Chapter Seventeen
THANE
She woke quietly.
Her scent changed, becoming richer and thicker, signaling her heat before she even moved.
I’d been awake for a while, propped against the nest wall with her tucked against my side and Malric’s arm across her from the other direction, watching the candles burn low and trying to keep my thoughts in order.
Mostly failing.
She stretched, a small, careful movement, and then went still, taking inventory of herself and everything around her, as if unsure what she’d see this time.
I recognized the pattern. She was cautious with her safety, now that she was aware of the fragility of her situation.
At least she didn’t seem scared of us, a fact for which I was grateful.
“Hey,” I said quietly.
Her head turned toward me. Her eyes were clearer than they’d been in hours, the glaze of the heat had receded, and she looked like herself again. Wrung out and warm but herself. But her scent told a different story. That her heat was building again.
“Is it over?” she asked, her eyebrows raised.
Hope flared in her eyes, her teeth worrying at her lower lip, and I hated to dash her hopes. But I was also looking forward to my chance between her thighs, feeling her come undone around my cock.
“No,” I said, cupping her cheek. “That was the first phase.”
She closed her eyes briefly, shoulders slumping. “How many phases will this last?”
“It varies. Full heats run in waves. The first breaks, you get a window—could be an hour, could be a few—and then it builds again,” Malric said from her other side. He’d been awake too. Of course he had. “You’ll feel it coming. You’ll have some warning.”
“How much warning?”
“Enough,” he stroked a hand over her soft belly in soothing circles.
She turned to look at him and the thoughts that had been racing through my head, the worries over how to manage the complexity of this relationship quieted.
I watched his hand move to her hip, the easy proprietary certainty of it, and it confirmed what I’d been telling myself for the past hour.
This wasn’t about turns. This isn’t about evenness.
This was a triad and I knew what it meant, and I chose it.
All of that was true.
It didn’t entirely address the fact that I had held her through her second heat spike, the first with an alpha, had steadied her and grounded her and kept her from coming apart at the edges.
Malric was the primary alpha and took the lead in the first full heat, which was the right call.
She needed him first, needed the steadiness he carried, needed the safety he represented before she could come fully undone.
I knew that.
Knowing it didn’t stop the wanting.
“You need to eat something,” I said, because that was useful and immediate and would keep my mind occupied. “And drink. Your body is burning through everything.”
She made a face.
“I know,” I said, laughing. “Try anyway.”
Malric was already reaching for the tray I’d filled with food from the dining table after she’d fallen asleep earlier.
Malric and I had eaten something before falling into a light sleep, knowing we’d need our strength as much as Aveline did.
We talked quietly about preventing ourselves from falling into a rut, for fear her father would show when we were at our most vulnerable.
He pressed a cup of water into her hands, and she eyed it as if it were about to bite her, then sighed. She took a few sips and then she turned her head away from the cup with a small sound of refusal.
“A little more,” I said, rubbing her shoulders.
“I’m not thirsty.” Her lips turned in a pout.
“Your body is lying to you.”
She gave me a look that said she was aware her body had been betraying her for some time, but couldn’t find a compelling argument to sway me.
With a heavy, put-upon sigh, she took two more sips before she set the cup firmly on the tray with a narrowed glare at me.
I suppressed a smile at her small act of defiance.
“Food,” Malric said, and held out a piece of bread slathered with honey butter.
She looked at it like it had personally offended her and she folded her arms in front of her. “I don’t want it.”
“I know you don’t want it.”
“Then why—”
“Because what you want and what you need are different things right now,” he said, calmly, implacably. “Two bites.”
She sullenly reached for the bread, but he held it out of reach. “From my hands.”
She glared at him but opened her mouth. Ate two bites with pointed precision, eyes fixed on Malric the entire time as if challenging him.
I smothered a laugh, turning my head so they wouldn’t see me, though I saw Malric’s own lips pressed together to hide his smile, so I knew I wasn’t alone.
After the second bite, when he held the bread up to her mouth, she pointedly turned her head.
