Chapter 15 Mattaniah #2
The world goes soft at the edges as my body stops responding to my instructions.
The hands gripping my hips feel very far away, and the sounds I was making taper off into silence as my muscles go slack against the mattress.
My breathing slows into something deeper than consciousness, a warm heaviness that pulls me down until I can't find the surface.
"Tell me how it feels." Dominic's voice reaches me from somewhere above, his hand tightening on my neck. "Mattaniah. Tell me how it feels."
My mouth opens but nothing comes out. The words are somewhere in my chest but the connection between my brain and my tongue has been severed. I can hear his command but I can't respond.
"Answer me when I speak to you." His voice sharpens, his Alpha bark pouring into the words.
My body should snap to attention the way it always does when an Alpha uses that frequency, but nothing happens.
I float somewhere above the mattress, detached from my own limbs, unable to find my way back to my mouth.
"Dom." Amos' voice cuts through the fog from my left, hard and stripped of every trace of warmth. "Stop. Right now."
Dominic's hips stutter.
"Look at his eyes, Dom." Amos is beside me now, turning my face toward him. I can see his expression through the haze even though I can't make my mouth work to tell him I'm okay. "He's gone. He can't hear you. He can't respond. You need to pull out right now."
The hands release my hips. Dominic withdraws and the emptiness registers somewhere in the floating distance of my awareness. The mattress shifts as Amos' hands cup my face, his thumbs stroking my cheekbones.
"Niah. I need you to come back to me." His voice softens. "You're safe. You're in your room. Can you hear me?"
I can hear him. I just can't find the way back up. The place I've fallen into is warm and vast, and the part of me that's been holding everything together for weeks wants to stay here where nothing requires effort.
"Squeeze my hand if you can hear me." His fingers thread through mine and I try to close my grip.
My fingers respond sluggishly, a weak pressure that makes Amos exhale.
"There you go." He lies down beside me and pulls me against his chest, his scent filling my nose and his heartbeat pulsing against my ear. "Just follow my voice. No rush, Niah."
Minutes pass. Maybe ten, maybe twenty. The warm place releases its hold in increments, awareness seeping back as sensation returns.
Amos' chest against my cheek first. Then the soreness in my hips where Dominic's hands gripped too hard.
Then the sound of breathing that isn't mine, two sets of it, one against my hair and one from across the room.
I open my eyes. Amos is wrapped around me. Dominic is sitting on the far side of the bed with his back against the headboard and his hands clenched on his knees, staring at me with a look I've never seen from him.
He looks horrified.
"There you are." Amos' voice is warm against my temple. "Welcome back."
My mouth works. "What happened to me?"
"You dropped." Amos strokes my hair. "Your body decided it was safe enough to let go completely, and your conscious mind went somewhere deep. Some Omegas do that with dominant Alphas they trust, especially after being knotted when the nervous system is already wide open."
"Dropped." That word doesn't come close to what I just experienced. "That felt like disappearing."
"The clinical term is subspace." Amos' thumb traces circles against my scalp.
"Your motor functions go offline. Speech, voluntary movement, sometimes your ability to track what's happening around you.
Your body stays responsive but the part of you that makes decisions goes somewhere your conscious mind can't reach. "
I swallow. My throat is dry. "I could hear Dominic telling me to answer him. I wanted to respond and I couldn't. My brain and my mouth weren't connected anymore."
"I know." Amos' arm tightens around me. "That's what happens when the drop is deep."
A sort of uncomfortable quiet settles between us. My fingers are still threaded through Amos', gripping harder than I mean to, Dominic's gaze on me from across the bed even with my eyes closed.
"Has that ever happened to you?" I turn my face further into Amos' chest as I ask it, my voice muffled against his shirt. "The... subspace."
"Once." His hand keeps its rhythm in my hair. "With Dominic. If the Alpha handles it right, it feels incredible."
"It didn't feel incredible." My grip on his hand tightens and my eyes burn. "It felt like I was drowning in something warm and I couldn't find the surface."
"Because I fucked up." Dominic's voice comes from across the bed, stripped raw. "I wasn't watching you. I was too deep in my own shit and I missed every sign that you were going under." A low growl rumbles through his chest. "I had no idea you'd go under that fast," he says.
"Neither did I." My voice comes out ragged and I press closer to Amos' chest. "I've spent my whole life keeping a grip on everything.
White-knuckling it through every shitty situation my mother put me in.
" The tears spill over, slipping onto Amos’ skin.
"Tonight my body just let go without asking me first."
Amos' arms tighten around me as he presses his lips against the top of my head, his thumb wiping a tear from my temple.
"You trusted me." Dominic's voice cracks. "And I wasn't paying attention."
