Chapter 1 #3
Atlas laughs. Low. Dark. He rolls his hips gentle, the head of his cock sliding deeper into my throat and back. "Easy, brother. He's right here. He's not going anywhere. Look at him taking us both."
"He's perfect."
"He is."
A pause. Bane's hips snapping into mine in a slow, building rhythm. The wet slap of his cock dragging slick out of my hole and slamming back home. Atlas stroking my hair, my cheek, the underside of my jaw where his cock keeps pushing through.
Then Bane, mumbled, almost lost under his own breath: "Bless Zero for keeping that woman downstairs."
Atlas grunts—a sound that makes his cock jerk on my tongue.
"He'd want a thank-you note."
"He's getting one."
And now it is this: Atlas in front of me on the bed, kneeling close, slow and filthy, fucking my mouth with a tenderness that doesn't match the act.
His fingers stroking me everywhere as he bruises the back of my throat.
"Look at you," he murmurs down at me. "Look at you taking us.
Look at you. So beautiful. So good. So full, huh? "
I nod around his cock, tears tracking my cheeks.
Bane behind me, on the floor at the foot of the bed, building toward the thing my body is begging for.
Hands on my hips so tight I will have marks.
Cock dragging slick out of me on every pull and pounding it back in.
Bane is doing everything he can to keep his moans to a minimum, leaning down occasionally to growl low in my ear as I arch deeper for him.
I am being used at both ends. I am being filled. I am being held. I am being adored. The fire is everywhere and the burn is climbing and I have never in my life been this present in my body and this far from my mind at the same time.
Atlas’s hand wraps around the back of my head and he holds me as his hips pick up, fucking my throat until spit is dripping off my bottom lip.
“Oh, fuck. I’m gonna come,” Bane grunts.
His knot grows in one final, massive swell.
He sinks home one last time. The stretch of his knot locking inside me is everything—pain and pleasure and rightness and belonging—and I cry out around Atlas's cock.
His hand fists tight in my hair and holds me down on him and the cry becomes a wet muffled groan deep in my throat.
And then—
Bane leans down.
Mouth at my throat. The spot. The one that has been waiting for him since the cell. His tongue flat and warm against the skin. The slight drag of his teeth, finding the place.
He bites.
The pain is sharp and bright and clean—the small shock, the tightening of my entire body, the deep whine I let out—and Atlas comes down my throat at the same moment with a low groan of his own, his fist still tight in my hair holding me there to take it, his cock pulsing on my tongue.
Bane is coming inside me in long hot pulses against the bond he is in the middle of setting, his knot tying us together so deep I feel him in my belly, and—
The heat cools.
Not gone. Banked deep. The screaming pitch of it that has been climbing my spine drops all the way down to a low warm hum, the embers settling into something my body can rest inside.
And then it’s just… connection.
Three threads. Distinct. Woven.
Atlas in front of me, in me, on my tongue, his fist in my hair, in the bond he set into me weeks ago.
Zero somewhere downstairs—a bright wire, alert, awake, watching the house from the kitchen below.
Bane behind me, locked inside me, his teeth still gentle on my skin, the new thread between us thrumming so loud I can feel it in my fingertips.
A settling. Like a door closing that I didn't know was open. Like a room I lived in for years without realizing one wall was missing until it was suddenly there.
Atlas slides slowly from my mouth.
His thumb wipes my lip. His other hand still cradles my skull, gentling now, smoothing the hair he was just fisting.
He's saying something. His voice low and warm.
The words won't quite reach me. I am drifting.
I am gone. My body has been finally, finally given the thing it has been screaming for, and now there is nothing left—no fight, no fire, no thought—just warm and full and held.
I am dimly aware of Bane behind me, still locked inside me, his arms wrapping around my chest from behind, lifting me up off the foot of the bed and easing us both up onto it without unseating his knot, settling us on our sides.
His mouth at the bite. His tongue soothing it.
A low constant murmur into my hair. I've got you, you're so good, you're so good for me, you're perfect, you're mine, I've got you, I've got you.
I am dimly aware of Atlas at my side. The wet shirt cool against my forehead. Down my chest. Across my stomach where my cum is dry. He is wiping me clean. He is kissing my temple. He is saying things I can't quite hear.
I am dimly aware of being held between them. Bane's chest at my back, warm and solid. Atlas's hand on my cheek, thumb stroking under my eye. The lamp's light yellow on my closed eyelids.
I drift.
Somewhere in the drifting—I don't know how long after—I hear Richard and Margot's bedroom door click shut. The snick of a lamp cord. The rush of waves outside as a gentle storm arrives.
The house settles.
I drift further.
