Chapter 32
MAYA
L ogan fills the doorway, massive and looming like a terrible specter of violence and destruction. Blood covers his clenched fists, a result of his violent attempts to break down the door.
But now, the violence in him is restrained by triumph, the liquid gold of his eyes practically brimming over with satisfaction. He stares down at us from the top of the stairs, chest heaving with ragged breaths, raging pheromones filling the air with each exhale.
The effect of Logan’s scent on Cillian is immediate and devastating. Cillian’s entire body goes rigid beside me. His hold on my arm loosens as a palpable tremor runs through him. The transformation is shocking. Even though I’m expecting it, I can’t quite believe that the disciplined, controlled guard commander can be so easily reduced to a raw and vulnerable pool of need.
Because no amount of control will overcome an Omega’s designation .
“Good boy,” Logan purrs to Cillian, who practically melts at the sound. “Lock the door.”
I manage to slip out of his grip as Cillian moves to obey. Logan watches with amusement as I lurch backwards down the stairs. He doesn’t so much as twitch to chase me, though my obvious attempt to flee must be triggering his Alpha instincts.
He knows as well as I do that there isn’t anywhere left to go.
But I still scramble back until my feet tangle in the blankets of my pathetic nest. My back hits the far wall hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs.
Logan gives me the faintest smile. “Why are you running, Maya? No one is chasing you.”
I hold my hands up in front of me as the most pathetic shield imaginable. “Don’t touch me.”
“I’m not going to do anything to you,” he chuckles, shaking his head as if laughing at some inside joke. “At least, not until you beg me for it.”
Cillian makes a high-pitched sound of distress, swaying on his feet. “Alpha…”
Logan swoops the smaller man up in his arms and nimbly descends the stairs as if he barely carries any weight at all. He deposits Cillian’s limp form into the nest more gently than I expect, though I don’t miss the calculated irritation in his gaze as he surveys me.
“His nest is practically drenched in your slick, Maya.” His voice taunts me with a dark note that sends a curl of unwanted pleasure straight to my center. “My my, what have the two of you been up to?”
Alpha is angry , the needy Omega part of me thinks desperately. It takes an effort to suppress the innate reaction.
“I don’t want you,” I bite out, wishing I believed in my own conviction.
His expression is mocking as he regards me with a heavy-lidded gaze. “Are you sure that really matters to you right now? Why don’t you ask your cunt and see how it feels?”
“You already have a mate.”
“Do I? Wouldn’t know from the way he acts.” Logan shoots a glance at him, one full of a mix of disdain and longing that Cillian is much too far gone to notice. “Though maybe I’ll revise my opinion after tonight. He did let me in here like the good Omega he pretends not to be.”
As if the words spur him, Cillian begins to recover from his haze. The need triggered by our artificially induced heat must energize him. He pushes up on his knees, cheek still pressed into the pile of blankets, presenting himself for mounting like any true Omega would in the presence of their Alpha.
“Alpha, please,” he whimpers.
Logan bends over him and presses his nose to Cillian’s neck, deeply inhaling. “I forgot how much I missed the way an Omega smells in heat. Fucking delicious. Helps that he is absolutely drenched in you, too. The two of you must have been rolling around together for a while before I showed up.”
Shame rises in me, even as a flush heats my cheek and my belly clenches with remembered pleasure. “What are you going to do, Logan?”
“I’d think that was obvious. I’m going to take back what’s mine.” Logan lifts his upper body with a broad hand on Cillian’s back, forcing the smaller man to arch his hips higher until his backside presses obscenely against the front of Logan’s hips. I must make some sort of desperate sound because he flashes me a mocking smile. “But I’ll make you a deal. You stay in your cute little nest, not even one toe set outside of it, and I won’t lay a single finger on you through your heat, even if you beg me for it.”
I grab the nearest blanket and wrap it around myself like a shield. “You won’t be touching me.”
His smile is practically a snarl. “We’ll see.”
I huddle deeper into my blanket cocoon, desperately trying to ignore the scene unfolding mere feet away from me. The room feels like it’s shrinking, the air thick with pheromones that make my head swim and my body ache with unwanted need.
Logan’s hands are everywhere on Cillian’s body, possessive and demanding. Cillian responds with desperate whimpers that pierce straight through me, triggering my own Omega instincts. I press my thighs together, ashamed of the slick pooling between them.
“Look at him. You can’t imagine how good he feels,” Logan taunts, his eyes finding mine over Cillian’s shoulder. “This is what happens when an Omega submits like they should.”
I tear my gaze away, focusing on counting the cracks in the ceiling. If I could just make my mind go somewhere else, then I can resist the lure he casts. Maybe I can even forget for a few minutes that I desperately wish it was me wrapped up in the arms of an Alpha .
