Chapter 36
CASSIAN
Jess is dead weight on my chest. Not complaining, though.
Her cheek smashes against my sternum, lips parted on a soft snore she’ll deny if I ever bring it up. Sweat-damp hair sticks to my skin. Everything smells like her—heat-sweet and wild and a little fried at the edges—layered over stale Gatorade, protein bars, and four days of bad decisions.
My back screams. My thighs burn. My cock has filed for medical leave. Totally worth it.
The dark curtains on her windows turn the room into a cave, but my body clock doesn’t care about light anymore. It runs on her breathing now. Each slow inhale drags her scent over my skin.
My instinct hums under my ribs, not that feral roar from the first night, more like a low engine idle, ready if she twitches wrong.
Empty bottles and crumpled wrappers litter the floor around her nest of twisted sheets, kicked blankets, and enough pillows to smother an army. The whole place looks like a storm hit and decided to stay.
Distant, through the walls, water pounds in the shower down the hall. Rowan and Eli. They finally tapped out to rinse off before we all permanently fuse together.
Jess shifts on top of me, that tiny, unconscious wiggle of her hips that sends a spark down my spine anyway.
“Easy,” I growl under my breath, not sure if I’m talking to my body or hers.
Her fingers flex against my ribs, little crescent moons from where she clung during one of our sex sessions. A soft sound escapes her, half whimper, half sigh, and she tries to burrow closer like there’s any space left.
Yeah. That does things I’m too wrecked to act on.
I drag my hand up her back, palm broad and rough over her spine. Calluses catch on her skin. These hands frame doorways, haul lumber, hit heavy bags until my shoulders sing. They’re not made for gentle.
They’ve learned her anyway.
“Cassian,” she breathes, the word nothing but a puff of air over my chest.
First time I met her, I couldn’t be bothered to ask her name. Slapped “sweetheart” on her like everyone else, and she demanded I use her name. I knew then I was a gonner.
Now my whole nervous system goes hot whenever she’s near me.
“Right here, Jess,” I rasp, voice shredded from four days of barking orders and groaning into her skin. I tilt my head and press a slow kiss to her hairline, tasting salt and the fading edge of fever. “You’re good. You’re safe. Heat’s backing off.”
She blinks up at me, lashes clumped, pupils big but not drowning-black. Pink flush still rides her cheeks, but the glassy, frantic sheen is gone. Her eyes actually focus, instead of just…fixating on the nearest Alpha willing to climb inside the fire with her.
“How can you tell?” she asks. Her voice is wrecked, all gravel and scrape. It hits me low, like a punch.
I let my hand slide down over the swell of her ass, skimming the dip of her hip, feeling how loose her muscles are now. No desperate clench, no jitter in her thighs ready to fling her into someone’s lap.
“The air isn’t buzzing,” I say. “You’re not trying to crawl under my ribs.” I dip my head, run my nose along her jaw, slow. Inhale. “Your scent’s still sweet. Just…less ‘I’ll die if you don’t fuck me right now,’ more ‘I’ll murder you if you get out of this bed.’”
Her cracked lips twitch. “That accurate, huh?”
“Yeah.” My thumb snags on a peeling patch of skin at her hip; four days of sweating, spot washing when we could, not exactly spa treatment. “I’m a professional.”
“You’re an ass,” she mutters. Her eyes soften. “My ass, though.”
Something in my chest stutters hard enough that I almost miss my next breath.
Not the first time she’s called us hers. Heat makes Omegas sticky like that—claiming, clinging. But this doesn’t feel like biology. It sounds like she’s filing paperwork with the universe.
My ribs feel too tight. Like someone swapped them out for a size smaller while I wasn’t looking.
“Yeah,” I say, voice coming out lower, rougher. “Guess I am.”
Her gaze traces my face as if she’s memorizing it, from the scar on my temple from a two-by-four that came down wrong. Crooked nose from a fight I technically won. The scruff I never fully bother to shave off. Her fingers follow, thumb brushing the scar, soft where the world was not.
“You okay?” she asks.
Stupid question. My whole body feels like it got hit by a truck and then backed over again. But shit, I’d sign up for another round if she needed it.
“Fine, sweetheart.” The old word slips out before I can catch it.
Her brows twitch, that tiny tell that says she noticed. Guilt bites, sharp and unexpected. I swallow it down and correct, fingers tightening on her hip.
“Jess,” I say, like an apology, brushing a kiss across her lips. “I’m fine, Jess.”
Her mouth curves, slow and tender and dangerous. “You remembered to use my name.”
