Chapter Twenty-Seven
AVERY
Fourteen hours before I had to sit in a hearing room and testify about the most private parts of my life.
And Micah Kent was in my apartment with his rut three days close and the specific quality of I am holding this but I need help holding this that I'd learned to read on him over the past few months.
We were alone. Isaac had moved to the bedroom with Dean at some point — a quiet coordination that I hadn't asked them to do but that they'd done anyway, because the pack had gotten very good at reading what a room needed.
I'd heard the door close and then it was just me and Micah in the low light of my living room with the city outside the window and the hearing in the morning.
The night before I was going to walk into a courtroom and tell the truth about what Marcus Vale did to people like Dean, Micah’s rut decided to surface.
I should have been preparing. I should have been going over my testimony one more time, or organizing the documents Nadia had flagged, or at least sleeping.
Instead I was on the living room couch at eleven p.m. watching Micah pace, and his scent was filling the room like smoke — cedar and bergamot sharpening into something raw, almost metallic, the particular bitter-edge that meant his rut was hours away, maybe less.
Isaac and Dean were in the bedroom. Dean had gone down early — pre-hearing nerves of his own, the advocacy worker who’d started the chain of events that was now heading for a judge — and Isaac had followed, because Isaac followed Dean the way gravity followed mass. Inevitable. Structural.
Which left me and Micah. Alone in a living room that smelled like an alpha coming apart at the seams.
“Come here,” I said.
He stopped pacing. Looked at me. His eyes were dark, pupils wide enough to swallow the grey, and the tension in his body was visible — jaw clenched, hands fisted at his sides, the controlled stillness of someone expending enormous effort to not lose control.
“I’m not — I don’t want to—” He swallowed. “You have tomorrow.”
“I know what I have tomorrow.”
“You need sleep.”
“Micah.” I stood up. Crossed to where he stood by the window. Put my hands on his chest, and his heart was hammering under my palms, rut-fast, and the heat coming off him was remarkable, like standing next to an engine. “I know what I need.”
“Avery—”
“Shut up.” I took his face in my hands. “You are not going to ruin my testimony. You are not going to ruin anything. I am here, and I am choosing this, and you are going to let me.”
Something in his expression cracked. Not broke — Micah didn’t break — but cracked, the way a window cracks when the pressure on one side exceeds what the glass can hold. He leaned into my hands. Pressed his forehead against mine.
“I love you,” I said.
I hadn’t planned to say it. The words came out with the same inevitability as his rut — biological, unstoppable, something my body decided before my brain could intervene.
I’d known it for weeks. Maybe months. Maybe since the first night at The Meridian, when he’d said thorough and I’d understood that someone had finally named what I’d been missing.
He went still.
“Say it again,” he said.
“I love you.”
“Again.”
“I love you, you impossible, thorough, comprehensive—”
He kissed me. Not the controlled Micah kiss, not the precision instrument of his usual mouth.
This was messy, open, desperate. His hands went to my waist, my hips, my ass, pulling me against him, and he was hard — God, he was so hard, his cock straining against his pants, and the rut was right there, right under his skin, and when he groaned into my mouth I felt it in my spine.
“Couch,” I said. “Now.”
We didn’t make it to the bedroom. The couch was closer and his rut wasn’t interested in logistics. He pulled my shirt over my head, unhooked my bra with one hand — a skill I’d never asked about and wasn’t going to — and his mouth went to my breast, sucking my nipple hard enough that I hissed.
“Easy—”
“No.” He looked up. His eyes were nearly black. “Not easy. Not tonight.”
Fair. I pulled at his shirt and he stripped it off, then his pants, and I shoved mine down and kicked them off the end of the couch, and we were skin against skin, his rut-heat searing against my body, and the scent — cedar and smoke and something almost burnt, like he was running so hot the chemistry was charring — filled my lungs.
His mouth moved to my other breast. Sucked harder, tongue working my nipple, and his hand slid between my legs. His fingers found my clit and circled — not the precise, methodical circles of his usual approach. Rougher. Less controlled. The rut stripping away the finesse and leaving raw intent.
“Micah—” I arched into his hand. His fingers slid lower, two of them pushing inside me, and I was wet — embarrassingly, obviously wet — and the sound his fingers made was obscene in the quiet living room.
“You’re so fucking wet,” he said against my breast. His voice was gravel and smoke. “Already.”
“Shut up and—”
“No.” He curled his fingers forward, found the spot that made me jerk. “Not shutting up. Not tonight.”
He worked me with his fingers — deep, curling strokes that pressed against the front wall while his palm ground against my clit, and his mouth was on my neck, my jaw, the corner of my mouth, and I could feel the orgasm building already, too fast, too soon.
“Not yet,” I managed. “I want you inside me when—”
He pulled his fingers out. Lifted me by the waist — alpha strength, rut-enhanced, effortless — and settled me in his lap, straddling him, his cock trapped between us. My pussy ground against the length of it, slick and hot, and the friction was immediate, intense, exactly right.
“Condom,” he managed.
“Where—”
“Wallet. Back pocket.”
I reached over the arm of the couch, found his jeans on the floor, extracted the condom.
Tore the foil with my teeth. His cock was hot in my hand, flushed dark, the head slick with pre-come, and when I rolled the condom on he gripped the couch cushions like he was trying to anchor himself to the earth.
I rose up on my knees. Positioned him. Sank down.