“Maya,” Logan croons. “Come and play. You know you want to.”
Cillian moans as Logan’s teeth graze his neck. The sound makes my insides clench with yearning and something darker I don’t want to name.
Jealousy feels like a distant thing, but it’s there all the same. Twisting and churning inside me like a living organism. Heat might make it impossible to ignore the feeling, but hormones aren’t the true source of that initial pain.
The sharp gasp Cillian makes as Logan finally enters him is so evocative that I might as well have watched it happen. The distinctive sound of flesh slapping in a rhythmic pattern has my body curling in on itself as I fight the urge to push to my knees and present myself.
Logan’s whispered praise and Cillian’s groaned response feel simultaneously like a punch to the gut and a jolt of electric pleasure to my dripping cunt. Need and envy coil inexorably together until it’s impossible to tell one reaction from another.
I bury my face in a pillow that smells disappointingly of no one’s scent but my own. My hands cover my ears, but it isn’t enough to stop me from hearing them. Scenting them. Feeling the vibrations of the floor as they rock back and forth, shaking me with them so I have no choice but to feel like I’m part of it.
Heavy fabric slaps against the back of my head. Cillian’s scent surrounds me as I raise up to see the sweatpants Logan just tossed into my nest, still damp with pre-cum from earlier.
I shove it away with a desperate sound as Logan’s laughter drifts over me .
I force my eyes to squeeze shut, willing it all away.
I ’d forgotten how much an unresolved heat could feel like dying.
There aren’t really words to describe the emptiness, the howling abyss inside that you’re desperate to have filled.
I’d exhausted myself with my own hands, grinding against pillows and blankets, but nothing I can do on my own will ease the ache.
The lights above my head are too bright as I lay sprawled on my back, burning into my retinas every time I open eyes that refuse to stay closed.
Why won’t my eyes stay closed?
Maya .
My eyes snap open again as I realize it isn’t the first time my name has been whispered through the air.
Maya .
I roll painfully on my side with a groan to face the hulking form across the room, my vision blurry with unshed tears.
“Maya,” he says again, that single word like a caress. “Come to me, sweet girl. It’s time.”
Alpha. Alpha is calling me.
His scent draws me in. An alluring mess of contradictions. Like safety and danger. Homecoming and a desperate flight into the unknown. A wave of cramping bows my body, my hips making a squelching sound as they grind into slick-drenched blankets underneath me.
I blink through the spots in my vision and his image looms larger.
“That’s right, sweetheart. Keep going.”
I look down at the linoleum under my hands and knees, confused. Then I turn back to see my disheveled nest several feet behind me, the distance I’ve crawled without even being aware of it.
His satisfied purr vibrates across my senses. “Good girl. Come to your Alpha.”
I know I don’t have an Alpha, but that seems like an unimportant fact as my mind reels.
Arms wrap around me, gathering me closer more gently than I deserve. Hands rove over me, patternless and methodical, stoking the flames of my desperation higher rather than alleviating it.
Logan’s scent wafts gently over me as I’m enveloped in the furnace-level heat of him. This close, the scent now seems incomplete, bereft of some critical element. His wet hair hangs long to brush against my cheeks, freshly washed skin tasting faintly of salt on my tongue when I give a tentative lick at his lower lip.
He showered. Preparing himself for me by washing away the scent of his real Omega.
Silently weeping, I let my head fall forward against his shoulder. “You’re not my Alpha.”
“I could have been. I should have been.” He growls against the fragile skin of my throat, then nips hard enough to draw a gasp from me. “You smell like mine. You’ve always smelled like mine, even after everything got all fucked up. I was always meant to be your Alpha. ”
Even in the haze of heat, I know I don’t want to hear this. That sense of unfairness, the deep well of hurt I’ve been refusing to acknowledge, gives me a flash of mental clarity.
I growl. “I don’t have an Alpha.”
With a snarl, he grips my jaw to force my head painfully back until our gazes meet. He glares down at me and, without preamble, shoves four fingers of his other hand straight into my pussy.
I’m still virgin tight, but the pain of his intrusion is a fleeting thing. With a groan, I buck against his hand, exultant to finally be filled.
“You can say that again when your cunt is clenched around my cock. It might be a more believable sentiment then, but I doubt it.” He punctuates each word with a thrust of his hand, too quick to provide more than superficial pleasure. “I don’t care how impossible it is. I don’t care if it’s selfish or if it hurts. We have always been endgame.”
I won’t be able to come this way, and he knows it. Need spirals higher, suffocating, until I could drown it. I’ve been pushed too far past the point of shame, of self-recrimination. He told me I would beg, and he was right.
My fingers tear at him, nails clawing at any patch of skin I can reach. “Logan, please!”