“Of course I remembered your name,” I grunt. “I’m not that big of an asshole.”
“Mmm. Debatable.” She tries to keep it light, but the words land heavier between us. “When we met, you…didn’t bother until I made you.”
“Yeah.” Heat crawls up the back of my neck.
I don’t blush; I grind my teeth and let it leak out as a growl.
“Don’t think I didn’t hear it. Eli said it first, back at that shitty evaluation room—file in his hand, your picture clipped to the front.
Jessica Maria Mancini. He said it like it meant something. ”
Her brows pinch, like she’s trying to line up that memory with this moment.
“I told myself it didn’t matter,” I go on.
“You were a trial Omega. Ninety days, then a report, then we all decide if we’re staying together or not.
And if one of us said no, then the Institute would shuffle you to some other pack.
Easier to pretend you were a line on a form than a person I could lose. ”
Her hand slides down, resting flat over my heart. It kicks against her palm, traitor loud.
“And now?” she asks quietly.
Now? If some other asshole called her “sweetheart,” I’d break their hand.
I let the truth come, rough and unpolished. “Now if anyone calls you anything but Jess, I want to rearrange their teeth.”
Her eyes go wide and ridiculous, all liquid and starry. “Cass.”
“Don’t say my name like that,” I mutter. My pulse jumps every time she does, which she started recently during her heat cycle, and I’m tired of feeling like a teenager with his first crush. “Makes my heart do stupid shit.”
She shifts again, not that frantic, grinding movement from earlier days, just a slow roll of hips, body checking in with itself. Even mellow, the slide of her skin over mine sends a low growl out of my chest.
“Thought you said it was easing,” she says, smug.
“Less inferno, more controlled burn,” I say. “My self-control’s holding on by a splinter. That’s all.”
“You have self-control?” One corner of her mouth kicks up. “News to me.”
“Had some before I met you.” I cup her jaw, thumb dragging along her lower lip. It’s swollen by me. By Rowan. By Eli. A flicker of possessive pride sparks, bright and mean. “Then you walked in, and now my days are just…managing whatever the hell this is.”
“Which is what?” Her eyes search my face like she expects to find blueprints to the universe written there.
I don’t do feelings. I do load limits, stress points, and how many beams you need before a roof caves in. I can walk into a half-finished build and tell you where it’ll fail just by listening to it breathe.
I know the exact second the load-bearing walls inside my chest shifted and reset around her.
She must see something, because her smile fades into something smaller, careful. “Cassian?”
“When Eli first floated your name,” I say, words slow, like I’m pouring concrete and trying not to spill, “I was skeptical. Thinking you’d bail without me having to do shit.”
Her fingers press a little harder over my heart like she’s checking if it’s still beating.
“I let myself think of you like that,” I admit. “A trial. A test. If I made you real up here,”—I tap my temple, then nudge her hand back to my chest—“and you decided we weren’t it? Or some suit decided to yank you away? That would’ve gutted me. So I played it like business.”
Her throat works, eyes shining. “I figured you couldn’t stand me.”
The quiet way she says it slices cleaner than any blade.
“Jesus, Jess.” My hand tightens on her hip.
“I liked you too damn much. First time you sat across from us at that table and told me to use your actual name, I wanted to throw the trial out and keep you anyway. I’ve already got enough shit stuffed in my head.
Old fights. Bad calls. People I couldn’t fix.
Letting you be you meant I didn’t get to walk away if some lab coat decided you belonged somewhere else. ”
Blake’s smirk flashes in my mind’s eye. The way he looked at Omegas like they were product. The way his gaze snagged on Jess at that damn banquet, like he was shopping.
If I’d put my hands around his throat right there, he’d be dead. I’d be in a cell. And Jess… My jaw locks. Jess would be shoved back into Nexus or handed off to another Alpha or even Blake like a delivery. That idea makes my vision go white and my hands go looking for something to break.
“And,” I say, hauling myself back from that edge. “I was trying to keep you at arm’s length until we knew what the hell we were doing. Didn’t really work.”
She snorts softly. “No. You still wound up tangled in my nest with me.”
“And you still ended up in my head.” The words surprise me as much as her. I’m not the one who says this shit out loud. “Congratulations. You win. Prize is three overprotective guys and a lifetime supply of Gatorade.”
Her eyes shine. She pretends they don’t. “Not a bad deal.”
Down the hall, the shower cuts off. Pipes clank as the water line resets. We’ve got seconds before we’re not alone.
Good. Bad. I don’t know.
“There’s something I need to tell you about Blake,” she says.