Chapter 18
TORBEN
She chooses me before the heat steals the choosing, and the weight of being chosen deliberately, with clear eyes and a strategist's full awareness of the cost, is heavier than any order Stellan ever gave me.
We don't make it back to the fortress with dignity.
One of the senior wolves who held the reserve position in human form tosses me a cloak on the battlefield, and I wrap it around my waist while Revna walks beside me through the wreckage of the engagement, her scent pouring off her in waves that make every wolf we pass lower their head and step aside.
The omega pheromones are thick enough that Signe intercepts us at the fortress gate with a healer's bag and a single instruction: "Get inside.
Lock the door. Don't come out until I tell you. "
"Romantic," Revna says.
"Clinical," Signe corrects, already pressing a waterskin and wrapped food into my free hand.
"You'll need both. The heat will run in waves, with lucid intervals between.
The intervals get shorter as the cycle progresses.
Stay hydrated. Eat when you can." She looks at me with the flat assessment of a healer who has watched this biology play out before and knows what comes next.
"The knot will form when the cycle peaks.
Neither of you has experienced it. It will be intense and it will last. Don't fight the lock. "
"You realize you're giving knotting instructions to a war counselor and a man who just won a dominance fight," Revna says. "We can figure out the mechanics."
Signe's mouth twitches. "Eat the food, Revna."
The walk through the fortress is the longest of my life.
Revna is beside me, close enough that her arm brushes mine with each step, and every point of contact sends a jolt through my nervous system that makes my cock strain against the cloak I'm barely wearing.
Her scent is intensifying in real time, the heat building toward the first wave, and the omega pheromones pouring off her skin draw the attention of every wolf we pass.
I put my hand on her lower back and the touch is possessive and public and entirely insufficient.
I want to pin her against the corridor wall and bury my face in her throat and breathe her in until the distinction between her scent and my lungs disappears.
I want to pick her up and carry her because the pace she's walking is too slow for a man whose biology is screaming that his omega is minutes from the first wave and needs to be behind a locked door and under him before it hits.
I do neither. I walk. My jaw aches from clenching. She glances up at me once, reads the strain in my face, and her mouth curves with the satisfaction of a woman who knows exactly what she's doing to the wolf beside her and is enjoying every second of it.
The corridor to our quarters is empty. Signe cleared it, or word spread faster than we walked.
The door closes behind us and I throw the bolt, and the sound of the lock engaging is the same sound that has measured our days since the beginning, except this time the lock keeps the world out instead of keeping her in.
Revna stands in the middle of the room, arms wrapped around herself, and the flush across her chest has spread to her throat and the skin below her ears.
Her eyes have gone dark at the edges, the pupils blown wide, and her scent fills the space between us with a concentration that makes my vision narrow to her and nothing else.
The omega biology is running full open, every pheromone receptor in my body firing at once, and the alpha imperative that has been building since the first shared breath through stone hits its terminal velocity.
"How long?" she asks, and I can hear the heat in her voice already, a roughness underneath the control, the omega rising like a tide.
"Hours."
She nods. Holds my gaze. The strategist is still in there, behind the dark eyes and the flushed skin and the scent that is making coherent thought increasingly optional. The woman who said 'not the omega, me' is making sure I see her before the biology takes the wheel.
I see her.
"Then come here," she says.
The first wave takes her before I cross the room.
She bends at the waist, hands bracing on the edge of the bed, and the sound she makes is low and involuntary, the desperation of an omega whose heat has arrived after years of suppression.
The intensity is magnified by the duration of the denial.
Signe warned us about this: the chemistry burning hotter because the body has been denied its cycle for over a decade and the accumulated biological pressure has nowhere to go but through.
I'm behind her in two strides. My hands find her hips and the contact sends a shudder through both of us, the scent-loop slamming open at full capacity.
Her omega scent spikes so hard the room narrows to the two of us and the bed and the space between, and my cock is harder than it's been in my life, straining against the rough fabric of the borrowed cloak that I strip off without looking where it falls.
"Don't be careful," she says, and the words come out ragged, her fingers white-knuckled on the bed frame.
"Don't be tender. Don't be whatever you were this morning.
That was beautiful and I'll want it again, but right now I need you to stop thinking and start fucking me before I lose the ability to tell you what I want. "
The permission detonates something that the last several weeks of restraint have been holding in check. The alpha that my biology has been building, the territorial, possessive, primal wolf that has been straining against the leash of the man I was trained to be, snaps the leash and surges forward.
I strip her clothes off with hands that aren't gentle.
The fabric tears where it catches, and neither of us cares.
Her body underneath is flushed from throat to thighs, her skin burning under my palms, and the slick between her legs has soaked through everything she was wearing and is now coating my fingers, my wrists, the insides of her thighs in a slippery heat that makes my cock jerk against her ass.
I bend her forward over the bed and push inside her in one long stroke, and the sound we both make fills the room with a raw, animal honesty that has nothing to do with tenderness or strategy.
She's so wet and so swollen that the entry is frictionless, her body opening around me with a desperate, clenching heat that pulls me deep and holds me there.
"More," she says, and the word is barely a word, more breath than voice, and her hips push back against mine with a demand that matches the omega imperative pounding through her bloodstream. "Harder. Stop holding back."
I stop holding back.
The pace is fast and deep and driven by a biological engine that has been building across the entire arc of our history together.
Every thrust seats me fully inside her, and every withdrawal pulls a sound from her that is raw and wrecked, the pleasure-pain of an omega in heat being filled by her compatible alpha.
The slick makes everything obscenely wet, the sound of our bodies connecting a rhythmic, liquid percussion that fills the room alongside her moans and my groans and the creak of the bed frame under the force of our movement.
Her omega biology does things I haven't felt in the previous encounters.
Her body clenches in waves that ripple along my cock from base to tip, the internal muscles working in a pattern designed to milk a knot she doesn't have yet, and the sensation is so intense that I have to lock my jaw and breathe through it to keep from finishing before the biology is ready.
She reaches back and grabs my wrist, pulls my hand to her throat, presses my fingers against the bonding site just left of the hollow.
The demand is clear. She wants my hand there while I'm inside her, the claiming and the fucking simultaneous, and the possessive fury that surges through me at the feel of her pulse hammering under my fingers is enough to darken the edges of my vision.
The first wave crests fast and brutal. She comes with my hand on the bonding site and my cock buried deep and her face pressed into the furs, and the clench of her orgasm triggers mine with a force that rips a groan from the bottom of my chest. I spill inside her, hot and thick, and my release inside my omega produces a cascade of pheromones that soaks the room in a scent so dense it's almost visible.
The wave passes. We collapse together on the bed, both of us breathing hard, both of us slick with sweat and her arousal and the aftermath of a release that barely took the edge off the heat building underneath.
"That was the appetizer," Revna says into the fur, her voice muffled and rough, humor surfacing through the wreckage the way it always does with her. "The main course is going to be worse, isn't it?"
"Signe said the waves intensify."
"Of course they do." She rolls onto her back and looks up at me, and the flush on her face is beautiful and wrecked and already rebuilding toward the next crest. "Tell me something. Between waves. While I can still form sentences."
"What do you want to know?"
"When did you stop following orders and start making decisions for yourself?"
The question cuts to the bone of everything I've been since Stellan put her in my custody. I lie beside her, my hand on her stomach, feeling the heat build under her skin as the next wave gathers.