He flips us with nauseating speed and my spine slams down hard against the thick blanket. The force of it drives all the air from my lungs, but full-blown heat has almost entirely dulled my ability to feel pain.
“Only good Omegas get a knot, sweet Maya.” He licks a path from my chest and up my neck, making me shiver. “Are you going to be a good girl? ”
“Yes…” I keen when he pulls his fingers out of me, my inner walls clenching with cruel agony on empty air. I babble, begging for something I barely understand. “I need you…”
Logan enters me with a hard thrust of his hips. I go rigid beneath him, shocked at the sudden and intense burn as he drives all the way inside me.
He gives a tentative shift of his hips, shushing me when I cry out. “All those games you played with my pack. How are you still this tight?”
I’m so full. So painfully and deliciously full. I simultaneously want to shove him away and urge him on until he crawls all the way inside me. The ratcheting tension leaves me feeling delirious. He drags himself back out with a sharp burn along my insides. “You’re too big. It’s too much.”
“You can take it. You were made to take me.” His biceps tense as he holds himself still above me, trembling with the effort it must take not to drive into me with full force. “Just relax and open for me.”
His hips shift in a slow drag, each thrust eased by the copious slick that ekes out around his cock and coats my upper thighs. Pain fades away to be replaced by the sort of pleasure that threatens to tear me up from the inside out.
His forehead drops against mine. “Fuck. Can’t knot Cillian without killing him. Can’t claim you when I knot because I already have a mate. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
My mouth opens and closes, but I’m entirely unable to form actual words.
“By the time your heat breaks, I will fix this. I’m going to make it right.”
Seemingly spurred on by his own words, Logan’s thrusts grow faster and harder. Enough to hurt me if my own peak wasn’t rapidly approaching, distracting me from what should be the painful grind of his hipbones against mine and the burning stretch of a passage forced to accommodate too much, too quickly.
His hand falls to my clit, rolling it between his fingers just as he shoves himself deep with a hard roll of his hips that is almost pure violence.
My climax hits with a piercing intensity, flaring down every nerve-ending and unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. I whip my head back and forth, screaming, crying, with release in a way that would be mortifying if I witnessed it with a clear head.
Logan hisses through clenched teeth as his knot swells inside me. He thrusts one last time, forcing the wide base of him past the curve of my pelvis and locking us together.
I fight down a surge of panic that tightens my throat and makes my breath come in ragged gasps. That makes me squeeze down on him in an unconscious reaction that sets Logan’s hips rocking against mine. Pulling away sends a shock of pain shooting through my stretched entrance, compelling him to claw me back until I settle again, shushing and petting with rough and grasping hands.
Anxiety is normal with a first knot, the expectation set for us at the Enclave that a good Alpha would know to soothe their Omega through it.
But that doesn’t change just how much I feel like something terrible is about to happen.
My insides clench again with a mix of anxiety and aftershocks from my orgasm. Logan groans in response, and I feel the splashes of heat as he paints my insides with his spend.
We could be like this for minutes or hours, I’ve never heard of any consensus on the time it takes for an Alpha’s knot to finally deflate.
Logan lifts me up with one arm around my back until I’m straddling his lap, my head forward to rest against his shoulder. His knot is still buried inside me as my legs sag on either side of his hips, too heavy to move.
The mass of blankets stirs and Cillian pushes the blankets covering his face back with a soft whine.
His eyes flash with multiple, conflicting emotions when his dazed gaze lands on the two of us, still trapped together by the knot beside him. Jealousy and longing are impossible to mistake.
But I’m surprised to see the blooming heat of desire.
I shudder as Logan’s hand slides up my back, his touch leaving a trail of fire on my skin. My body feels both languid and tense, locked to him in the most intimate way possible as Cillian watches us with hooded eyes.
Premonition ticks like icy fingers down my spine.
“Cillian…my Omega,” Logan murmurs, his voice thick with sensual promise. “Look at this pretty toy we’ve found.”
Logan reaches down to play at where his cock stretches my slit, coating his fingers in slick and making me tense around him with a surprised squeak. He gently kisses me on the forehead as his fingers move lower to tease at the puckered skin ofmy rear entrance.
I instinctively try to shift away, despite that being impossible. His arm still tightens like a vice around my waist, as if I don’t already have his knot locking me in place. Ignoring my whining protest, he paints that tight ring of muscle with more slick, keeping his touch light and almost teasing.
Logan’s voice is a baited lure when he looks at Cillian again. “Don’t you want to play?”
Cillian’s eyes meet mine over Logan’s shoulder. His gaze is clouded with heat but also with something else, something darker. I’m too overwrought to speak, throat threatening to clench shut when I try to force enough air past it to speak.
Logan captures my mouth in an unexpectedly gentle kiss. He moves without demand, not bruising or claiming. Instead, his lips gently trace mine with enough sweetness to make my chest ache with something better than fear.
