Chapter 25 Connall #3
The scent of heliotropes has followed him most of his adult life.
Into clubs and markets. In the garages and in All’s End.
Even into the pit on fight night when he and Beau would try to figure out what to do with someone too injured to go home, or on the rare occasion these days when someone never would again.
The night before, he’d even set the magical password with the scent of flowers fresh in his mind and a memo to Ollie to order a new bouquet for the withering one in his office. He’d even smelled it before he’d gone up to his office and found Elias on the landing, fast asleep.
“Last night—you were in the pit.”
“Yeah. Fight nights are good,” he says without elaborating. His eyes drop to Connall’s mouth, but he lets Connall’s wrist go with a last squeeze.
Fight nights are never good—they’re barbaric. No one fights for Connall unless they have something to gain or nothing to lose.
“Did you get that bruise there?”
“It’s not the first—” Soren breaks off with a shrug, implying that it won’t be the last.
Connall wants to growl and yell. Tell his mate that he’s fought his last fight in the pit, but he grits his teeth.
With a nod, Soren drops onto his ass on the edge of the deck, puts his bare feet in the summer-dry grass, using his toes to pluck tufts out absentmindedly.
Connall thinks back to the night that he chose this destiny. “You were in Florida, too. I thought I smelled flowers that night. At the end.” The scent had offered him a little comfort then, amidst the crushing feeling of grief.
“Mmm. You were—” Soren stops, with a shrug. Connall finds he wants to beg him to finish his thought. He smells sweet, and Connall wants to run a hand over his hair, just to feel the fuzzy buzz cut tickle his palm.
“Sometimes when shit was bad, I’d convince myself you were right there—I thought it was my head,” Connall says quietly, the words coming slower now.
“Like…when you lose someone, and it changes you hard enough, your brain fills in the gaps. Like muscle memory.” He swallows.
“I told myself it could never really be you.”
The words hang between them, fragile and heavy all at once. Connall doesn’t try to take them back. He wouldn’t know how.
Soren studies his face for a long moment, like he’s deciding whether the truth fits the man standing in front of him. Whatever he finds there seems to settle something in his chest. Not erase it. Just…place it.
“Yeah,” Soren says softly. He shifts, the tension bleeding out of him in inches instead of all at once. “Sit.” He reaches up and tugs on Connall’s hand.
The sun feels unbearably hot now that it has come around this side of the house, and there’s an itching under his skin. Connall thinks it might be because Soren smells like heaven, and the warmth of his shoulder is sending tingles down Connall’s arm and straight to his dick.
Connall croaks out past his dry throat. “I’m sorry. Sorry, I left you on that train. Fucking hate trains. I can’t even ride the subway now. Isn’t that stupid?”
The sense that he’d left something essential on that train had morphed into a lifelong phobia.
“Nah. Makes sense.” Soren shrugs, not even questioning how a grown man could be afraid of trains.
He’s understanding in a way that makes Connall think he carries his own scars from that moment.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you sooner that I was here.
I mean, I don’t know what you would have done or what we could have changed about it, but still—”
They sit for a moment, and Connall lets himself believe—just for now—that there’s something here they can build on. The worst of the day’s tight, spiraling anxiety eases its grip.
Soren had been on his side all along. That knowledge settles deep in Connall’s chest, steadying him in a way nothing else has. Enough that, maybe, he won’t have to face what comes next alone, and he might be there to help him understand why Quinn is so angry.
He’s about to ask about their relationship when the sliding glass door flies open, and Isaac comes flying out—barefoot, without pants, and shrieking like the hounds of hell are on his heels.
It’s only Elias, with a cup of ice in his hand. “Come back here, Izzy! You little shit. That was cold!”
There’s a wet spot on the back of Elias’s pants that has Quinn and Kaian laughing from the doorway. The cool air blows out over him, and he scents an intoxicating mix of sex, slick, and come.
Soren chuckles beside him, saying something Kaian finds funny, but Connall isn’t listening. His shrieking omega is running toward the tree line at the edge of Connall’s territory. Ancient instincts kick in hard, and he’s on his feet.
His eyes flash red, and only then does he understand what the itching beneath his skin has been.
It had been there the whole time while he tried to keep himself contained.
That is why his body refused to settle, why arousal clung to him through a conversation that should have demanded his full attention.
Whatever control he thought he had was already slipping.
He looks at his pack, and something inside him swells, hot and urgent, filling every available space.
They are beautiful like this, relaxed and laughing, close enough to touch.
The certainty settles in without warning: If he marks them, they will stay.
He will never be without them again. The idea does not feel reckless or dangerous at the moment. It feels inevitable.
Elias and Isaac are already moving in the yard, chasing each other in wide, careless arcs, laughter sharp in the air as they run.
The sight of it hits him hard. Something old stirs, older than reason, older than choice.
The instinct to follow, to give chase, to close the distance surges up and takes hold before he can stop it.
He goes after them without hesitation, instinct driving him forward, sense left behind in the grass where he stood.
“Holy shit!” Soren barks behind him.
For the second time that day, Soren’s arm hooks hard around the back of his neck and hauls him down, tackling him flat onto his front before he can reach them.
“He’s in rut!”