∞∞∞
I come up out of it a long time later.
The lamp is off. The room is dark and warm.
The window is cracked an inch and the smell of the sea is moving through it.
Thunder rolls in the far distant like a constant hum.
The sheets have been changed—I don't remember that happening—and there is a quilt pulled up to my collarbone that smells like cedar and amber and him.
Bane is wrapped around my back.
I can tell it's Bane before I open my eyes. The bond knows. The thread between his sternum and mine hums steady and warm and present, and his arm is heavy across my ribs. His thumb—slow, slow, careful—is working a small circle into the bite at the side of my neck.
"Hey," he murmurs. Into my hair. Soft. Awake. "There you are."
I make a small sound. My throat is wrecked.
"Yeah." He laughs quietly. "I know. Atlas wasn't gentle."
"Mm."
"How are you feeling?"
I take stock. Sore everywhere—jaw, throat, hips, the deep low ache between my legs.
The bite throbs warm under his thumb. My head is heavier than my own bones.
My body has gone quiet like the soft storm outside—the low warm hum of heat still there, banked, sleeping, but not crashing against me ready for destruction.
"Quiet," I say. After a long moment.
His thumb stills.
"Quiet?"
"The fire turned down."
He exhales. Long. I feel it through his chest at my back. "Yeah, baby. The bond will do that. Won't kill the heat off—your body still wants what it wants—but it cuts the worst of it out. Lets you rest."
"...oh."
"Did you think it would all just disappear?"
"I don't know. Maybe. It feels like I could sleep for three days."
"You can." His arm tightens around me. "You should. Your body's going to flare up again sometime tomorrow, probably the next day too. We've got you. But right now? Right now you sleep."
His mouth presses against the crown of my head. His thumb starts moving on the bite again—slow, small circles, the kind of touch you give a thing you can't quite believe you're allowed to touch.
"I've wanted to do that," he says. Into my hair.
"For so long, Max. So long. Since the library, that first afternoon, when you stumbled and I caught you and your scent went straight to the back of my brain.
Since the cell. Since every time I have been in a room with you and had to keep my hands at my sides. I thought about it every single night."
"Bane—"
"I had a whole speech," he says. Wet, half-laughing into my hair. "The whole drive up here. I had decided I was going to do it some other night. Take you somewhere quiet. Make a meal of it. I was going to be very chivalrous about it."
I laugh, and it scrapes against my throat, and he winces against my hair.
"Sorry. Sorry. Don't laugh."
"You had a speech?"
"I had a speech. The speech got—" He kisses the crown of my head. "The speech got beat by your body and my brother's better idea."
I press back into him. He tightens his arm. We breathe.
After a long time, he speaks again. Quieter.
"I have to be gone before you wake up."
I tense.
"Hey. Hey." His thumb keeps moving on the bite. "Just for the morning. Margot will come find you—check on you after Zero told her you weren’t feeling well. I can’t be in your bed when she does."
"...okay."
"Hey." He shifts. His hand comes up under my jaw and turns my face toward him in the dark. His eyes are warm and tired and so absolutely on me that I forget how to breathe. "Look at me."
I look.
"You're not going to be without me again."
"Bane—"
"I mean it. I'm not being romantic. It's a fact now.
" His thumb presses the bite, gentle, deliberate, and a wave of warm low calm rolls down my spine from where he touches.
"This thing. It's me. That's me, in your chest. Always.
It doesn't matter where I am. Through the wall.
In the next house. In the next country. I'm in there now. I'm not coming out."
I nod against his palm. Tears slide. He catches them with his thumb.
"Say it back to me. So I know you heard."
"You're in here."
"And?"
"You're not coming out."
"Good boy."
He kisses me.
Long and slow and dark and his. His tongue pushes into my mouth and the taste of him is the taste my body has been chasing for longer than I care to think about. The bond hums under his thumb at my neck and something low and animal in me settles the way only he can settle it now.
When he pulls back, his forehead stays against mine. "Sleep," he says.
It is soft. It is quiet. It is not a request.
The word lands in my body like a hand on the back of my neck.
His scent thickens the way an alpha's scent thickens when he wants to be obeyed—a warm pulse of pheromone rolling off his skin into the inch of air between us—and a jolt of calm runs straight down my spine and washes the last of my consciousness with it.
My eyelids are too heavy to argue.
I couldn't fight him if I wanted to.
I don't want to.
His thumb keeps moving on the bite. His arm is heavy and warm across my ribs. The bond hums in my chest, steady, present, never silent again.
I go under.
Against the bare skin of my shoulder, the mark Bane has set into me thrums once, warm and steady, and stays.
Not silent.
Complete.