The kiss remains soft as he shifts my weight, holding me closer. His hand cradles the back of my head, fingers threading through my hair with careful tenderness as he deepens the kiss. It’s slow and thorough, almost reverent in its exploration. The incongruity of it leaves me reeling, dizzy and confused as I try to grasp at the fading tendrils of anxiety that I know I was feeling only moments ago.
When he finally pulls back, his golden eyes search mine with an expression I can’t decipher. For just a moment, I glimpse something raw and unguarded in his face — something that looks strangely like regret.
He presses another soft kiss against my forehead, holding me tight as he whispers against my skin. “Hold steady, darling. This will only hurt for a minute. ”
Breaching pressure pushes against my backside, a familiar weight settling against my spine. But his previously soothing touch is anything but as warm hands settle on my hips to keep me still as Cillian slowly pushes inside me.
It burns in a way that makes the memory of Logan’s invasion feel like nothing at all. Friction enough to stoke a flame that could burn us all alive. Caught between them, stuffed full in a way I’ve never imagined, I let out a mewling noise that barely sounds human.
With a distant sort of awareness, I realize just how much this would hurt without the throes of heat loosening my muscles and dulling my pain receptors.
The buildup up of pleasure is insidious, lulling me into a false sense of complacency. If I just submit, the desperate Omega inside whispers, then everything will be okay.
My head falls back as Cillian’s lips trace the curve of my shoulder. His teeth graze my skin, not quite biting down. Logan shifts his hips, grinding the knot against a sensitive spot inside me. The dual sensation of their touches makes my mind spin, unable to focus on anything but the building pressure.
Logan grips the back of Cillian’s head, keeping him in place, while shifting closer until he practicallylooms over both of us.
“Do it,” Logan commands, voice straining with effort. “You know you want to. Make her ours.”
Starlight bursts across my vision as I unexpectedly come again, the pleasure jarring and unwelcome in its intensity. Jettisons of cum shoot deeper than should be possible as Cillian howls his own release .
Sharp pain in my neck takes me even more by surprise. The rip of tearing flesh, the crunch of sharp teeth striking bone, become a terrible symphony that grows until it bursts into a crescendo inside my chest.
Unwelcome sensation slams into me from all sides. I’m too weak to hold it back, powerless against the tidal wave of the corrupted double bond overtaking me. My sense of self shatters into pieces only to be shoddily glued back together, leaving fissures and scars where I had once been whole.
I choke on twin rage and lust, brazen satisfaction leaving a sour taste behind on my tongue.
And I don’t have to see it to know that Cillian was not the only who made a bite.
Cillian pulls back as much as he can, full lips stained red and eyes wide with terrible wonder. Logan’s mouth still grips his neck, limiting his movements, as the sharp scent of fresh blood taints the air around us. A second, unnecessary, claiming bite that I already know will be a perfect match for the one already scarred over on Cillian’s thigh.
The claiming bond opens like a chasm between us. It tears open the fragile hiding places in my mind where my secrets are kept and lays every one of my emotions bare, until there is nowhere left for me to hide.
We’re bound together, the three of us, in a twisted and unnatural connection that was never meant to exist.
My body is on fire, every nerve ending raw and exposed as the dual bond settles into place. Through the haze, I feel Logan’s satisfaction warring with Cillian’s guilt. Their emotions crash against mine like waves, threatening to drown me .
I want to scream, to rage against what they’ve done, but my throat is too tight. The bond pulses between us, an unwanted intruder in my mind.
It shouldn’t be possible. I wouldn’t believe it if I wasn’t left here trapped in the wreckage of my own psyche.
“You’re mine now,” Logan murmurs against my skin. “No more running.”
But he’s wrong. This twisted bond he forced on us isn’t about love or protection — it’s about covetous control. About owning me and keeping me trapped here, unable to expose their secrets.
Even if I manage to escape, I’ll never have anything more than this. My fantasy future with a loving Alpha has just disappeared in a puff of smoke.
I hate Logan for being so selfish.
I blame Cillian for being too weak to stop him.
As my vision starts to dim, spots dancing at the edges, I focus on a new sense of determination.
Despite our new connection, I manage to wall off that deepest part of myself, building mental barriers brick by brick. They may have claimed my body, may have access to my surface thoughts and feelings, but they’ll never reach the very core of me.
I let myself go limp between them, playing the part of the conquered Omega. While it might be hidden deep inside me, my resolve hardens like steel.
They think they’ve won. Think they’ve trapped me.
But they have no idea what they’ve just done, binding themselves irrevocably to someone who knows exactly how to destroy everything they hold dear .
My future has been stolen from me.
Now, I won’t stop until I’ve taken the same thing from them.
To be continued in Bonds of Pain, click here to preorder .