The sound he made — I’ll remember it. I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. A broken, grateful, desperate sound, like someone who’d been holding their breath for hours and finally got to exhale. His hands went to my hips, fingers digging in, and I could feel his whole body trembling beneath me.
“Move,” he whispered. “Please.”
Micah didn’t say please.
I moved.
I rode him slowly at first — long, rolling motions, taking him deep and pulling up until just the tip remained, then sliding back down.
His cock filled me completely, the angle of this position different from lying down, more direct, the head pressing against the front wall with every downstroke.
His hands on my hips guided me but didn’t control me. For once, I set the pace.
“Avery—” His head fell back against the couch. His throat was exposed, the tendons standing taut, and I leaned in and bit it. Not hard. Just enough to feel him jolt beneath me, his cock twitching inside me, his hips bucking up involuntarily.
“I’ve got you,” I said. Giving his words back to him. The words the pack used — Isaac to Dean, Micah to me, Dean to everyone. The four-word liturgy of people who stayed.
“I know,” he said, and his voice was —
Wrecked. Completely wrecked.
I increased the pace. Rolled my hips with each descent, grinding my clit against his pelvis, and the orgasm built in a tight, ascending spiral.
His hands on my hips tightened, bruising, and he started thrusting up to meet me, matching my rhythm, and the sound of it — skin against skin, wet and rhythmic, punctuated by his rough breathing and my sharp gasps — filled the living room.
“I’m close,” I said. “Micah—”
“Come.” His hand slid between us, his thumb finding my clit with that infuriating precision. “Come. Let me feel it.”
I ground down against him and his thumb circled my clit and his cock hit that exact angle and I came — hard, contracting around him, my forehead dropping to his shoulder, my nails cutting crescents into his back. The sound I made was his name, broken into syllables that didn’t quite cohere.
He held me through it. His arms around me, his cock still inside me, still hard, the rut demanding more than one orgasm could settle. His mouth was at my ear, breathing hard, and his hands stroked my back — up and down, up and down — while the aftershocks rippled through me.
“Again,” he said.
“Micah, I—”
“Again.” He lifted me — physically lifted me — and resettled me on his cock at a different angle, one that pressed the head against a spot I hadn’t known existed.
Then he gripped my hips and moved me, sliding me forward and back in a slow grind that wasn’t thrusting so much as rocking, his cock never leaving me, just shifting, pressing, finding.
“Oh—” My hands went to his shoulders, gripping hard. “Oh, that’s—”
“I know.” His voice was a rasp. “I can feel it. You’re clenching.”
I was. My body was reacting to the angle, to the relentless pressure, to the feeling of his cock grinding against the sensitive front wall with every roll of my hips.
The second orgasm built differently from the first — slower, deeper, less like a spike and more like a tide, something rising from the base of my spine.
“Micah. Look at me.”
He did. His eyes were black, rut-consumed, but he was in there. Behind the chemistry and the desperation and the biological imperative, Micah was looking at me like I was the only thing in the world.
“I love you,” I said again. Because I could.
Because saying it during sex wasn’t the same as saying it before — it was rawer, more exposed, with none of the protective distance that standing upright and clothed provided.
It was saying it while he was inside me, while I was bare and wet and aching, while the truth of my body matched the truth of my words.
His forehead dropped against mine. “Avery—”
“I love you, and I’m going to come again, and I need you to come with me.”
He gripped my hips and took over. Fucked up into me with short, hard thrusts that extended the building wave into something that felt like it had a heartbeat — each thrust pulling another pulse from me, the pleasure stacking, compounding, until I was shaking and gasping and the second orgasm broke through with a force that whited out my vision.
“Avery—” His voice cracked. “I love—”
He came. Deep inside me, his hips pressing up as far as they could go, his arms wrapping around me and pulling me flush against his chest, and I could feel every pulse of his cock, could feel his heart hammering against mine, could feel the rut chemistry flooding out of him in waves of cedar-smoke scent that filled the room like weather.
We stayed like that. Locked together on the couch, his arms around me, my face in his neck. His breathing slowly steadied. The rut eased — not gone, not done, but settled. Banked. The edge taken off enough that he could function, could think, could be Micah instead of just alpha.
“I love you,” he said into my hair. “In case that wasn’t clear.”
“It was clear.”
“I love you, and tomorrow you are going to walk into that courtroom, and you are going to tell the truth, and I am going to be in the front row.”
My eyes burned. Not the time for crying. Not the night.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay.”
We cleaned up. He carried me to bed — actually carried me, which I allowed because his rut needed the physical act of providing — and we slipped in beside Isaac and Dean, who were warm and asleep and smelled like black tea and pear and home.
Dean murmured something without waking. Isaac’s hand found Micah’s arm and squeezed.
I slept.
Not well, not long, but deeply enough that when the alarm went off at six, Micah was already in the kitchen. I could hear the coffee maker. Could smell it — dark roast cutting through the residual cedar and sex.
I got up. Got dressed. Walked into the kitchen where Micah stood in grey sweatpants and no shirt, pouring coffee into my mug — the blue one, the one he’d learned was mine — and he looked up when I came in.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
He handed me the coffee. Kissed my forehead. Didn’t ask if I was ready, didn’t offer reassurance, didn’t do any of the things people do when they’re afraid for you. Just gave me coffee and kissed me and let me be whatever I was going to be.
I was going to go testify.
I was not afraid.
* * *
* * *