Chapter 12 #2
His hand slides from my mouth to the back of my neck and he pulls me in and kisses me—hard, open, his tongue pushing past my teeth with a desperation I can taste, salt and coffee and the faint chemical edge of something I can't place, something that was in the air wherever they just were.
He kisses me like he's trying to crawl inside me. Like he's trying to get somewhere safe.
I let him.
Bane's hand tightens on my throat. Not choking—holding. His thumb presses the bond mark and the spark runs down my spine and I gasp into Zero's mouth.
Atlas's hand leaves mine. Slides to my hip. Pulls me backward into his chest so I'm pressed between them—Atlas behind me, Zero in front, Bane at my side with his hand still at my neck. Three bodies. Three scents. Cedar and amber and gunpowder filling my lungs in a single breath.
Zero pulls off my mouth. His forehead drops to mine. His breathing is ragged.
"Upstairs," Atlas says. Behind me. Against my hair. Not a question.
"Yeah," Bane says.
"Fuck yeah," Zero says.
Atlas takes my hand and leads me up the stairs.
Past the lounge where my notebook is still open on the window seat.
Past Bane's door. Past Zero's. To the end of the hall.
His room. He opens the door and the scent of him—cedar, leather, the clean cotton of sheets he changed this morning—rolls over me like a wave.
His room. His bed. The one I woke up in the first time my body betrayed me.
The one I've been in a dozen times since, always with his hands on me, always with his voice in my ear.
Tonight the other two are coming in behind us and the door is closing and the lock is turning and for the first time it's all four of us in one room with one door and one bed and nothing driving this except want.
No heat. No crisis. No biology screaming.
Just us.
Atlas turns me around. His hands frame my face. His thumbs trace my cheekbones and his eyes search mine and whatever he finds there makes his jaw loosen a fraction.
"You're sure," he says.
"I'm sure."
"All of us."
"All of you."
His mouth covers mine. Slow. The Atlas kiss—deliberate, patient, the kind that tells me he has a plan for the rest of the night and I'm going to feel every minute of it. His tongue slides against mine and I taste coffee and something sharp underneath, something angry, like he’s been clenching his jaw for hours.
Behind me, hands. Two sets.
Zero's at the hem of Bane's shirt I'm wearing, pulling it up, his knuckles dragging along my ribs as the fabric rises.
Bane's at my waistband, his fingers hooking the elastic of my sweats, easing them down over my hips with the patience he always uses when he undresses me—slow, careful, like he's unwrapping something he's afraid will tear.
Atlas breaks the kiss long enough for Zero to pull the shirt over my head.
Then his mouth is back. His hands slide down my bare chest, my stomach, lower.
I'm hard already—I've been hard since Zero kissed me in the foyer—and when Atlas's palm grazes the length of me through the fabric Bane is pulling down, a sound comes out of me that all three of them catch.
"There he is," Zero murmurs. Against the back of my neck. Mouth open on my skin. "There's our boy."
I'm naked in the middle of three clothed men and the vulnerability should terrify me and it doesn't. It lights me up.
I can feel their eyes on me—Atlas from the front, assessing, the pupils going dark.
Bane beside me, his gaze dropping down my body with the quiet reverence he gives everything he loves.
Zero behind me, his breath hot on my nape, his hands sliding possessive down my sides.
"On the bed, sweetheart." Atlas. The command voice, the alpha register. Low and final.
I would have obeyed him even if he didn’t use it.
I get on the bed. The sheets are cool against my back. I lie there, naked, looking up at the three of them standing at the foot of the bed in a row—my brothers, my alphas, my entire world in three bodies—and I watch them undress.
Atlas goes first. Methodical. Tie pulled loose and dropped.
Shirt unbuttoned from the top, each button precise.
The undershirt comes over his head and the lamplight catches the muscle of his chest, his shoulders, the silver at his temples.
He folds the shirt. Sets it on the chair. Even now. Even in this.
Bane goes next. The glasses come off first—set on the nightstand with a click.
Then the shirt, pulled over his head one-handed, the motion easy.
His body is lean and warm in the low light.
The scar on his side that I've kissed a dozen times.
He kicks his pants off and stands there in his briefs with his cock straining against the fabric and his eyes on me, patient, waiting for the cue.
Zero doesn't undress. He strips. Shirt grabbed at the back of the collar and ripped over his head.
Belt unbuckled, jeans shoved down, kicked off.
