Chapter 4 #2
I closed my eyes. Took a breath. When I opened them, Miner was still blocking the entryway, his expression not quite a mask but not far off.
I could try to push him out of the way, use my own body weight to force him back and shut the door in Denil's face.
Just for a minute. Not even two. Enough time to find something, anything, that would settle this unruly chemistry in my veins and let me think again.
Except we both knew a minute wouldn't settle anything. Heat ignored etiquette and every pretty plan I'd made. No social protocol had prepared me for three men responding at once. They would wait as long as I asked; I was still the one who had to decide what to do with them.
"Can you smell me?" I asked softly, unable to look away from their faces anymore.
Denil opened his mouth, then closed it with an audible click of his jaw before swallowing hard and nodding once. "Yes," he said finally. "Yes, you're our match."
I couldn't decide if it made me want to laugh or bite something.
Maybe both.
Still, the most humiliating part was that I liked it. I liked being wanted this way, by people so visibly fighting themselves to want me well. Every hard line of them said hunger; every choice so far had kept that hunger from making them monsters.
They were horny. Obviously, visibly hard, and trying not to be, the effort written across them in a language I didn't need translated.
"This is Celia's wedding," I whined. My voice came out quieter than I'd intended.
"She needs you. All of you. She's your sister, Denil.
She's—" I stopped. The sentence I'd been building, she's more important than this, caught in my throat.
I wasn't ready to turn this new, impossible want into competition with Celia, much less hear myself choose between them.
"Celia's wedding is handled," Miner said.
The mint and sea salt of his scent was the only one of the three that hadn't shifted.
It stayed cool while Denil's pine deepened and Isak's brown butter warmed.
"The ceremony happened. The reception is winding down.
Her pack is with her. She has four bond-mates, two mothers, three other siblings who aren't standing in this hallway, and about a hundred guests still down there who've been drinking champagne for three hours and didn't notice the three of us step away. "
"She told us to go have fun," Isak said. He'd found his voice, or some version of it. It came out low and warm, paired with a look softer than I expected. "Just like you, we did the thing. We were there. Now we're here."
"Because I pinged a heat app," I said. "Not because Celia sent you."
"Because you needed someone," Denil said. His voice was so low and close that I felt it in my sternum. "And we're someone."
The simplicity of it landed harder than it should have.
I looked at him, really looked past the broad shoulders, square jaw, and ice-blue eyes currently doing something complicated to my lower abdomen.
For the first time, I saw the man Celia had been describing for twenty years.
The overprotective older brother from her stories was still there.
His jaw stayed tight after the words, as if the rest of them were trapped behind his teeth.
It was not a comfortable thing to notice while standing in a hotel robe with slick on my thighs.
Miner edged one foot forward, slow enough for me to track and stop him. His hand stayed up between Denil and the threshold while he turned toward me, his attention on my face.
"The boundaries we confirmed at the door stand," he said. "Consent. Discretion. No bites. No assumptions. Nothing happens that you don't want. Nothing continues if you want it to stop. We're here for you, Nitsa. Not for your heat. For you."
The two syllables stopped me. Until then, I had been the omega, Celia's friend. In his mouth, they made the whole thing startlingly personal.
"This is insane," I said. It was not my most eloquent contribution to the conversation.
"It's not insane," Isak said. "It's inconvenient. There's a difference."
"Having a heat-response team show up at my door wearing the faces of my best friend's brother's pack is several standard deviations past inconvenient."
"It's also the situation we're in," Miner said. The same calm had survived both alphas, my accusations, and every pause. Its consistency put me on edge. "And you get to decide what happens next. Not your body. Not our instincts. You."
Denil had gone very still, arms crossed in what I was learning was his default. Now his forearms flexed against his chest, and his jaw stayed locked. Whatever calculations were running, he disliked every answer.
"If you want us to leave," Miner said, "we leave. The duffel stays. Water, electrolytes, heat-care kit, the standard protocol. You don't have to explain. You don't have to apologize. You say the word, and we're gone."
My eyes cut to Isak, who growled low at Miner for even offering. I looked at the duffel sitting at Denil's feet. Black and utilitarian, it belonged in an emergency or a military deployment. Somehow it had ended up at a wedding in the hands of a man who was, what, a Boy Scout?
"What's in it?" I asked.
Isak's mouth curved into something warmer and more complicated than a smile. "Everything you need. Nothing you don't. Some things that are nice to have. Some things that are—" He glanced at Miner. Miner gave him a flat look. Isak amended his answer. "Some things that are optional."
"Optional," I repeated.
"Very optional," Miner said. "And entirely your call."
The hallway suddenly felt too narrow. Behind me, the hotel suite felt too large, too empty, and too full of a king bed I'd been avoiding for twenty minutes.
Every pulse of heat urged me toward that bed.
A cramp tightened low in my abdomen, and warmth gathered between my thighs.
I stayed in the doorway and pretended the choice wasn't becoming urgent.
Celia would understand. She'd have several things to say about the cosmic irony of her best friend going into heat at her wedding and her brother's pack showing up to handle it, all delivered with the warmth and precision that made Celia Celia.
Anger and betrayal wouldn't enter into it.
She'd laugh first, then grow mildly concerned about how long I'd managed to deny the obvious.
"You don't have to decide right now," Miner said. His hand was still up, the line between Denil and the threshold still held, but his eyes were on mine. Steady. Waiting. "Take the time you need. We can wait."
"We can," Denil said. He lowered his voice until the roughness nearly disappeared and held himself exactly where Miner had stopped him. "However long."
Isak didn't say anything. He was looking at me with something raw: hunger, need, intensity, all at once.
The pause stretched, and everyone waited for me to choose.
I could go back to the app.