"Dom." Amos says it gently over my head. "Come closer. He needs you."
Dominic moves to the edge, my hand leaving Amos' shirt and stretches across the mattress toward him. My fingers find his and his close around mine so carefully it makes the tears come faster. He raises my hand to his mouth, leaving a soft kiss across my knuckles.
"I'm sorry." The authority that usually lives in his voice is completely absent. "Mattaniah, I'm sorry."
"You stopped when Amos told you to." I squeeze his hand through the tears, my voice hitching. "You stopped."
"I should have known before he needed to tell me."
"But you did stop." I pull his hand toward me and press it against my chest where he can feel my heartbeat hammering against my ribs. "I'm here. I'm okay."
Amos adjusts his position and reaches for Dominic, pulling him closer until the three of us are tangled together.
Dominic's arm comes around my waist from behind while Amos stays pressed against my front, Dominic's forehead pressing between my shoulder blades with his breathing uneven against my skin.
We lie like that for a while, the three of us breathing together in the dark, and my body should be winding down.
Amos' knot broke the spike. I've been held and talked through whatever the hell just happened to me.
Instead, my skin starts crawling. The restlessness begins as a twitchiness in my legs that makes me shift against the mattress, then spreads until my whole body feels like it's vibrating.
My hips move without my permission, pressing backward against Dominic, then forward against Amos, searching for something deeper than skin contact.
The spike is gone, but something inside me is still hollow and aching and I don't understand why.
"What's happening to me?" My voice comes out thin and panicky. "Amos, something's wrong. The spike broke. I felt it break, so why do I still feel like this?"
Amos' hand finds my face. "Your body went through a lot tonight, Niah. The spike, the knot, the drop. Your nervous system is overloaded and it's looking for something to anchor to."
"That's not helpful." My legs are shaking again, a bout of fresh slick gathering, my body doing things I haven't authorized while I grit my teeth against the humiliation. "I don't understand what it wants. I already had a knot, so why am I still..."
My hips jerk backward against Dominic, his cock twitching against my lower back. A sound escapes me that's half whimper and half frustrated groan because I just went through something terrifying with this Alpha but my body is pressing against his cock like nothing happened.
"What is wrong with me?" I whisper it into Amos' chest. "Seriously, what is actually wrong with me, because this doesn't feel normal, and I'm scared."
Dominic's mouth presses against the back of my neck. "Nothing is wrong with you."
"Everything feels too open and too empty and my body keeps reaching for something and I can't figure out what it is." My voice climbs higher, an edge to it that doesn’t feel like my own. "I can't sleep like this."
"Settle." The command is gentle but firm against my skin.
"I can't, Dominic." The tears are back, pressing hot behind my eyes. "I'm trying and I can't, and I don't know what's happening to me and I'm scared and I need..." My breath hitches. "I need something and I don't even know what it is."
His hand slides down my stomach to my hip. His thumb traces the bruise he left earlier before shifting behind me, his cock pressing against me, thickening, the head finding the slick mess between my thighs.
"I'm going to fill you up." His voice drops low. "I'm going to push inside you and you're going to feel my knot at the base, and you're going to fall asleep exactly like that. Full of me. With Amos holding you and my cock so deep inside you that you'll feel me with every breath."
The words short-circuit my brain before I come back online and realize what I’m looking for. My Omega needs to fix this, he needs to know we didn’t break whatever this is between us and Dominic. "Yes." My voice breaks on the word. "Please."
He pushes in slowly enough that I feel every inch of him slide past the oversensitive rim and fill the emptiness that's been driving me crazy.
My body opens around him without resistance, the sensation of being filled again wringing a sound from me that I muffle against Amos' chest. He keeps pressing forward until his hips are flush against my ass and I can feel his knot, uninflated but thick at the base, stretching me just a little wider.
"There." His arm wraps around my waist and holds me against him. "Feel that?"
"Yes." I shift my hips experimentally and the knot shifts inside me, pressing against my walls. The restlessness vanishes so abruptly my eyes water, gone between one breath and the next. "Oh. Oh, that's..."
"Your body knows what it needs, firefly." His mouth presses against the curve of my ear. "And your Alpha isn't going anywhere."
Amos pulls the blanket over us from the front as his hand finds my face.
His thumb traces my lower lip and I take it in without hesitation, my jaw closing around the familiar comfort while Dominic is buried to the hilt inside me from behind.
I don’t even know why I like this but it makes me feel full, claimed, theirs.
My body goes heavy between them, every muscle releasing at once.
"You're going to sleep just like this, firefly." Dominic's voice is a low murmur against my hair. "Every time you move in the night, you're going to feel me inside you. Every time you breathe, you're going to feel my knot."
I let myself relax, melting between them before I can remind myself this is a bad idea.