No underwear. He's hard and dark and not waiting for a cue from anyone.
He's on the bed before his clothes hit the floor, crawling up from the foot, his mouth finding my ankle, my calf, the inside of my knee.
"Zero—"
"Shh." His mouth drags up the inside of my thigh. "Let me taste you first."
Atlas climbs onto the bed on my left. Settles beside me.
His hand cups my jaw and turns my face toward him and he kisses me again—deep, slow, the kind of kiss that is a whole conversation—while Zero's mouth works higher up my thigh.
Bane climbs on to my right. His hand finds my chest, splays flat over my heart.
His mouth goes to the bond mark on my neck—his mark—and he presses an open kiss there that sends a shiver down my spine that Atlas feels through the kiss and Zero feels through my thighs and the bond between the four of us cracks open like a door.
I can feel all of them.
Not just their hands and their mouths. Them.
Atlas's restraint, fraying. The cost of the day loosening out of his muscles as he kisses me.
Bane's tenderness, enormous and unhurried, his thumb tracing slow circles on my sternum.
Zero's hunger—raw, animal, the leash he holds himself on slipping one notch for every inch his mouth climbs.
Zero's tongue drags flat and hot across the crease of my thigh and I buck into Atlas's kiss. Bane's hand presses me down.
"Easy, baby. Let him."
Zero doesn't go to my cock. He goes past it. Pushes my thighs apart with both hands—wide, wider—and lowers his mouth between my legs.
His tongue finds my hole and the sound I make is muffled by Atlas's mouth.
"Fuck—Zero—"
Atlas swallows the rest. His hand tightens on my jaw.
His other hand slides into my hair and holds, firm, keeping me in the kiss while Zero eats me out with the single-minded filth of a man who has been thinking about this for hours.
His tongue works me open in slow flat strokes, then dips inside, then circles, and I am leaking slick onto his chin and trying to arch off the bed but Bane's hand on my chest is an anchor and Atlas's mouth is a cage and I can't move and I can't breathe and I don't want to do either.
"He's so wet, Atlas." Zero, from between my legs. Wrecked. "He's dripping. You should see this."
Atlas breaks the kiss. Looks down the length of my body to where Zero is spread between my thighs with his mouth slick and shining. Something crosses Atlas's face—possessive, awed, the composed eldest brother undone by the sight of his brother's mouth on his omega.
"Get him ready," Atlas says. Low. "But don't rush."
"I don't rush." Zero's tongue drags through me again and my hips jerk. "I savor."
Bane laughs. Soft, almost not there. His mouth is still at my throat, working the bond mark in slow open kisses, and his hand has drifted from my chest down to my stomach, tracing the line of hair below my navel. His fingertips graze the base of my cock and I twitch so hard Bane has to pin my hip.
"Look at you," Bane murmurs. Into the mark. "Look at you, Maxie. All three of us and you're just lying here shaking for it."
"Bane—"
"Shh. I know. I know, baby."
Zero adds a finger alongside his tongue. I cry out and Atlas's hand is back over my mouth in an instant—the reflex, the habit, the automatic response to any sound I make that might carry through walls. Except tonight the house is empty. Margot and Richard are in Connecticut learning about soil.
There's nobody to hear me.
Atlas realizes it the same second I do. His hand loosens. Doesn't leave—just loosens. His thumb traces my lower lip.
"Let him be loud tonight," Bane says. To Atlas. Soft.
Atlas looks at Bane. Something passes between them—a decision, a permission, a shift in the rules they've been following for months. Atlas lifts his hand off my mouth. Sets it on the pillow beside my head. Leans down.
"Be as loud as you want, sweetheart."
Zero curls his finger and presses against the spot inside me and I scream.
Not a moan. Not a gasp. A scream—sharp, broken, what I've been holding behind Atlas's palm and Bane's hand and pillows and my own fist for months. It rings off the ceiling and fills the room and nobody stops me.
Nobody covers my mouth.
Atlas's eyes go dark. Bane's hand tightens on my hip. Zero makes a sound against my ass that vibrates through me like a struck bell.
"Again," Zero says. "Do that again."
He adds a second finger and I do it again. Louder. The sound of my own voice in the open air—unheld, uncovered, unmuffled—does something to me I don't have language for. Like a door opening that I didn't know was shut. Like the first breath after years underwater.
"Good boy," Atlas says. His hand in my hair. His voice in my ear. "There you are. Let us hear you."