20
striker
I WAKE UP and we’re all sleeping on top of each other on this bed that is not big enough for five people.
Lotus is awake, crawling out from beneath Calix, free of the knots that were holding her between the two men. She’s entirely naked, and her breasts are perfect and high and round, and I can’t resist reaching up to cup one.
She notices, giving me a little grin.
I pull her down against me.
She settles into me, fitting perfectly against my body, tucked here under my shoulder. I let out a gasp at this goodness.
I never…
I’ve never held a naked woman like this. It feels so right, so natural, and I have a thick feeling in my throat that I would ever have thought to cut myself off from this. It seems like insanity now.
On the other hand, this should seem like insanity. I just had, um, an orgy?
Didn’t feel like that, though. It felt like a joining, like a bonding.
She rubs her face against my skin.
I nudge my face down and capture her lips with mine. I’ve never kissed her, not until this moment. That’s a crime.
She lets out a soft moan, her tongue sliding against mine.
Bite her, says something in the back of my brain, and I want it. I see myself doing it, sort of like a snake striking her, holding her wriggling body down as I sink my teeth into her, and—
I recoil.
It’s too much like the training with Acker.
She feels the tension in me and breaks the kiss. She raises her head and looks down at me in concern, running a hand up and down my chest, a soothing motion.
Somehow, during all of this, I’ve gotten a hard-on again.
Her hand goes lower and she finds that.
I tip back my head, showing her my neck, gasping at the feeling of her small, clever hands on me. Everything twines up, the feeling of being a predator, striking her, and the feeling of loving her, of protecting her, of joining with her, and I can’t tell where one feeling starts and the other picks up. They are the same feeling now, lust and love at once, and I find myself rolling on top of her, kissing her again.
Her body accommodates mine easily, her thighs parting, cradling me, and my erection makes contact with the center of her wet opening.
“Want you,” I whisper.
“Yes, please,” she whispers back, pretty and shy and blinking up at me.
It feels so amazing, her soft and supple flesh under me, and the warm, slipperiness of her pussy as I reach down and nudge myself into her. She accepts me, takes me into her, and I sink into the goodness that is my omega. My perfect sheath. I fit into her, and the sheer rightness of it takes my breath away.
I rock gently against her, my knot starting to expand as I do.
She runs her small, soft fingers over my back, clutching me against her.
God, I want to knot her. I want stuck in her, trapped there, anchored there.
Take me? I think. Can you take me? All of me?
But I don’t say it out loud, and I don’t knot her.
It hasn’t been like this yet. It’s always been a frenzy of need, almost brutal, and this is just gentle.
I don’t even know if my knot can be gentle. There seems to be something inherently rough about forcing that huge part of myself into that tiny, tight part of her. I know she likes it, but… but…
I feel nervous and hesitant as I move in her, shallow thrusts. Part of me knows if we make too much movement or noise, we’ll wake the others.
I don’t want her all to myself, not at all, but I want… just this… just now… this moment… her and me.
Now, one of her hands is on my face and I focus on her, looking into her eyes as she traces my features and looks at me.
We kiss.
We kiss and kiss and move against each other.
I start feeling my knot go deeper into her, just a little, as I roll my hips against her.
She widens her spread thighs, just a tiny little movement, and the next roll pushes half my knot into her.
We both hiss at the same time.
“You’re perfect,” I tell her, my voice barely audible.
“So are you,” she says.
And that’s when I knot her. Maybe it is brutal, I don’t know, because I feel resistance and I just push in all the way anyway, just take her, claim her, get all the way deep into her.
Her eyes roll back in her head, and her breathing changes. There’s a little ripple in her pussy, squeezing my knot, and it’s so good that I white-out for a second, lost to pleasure.
She pushes her fingers in between our bodies, seeking out her clitoris, and I adjust to give her access. Then, I sit up and just stare. It’s mesmerizing, her pretty, glistening pussy, watching her fingers rub herself while my cock is buried all the way inside, stretching her and taking her. I’ve never seen anything quite so erotic in my entire life.
I watch her make herself come, and my breath comes in wheezes as I follow her over the edge.
Then I collapse on her, and our mouths move together, as I kiss her senseless.
A groan from the other side of the bed. It’s Arrow. “What smells so good?”
I’m out of breath. I rest my forehead on Lotus’s shoulder, chuckling to myself.
“Oh, it’s you two,” he says and scoots over to us.
I lift my face.
He kisses me.
Oh, shit, he tastes so good, and I’m drowning in post-orgasmic bliss, and I groan into his mouth.
