaller this time. An aftershock that made her cry out softer and yet still filled with desperate need. Her body wringing the last of me out of me. I held her through it, my whole weight braced over her, my mouth at her temple.
The bite spot pulled at me.
I had felt the urge with the kisses. I had felt it when I was behind her and her shoulder was right there at my mouth.
Now it was a hammer. The bonding spot, the soft place where neck met shoulder, calling me, screaming at me.
Every animal thing I had been muzzling for seven years was howling at me to set my teeth into her and seal what we had just made.
I bent my head. My mouth was at her neck. I felt the pulse there. I felt my own teeth aching for it. The way her hand had come up to the back of my head, holding me there, not pulling me away. She would have let me. She would have let me bite her right then and there.
And that was why I couldn't.
Not like this. Not in private. Not without the others. If we were going to make this real, we were going to make it real where everyone could see it. All three of us together. Or none.
So I pulled back.
I kissed the spot instead. Hard. With teeth, but no break. A promise.
“Bo.” Her hand was tight in my hair. “Bo, was that...”
“No.”
“Why didn't you...”
“All three of us. Together. Or none.”
“Oh.” Her breath hitched. “Oh, Bo. OK. Yes. OK.”
The knot held for a long time.
We lay locked together while my body emptied itself into hers in pulses I couldn’t control, while she came down slowly from her own climax, while the third wave that had been pushing at the edges of all of this finally crested, broke and started to ebb.
When it was done. When I could move again. I rolled us carefully onto our sides, my arm under her head, the knot still tight between us. She tucked herself against me, and I held her there.
“Bo.”
“Mm.”
“That was the most you've ever talked to me.”
I laughed. Quiet. Surprised.
“Yeah.”
“Was it the heat?”
“No.”
“What was it?”
I had to think about it. I had to find the words. They came slower than I wanted, but they came.
“Was you,” I said. “It was you saying you'd let me turn you. Was you trusting I needed to see your face. Was you saying you saw me.”
She was crying again. Quiet tears.
“Bo.”
“I was going to die alone up here,” I said. “I had it figured out. I had it worked out in my head. The way I’d do it. Where I'd be buried. Calder knew. Shepherd knew. They didn't agree but they were going to let me.”
She made a sound. Soft. Broken.
“It wasn't a plan exactly,” I said. “Wasn't anything I was going to choose. It was just what was going to happen. Eventually. The last cage.”
“Bo.”
“Then you came up the steps.”
She pressed her face into my chest.
“I'm not dying alone now,” I said. “I don't even know how to want that anymore. You took it. Just by being here. Just by understanding that I might need to see your face.”
“Bo.”
“I love you,” I said. Plain. The first time I’d said it to a living person in fifteen years. “I'm not asking you to say it back. Just need you to know. Whatever comes after this. You should know.”
She held me. Crying harder now. The knot pulsed inside her one more time, drawing another long shaking exhale out of her, and then it began at last to ease.
“I love you too,” she whispered. “Bo. I love you too. All of you.”
We stayed like that.
When the knot finally eased, I didn’t pull away. I stayed inside her, soft now, comfortable, and I felt her breathing slow against my chest.
“Calder,” she said. Not loud. He heard her anyway.
He came over. Knelt down beside us. His hand found her hair, smoothed it back from her temple. Shepherd appeared on her other side, glasses off, his hand finding her shoulder.
“Hi,” she whispered to them.
“Hi,” Calder said.
“Hi,” Shepherd said.
“Stay.”
“We're staying.”
“All of you.”
“All of us.”
I felt her settle. Her breathing slow. Her body soften against mine.
Calder lay down behind her, one arm around her waist, his chest against her back.
Shepherd stretched out across the bottom of the bed, his hand on her calf.
The four of us in the blanket nest by the fire, tangled together by something none of us had words for, while the storm howled outside.
She fell asleep first.
The three of us looked at each other over her head. Said nothing. Didn’t need to. Calder's eyes found mine and held them for a long moment, and what passed between us was everything we hadn’t said in seven years, and everything we didn’t need to say now.
I had been told once, by an old guide who taught me to track in the high country, that wolves didn’t love. And that was how packs should function. That what looked like devotion was just survival. It was a mirror of nature and anything else was a pollution of what packs were supposed to be.
I had believed him at the time.
But now I lay here with my omega in my arms and the men I built a life with sleeping curled around her, and I knew the old guide had been wrong. I had known it for years, really. I just hadn't been ready to say so.
I closed my eyes. Letting myself drift in the peace I’d unexpectedly found here.
Some part of me waited for the old instinct. The pull toward the loft. The need to be alone, away, separate. But it didn’t come. There was nothing in me anymore that wanted to be anywhere but here.
The first thing I felt, before sleep took me, was an ease so deep I almost didn’t recognize it.
I was home.