“No more,” she said.
He paused for a moment, then, with exaggerated carefulness, placed the bread on the plate and set it aside.
She settled back into the furs and was quiet for a moment.
I watched her shoulders relax by degrees, the small adjustments of a body settling into the temporary comfort of the window between waves.
Her hair was loose around her, still slightly damp at the temples from earlier, and her scent in the nest had become something deeply integrated with mine and Malric’s, the three of us overlapping and entwining in a way that felt pleasant and something else.
Right. That was the word. It registered as right.
Her face was growing flush and a light sheen was gathering on her skin.
Her scent was saturating the air, deeper and heavier than earlier.
As if catching up to the changes her body had made, her breathing changed.
Not dramatically, not all at once. A slight quickening, a small catch.
Her hand moved to her stomach, pressing flat, and she went still.
“No,” she said quietly to no one in particular.
“I know,” I said, stroking over her arms.
“I thought—” She stopped. “I really hoped it was done, despite what you told me.”
“It builds faster after the first break,” Malric said. He was already moving, shifting position in the nest, settling her in front of him carefully. Her shoulders tightened, but he eased her back against him, gently running his hands over her skin.
“I’m scared,” she said, her voice wavering.
I moved in front of her until I was kneeling, forcing her to focus on only me. “Look at me.”
She did. Her eyes were still clear, but the edges of the heat were visible now.
The faint flush climbing her throat, the way her breath was coming slightly too fast, the way her pupils had expanded and filled her eyes.
She was holding herself braced, waiting for the wave to hit and bracing herself for it.
I put my hands on either side of her face.
“You’re not enduring this. That’s not what this is. You don’t grit your teeth through it. You move with it.” I held her gaze. “We’re right here—both of us. You don’t have to manage anything. We’ll make sure you enjoy it. Didn’t you enjoy it?”
She blushed a pretty shade of deep red. “I did like it,” she admitted in a tiny voice, her head tucked down.
“I know,” I said. “We’ll make it good for you, Omega.”
Heat flared in her eyes, but before she could speak, I kissed her.
Not softly, not the sweet kisses from before.
I kissed her as if I’d been thinking about kissing her for the past hour, which I had.
Slowly, the tension in her muscles dissolved as her hands found my arms, digging tiny crescents from her nails, and her body decided this was a better option than bracing.
Malric’s hands moved over her back from behind. She sucked in a quick breath as she registered both of us touching her, but I deepened the kiss before she could think about it too carefully. Her scent spiked, the honey flavored with silver blossoms hanging heavy in the room.
The heat in the room jumped several degrees, and my response to it was immediate and not subtle. I’d managed to keep control while she slept, the proximity and her scent a sustained test of my self-control that I had passed through sheer bloody-mindedness. The window on that was closing.
I pulled back from the kiss far enough to breathe.
Her eyes were darker. The glaze was coming back in, the heat taking hold, and she looked at me with a hunger that spoke of the heat and demand, rather than any kind of fear or tension.
“Thane,” she said, a hint of a whine in her voice, the omega side begging to be satisfied.
“I’m here.”
Malric’s hands slid to her hips from behind and he pressed his mouth to the back of her neck.
She shivered, her eyes going hazy and unfocused.
He caught my gaze over her shoulder. Something passed between us—the wordless communication we’d developed over the years, recalibrated for three people, and I understood what he was doing.
He was giving her to me.
Not a transaction. Not a concession. He was reading the situation with the precision he brought to everything and he understood, without me having to say it, what I needed, what she needed, and that right now they were the same thing.
I cupped the back of her head and tilted her head for my kiss, and she eagerly met me, the heat making her body willing.
I kissed my way down her throat, licking and sucking along a path straight for her breasts, already decorated with love bites from Malric.
I had held them and teased them earlier, but hadn’t had a chance to properly taste them as I had been dying to.
Her fingers threaded through my hair, not pushing, just resting, the nails pricking my scalp.
“You’re so fucking beautiful, Omega,” I said.