When we break the kiss, he kisses Lotus, and I don’t know what I like better, kissing my mates or watching my mates kiss. It’s all heady and delicious.
“Morning,” says Arrow.
“Is it morning, or is it afternoon?” says Lotus, squinting. “How long did we sleep?”
“Whatever.” He grins at the both of us. “I want to wake up like this every time I wake up, I think.”
“Yeah,” says Lotus softly. “Yeah, me too.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“I want knotted first thing every single day,” says Lotus, stretching her arms above her head, making her pretty breasts elongate in intriguing ways.
I touch one of them again, grinning down at her. “I think we can handle that, between the four of us.”
“I’m lucky to have so many knots at my disposal, aren’t I?” she says with a wicked grin.
“We’re lucky to get the chance to knot you,” says Arrow.
I seize her hips and press deep into her, letting out a little sigh. “We really are.”
Calix and Knight are stirring now.
Calix sits up sleepily, running a hand through his mussed hair and takes us in. Knight furrows his brow as he stretches.
“Smells like dessert in here,” says Knight.
“Does it, though?” says Arrow. “It’s like a food smell, but not a food smell. It’s musky in some other way, sort of earthy.”
“Smells like sex,” says Calix with a yawn. He scratches his stomach. “Good,” he says, nodding at us. “I think our omega needs a lot of attention. If she’s getting that bad off on a regular basis, we should try to knot her regularly, try to keep that at bay.” He squints. “Is it morning? Because I have to go to work.”
“Right, how far of a drive is that? Two hours?” says Lotus.
“About that,” says Calix. “Is it dark?”
“Getting dark, I think,” I say. “I don’t think it’s morning.”
Calix gets off the bed and wanders over to fish his pants off the floor. He takes out his phone and nods. “Yeah. Evening. So, I could stay tonight, here with you guys, but…” He gets back on the bed. “We need to do something about this entire situation. We need a safe place to establish the pack bonds. We need somewhere private and comfortable, with a fucking nest.”
“What’s that mean? How do we establish pack bonds?” I say.
“Fucking,” says Calix with a little grin that makes him look adorable.
I lean over, still knotted into our omega, grab him behind the back of his neck and kiss him.
When we pull away, he looks dazed as he smiles at me somewhat besottedly.
I feel it, too.
I’ve never fallen in love before, not even with one person. Falling in love with four people, all at the same time, is dizzying.
Calix laughs, a happy laugh. “Yeah, so a lot of fucking. We need to do so much fucking. And, uh, of course—” His voice drops. “The bites.”
I thrust into Lotus again, that snake-jawed part of me rearing its head. I want my teeth in her. Badly.
But I shake myself. “I don’t know about the bites.”
“You were down before,” says Knight. He turns to Calix. “You’re the one who says we need to wait.”
“It’s only that when I get thinking about it,” I say, and look back down at Lotus, whose body I’m fucking inside at this moment, “it makes me feel like the hound training made me feel. It makes me feel a little unhinged.”
“No, the bites won’t hurt her,” says Calix.
I’m looking down at her as I respond to him. “Sure about that? They draw blood, right?”
The scent in the room suddenly changes, a sharp kind of sex-tinged scent coming from all of us. Blood is turning all of us on, even Calix, even Lotus.
No one says anything.
My knot deflates and I pull out of Lotus.
“It’s weird,” says Arrow in a funny voice. “There’s nothing else like that in nature. There aren’t animals who bite each other during mating. It makes us sound like vampires or something.”
“We don’t suck her blood or anything,” says Calix, but his voice is strangled and kind of aroused.
Lotus pulls her knees up to her chest and leans against the headboard. “How much blood?” she says in a breathy voice.
“Not… it’s just…” Calix reaches out and runs his fingers over her arm, reverent. “Just to mark you, pretty omega, just to show that you belong to the pack. It’s not… it’s good, I swear.”
“But you don’t know, do you, because you’ve never done it?”
“I’ve seen biting ceremonies,” says Calix.
We all look at him, eyes wide and curious.
“It’s not always like that, like public sex, in the Polloi,” he says. “But sometimes, like, if it’s a joining between two important packs, the son of some important Vasilissa mating with an omega heiress, then they’ll do it like that. Everyone gathers around and watches. People make food. Usually you grill out for stuff like that. Picnic food. Hamburgers, pasta salad… yeah, I’m realizing how weird this sounds.” He blushes, ducking down his head. He speaks to the bedspread, not us. “But the bites aren’t violent, and everyone feels good, and no one gets hurt.”
“Everyone’s there?” says Lotus. “Like, even the kids?”
“Yeah?” says Calix, looking up at her as if he’s asking her if this is weird. He collapses into the bed. “Sex is natural, and everyone in the secular world is all hung up on it, like it’s this profane thing, but it’s not. It’s just a normal thing people do.”
“So, how old were you the first time you watched people have sex in public?” she says, faintly horrified.
“I don’t know,” he says. “When I was a kid, that part was boring. I’d be off running around with other kids catching fireflies or playing hide and seek or whatever. You’d see it, I guess, but you wouldn’t really watch it. You know how certain things seem like they’re just dumb, boring adult things when you’re a kid? It was like that.”
“Huh,” she says, shrugging. “That’s… maybe I can see that. I guess if you grow up with something, you tend to think it’s normal.”
Calix sighs heavily. “I guess…”
“What?” she says.
“Maybe I’m wrong to say the bites aren’t violent, or that they don’t hurt. There’s something there, you’re not wrong.” He eyes her and then he looks at me. “If there wasn’t something violent in sex to begin with, Acker couldn’t have coerced that to use that drive within alphas to make you violent towards omegas.”
Everyone’s quiet, as if we’re thinking this over.
“And with designations, I think it’s maybe different than with betas,” says Calix. “There’s something heightened in the way we do it. There’s this element of savagery or something, but maybe it’s always there. It’s not only about that, or always about that, and I don’t even think that’s the most important element of it, but we all know what I mean.”
“It’s about surrender,” says Lotus. “But it’s not about a woman surrendering to men or an omega surrendering to alphas. It’s about all of us surrendering to instinct. The instinct is the savage part.”
“So, if we try to bite her, we could get switched on?” I say in a wooden voice.
Lotus shakes her head. “You haven’t hurt me, though. None of you have actually really hurt me.”
“I’m not willing to bet your life on that, omega,” I say firmly. “We need to get control of ourselves.”
“But if it’s really about surrender,” says Lotus, “then you have to be out of control. That’s sort of what sex is.”
“But it’s not instinctive for alphas to kill omegas,” says Calix. “That’s unnatural, what Acker made you do.”
“No, we always felt that,” speaks up Arrow. “Or I did, anyway, I always felt like it was wrong.”
Something settles into me in a way that it hasn’t before now. I sit up straight, horror tingling through me, making my stomach clench and my hair stand up on edge. “I killed women,” I whisper, and I get off the bed. “I killed them.”
arrow
STRIKER LEAVES THE room and the air changes.
It’s a bad feeling, not unlike the feeling you have when you’re a kid and one of your parents is crying or something. You don’t like watching the one person who’s your pillar of safety against an unkind world falling apart. It makes you feel as if the entire universe is unsafe. It shakes you.
I can’t say that I’m feeling Striker’s emotions, exactly, although Calix did say that if we were a bonded pack, that would happen.
It’s just that I hadn’t realized, until this exact moment, how much I rely on Striker to keep everything regulated. I look to him, as a leader, and I can sense that he’s just fallen apart.
Knight’s up and pulling on his pants. “Stay here,” he growls at us and follows Striker out.
But I don’t listen. I get up and get dressed too, leaving Calix and Lotus on the bed, still unclothed, looking worried.
The front door to the house is open, and I know they’re out there.
I find them outside, in the growing darkness, standing on the walkway out here, which has little green sea shells in it, molded out of concrete.
Knight has seized Striker from behind, in a bear hug, pinning his arms to his chest, and he’s holding onto the other man while Striker sobs .
I stand there, clenching my hands into fists and unclenching them, and I don’t do anything.
The last one, the last omega we killed, we were out of our minds with it. I remember that we found her out in the woods behind the facility, and that she lashed out at us until she… didn’t.
She was violent and out of control. She’d killed two staff members to get out with some shiv she’d made out of a plastic spoon, and when we caught up to her, she had it and she used it on us. She stabbed me in the thigh and she had dirt streaked all over her face and her hair was matted.
But then, we tackled her, and I remember that my cock got hard and I got a knot, which never happened, not with Acker, not with the videos, never. Only in the presence of an actual omega.
When that happened, she got real docile, real fast. She whined and went down on all fours to present for us. She wanted us to fuck her. Her instincts kicked in. And I wanted to fuck her, too.
But we killed her.
We didn’t just kill her, we ripped her apart.
And we were all out there, the three of us, spattered in omega blood, with pulsing knots, and I remember Striker touching me, touching my dick, and I wanted—I was so confused—and then they were there, the staff and Acker, and she had her soothing voice, telling us how good a job we’d done and taking us off to be petted and showered down and her hand on my knot and—
At the time, I felt the wrongness of it, but now, looking back on it, with all the missing pieces of myself in place, I begin thinking about that omega, who was just some girl, some girl who had a bad reaction to the drugs at the facility, who’d been locked away and stuck with needles and kept captive and treated like an animal.
She was a person, and we… we…
I think of the smell of her blood on me, how her blood smelled . Not like Lotus, because nothing smells like Lotus, but I am an alpha, and the scent of an omega, even one that isn’t my scent match, makes me react.
I don’t want to think about this anymore.
I turn, squaring my shoulders, and I suck in a breath that seems to cut painfully into my lungs. Letting it out is like breathing out shards. I stalk up the stupid walkway, back into the house, and I slam the door.
knight
“LET GO OF me,” Striker is saying, but his voice is mangled with tears, and I can hardly make out his words.
I don’t let go of him.
“We’re going back inside,” I tell him, my voice firm at his ear. “We can’t be out here like this. If someone sees us, it could endanger the omega.”
This makes him sag into me. He turns to look at me and then he nods, once.
I put an arm around his shoulders and walk him back inside.
Arrow’s pacing in the living room when we get in there.
I glare at him. I told him to stay put, didn’t I?
Arrow’s voice comes out like gravel. “We didn’t have a choice. That wasn’t us, it was Acker. She made us do that, and I won’t carry that. I won’t take responsibility for that.” It’s an accusation.
“No one is asking you to do that,” says Striker wearily.
“Shut up,” I tell Striker. I point at the couch. “Sit.”
Striker looks as if he’s going to argue, but then he sighs heavily and sits down.
I stare at Arrow until Arrow looks away, shame coming off of him in waves.
The shame, it’s thick on the air, thick in their scents. I can taste it on the back of my tongue. I don’t feel that, whatever it is they feel. Nothing makes me feel that kind of shame. It’s odd, because I think that I might have felt threatened by the emotion before, but now, things are changing.
The threat of it, the emotion, it always frightened me, because it reminded me that I was different than everyone else.
Other people feel things like shame and guilt, things that keep them from doing things that I do without any qualms.
I don’t like feeling different.
Deep down, even though I am some kind of monster and I’ve always known that about myself, I want to belong. I want to be like other people. And I know I never will, so when other people show me elements of themselves that I don’t have, it makes me angry, because…
I don’t know.
Maybe some part of me is jealous?
If I could do that, if I could feel that, would I belong?
Except it’s changing now, because I do belong. I belong in this pack, monster that I am, shame-free, violent freak that I am. I belong, and it’s not even a question. I am theirs and they are mine.
“It’s done,” I say to Striker quietly. “Whatever we did, it’s done, and it can’t be undone.”
Striker’s still crying, tears streaming down his face. “You don’t understand, Knight.”
“I do understand,” I say. “I don’t…” I roll my head on my shoulders. “I don’t feel it, whatever it is the both of you feel, but I do understand what you’re feeling.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Striker sobs.
I let out a huge sigh. I sit down next to him on the couch, and I gather him into my arms. I’m taller than he is, but we’re both brawny guys, so it’s a little awkward. He stiffens for a second, and I tighten my arms around him.
And then he sort of crumples into me, tucking his face into my bare chest and he sobs brokenly into me. I hold him.
At one point, I look up at Arrow and gesture pointedly for him to go away.
Arrow, looking abashed, scratches the side of his neck and then ambles back down the hallway, leaving us alone.
I hold Striker.
He cries.
It’s a long time.
This kind of thing, people crying, it’s another thing that would usually make me uncomfortable, because I don’t really do it either. I don’t cry. But this is Striker, and he’s my mate, and he needs this. He carries too much.
I realize I’m exactly the person who needs to be here for him, because he can push all of this into me, and I won’t carry it. I’ll let it go. It’ll pass through me.
After a while, he quiets, but he stays right where he is, in my arms, letting me hold him.
I kiss the top of his head, gentle, and it feels—I don’t know—not like I’m gay for him, although I guess I fucking am. So, okay, yeah, it feels like I love him. Because I do. But not just in the way where I’m attracted to him, in the way where I care about him and I want the best for him. I want him to feel my love for him.
He sighs. He lifts his face up, and his breath hitches as he looks at me.
“Hey,” I say, rubbing my thumb over his cheek, wiping away his tears. “Hey, we’re going to be okay.”
He sniffs hard.
I do something kind of fucked up. I lick his tears off my finger.
His eyes widen.
“Want to know how you taste?” I say.
His lips part.
“You taste like you’re mine,” I say. And then I kiss him.