Plague
Iwake up with my face pressed against a…
Sternum.
Warm skin over dense muscle, rising and falling beneath my cheek, and a heartbeat going slow and steady directly into my ear.
I don't move.
I figure out where the fuck I am instead.
First, my arm is wrapped around a long, lean, toned waist.
My hand is gripping sweatpants fabric.
There is a hand on my back, large but with elegant fingers, resting on my hip, and it's warm enough it must have been there for a while.
It most definitely is not Whiskey's bear paw of a hand.
Fuck.
I lift my head so fast my neck cracks.
Valek is looking down at me, lips quirked, half-lidded eyes glinting with clear amusement through the damp white hair plastered to his face.
"Good evening," he purrs.
I scrub the back of my wrist across my mouth. There's a damp patch on his chest roughly the size and shape of my open mouth.
For fuck's sake…
"How long have you been awake?" I demand.
"The entire time. Why?"
I try to sit up. His hand slides up my back and settles between my shoulder blades, and despite the lack of real pressure, it's enough for my exhausted body that I stay right where I am.
His thumb moves once against my spine. "I have never seen anyone go down that fast who wasn't concussed."
I press my forehead back against his chest because it's easier than looking at him.
"Don't tell Whiskey," I grumble. "I'll never hear the end of it."
"He already knows. I sent him a photograph."
"You what—"
"Two, actually." A low sound rolls through his chest under my ear. "Ivy made one her lock screen."
I close my eyes.
Of course she did. I can't even bring myself to be surprised.
"I'm going to poison your tea."
"Hmmm." More caresses from his thumb. "You'd never waste tea like that."
He's correct.
Infuriatingly correct.
I need to get out of fucking bed. There's a cat coming home tomorrow, and there are supplies still in bags in the hallway that need to be unpacked and sorted, and I haven't checked my email since before the game, and Ivy is somewhere in the mountains with a feral alpha I fully trust but has teeth like—
Valek gives a weary sigh. "Stop thinking. Breathe. Relax. Or you'll end up like Thane."
I shoot him a look. "End up like Thane how, exactly?"
"Covered in ice packs."
I roll my eyes, but I force myself to shut up and breathe.
He doesn't say anything else after that. It's the only reason I stay put. If he'd started harassing me, I would have been off this bed and down the hall in seconds. Instead he just lies there and lets me rest.
I haven't slept properly since the press conference. Four hours a night at best, most of them spent staring at the ceiling obsessing over all the shit going on.
I'm so tired my bones hurt.
His fingers slide up into my hair, and my whole scalp lights up. I dig my nails into his abdomen to punish him for it.
"Let me help you sleep," he whispers.
I lift my head. "I don't need—"
"I didn't ask what you needed. I made you an offer."
"An offer to what?"
He just smiles and waits, with that uncanny patience, his hand gliding along my spine until the muscles in my back tense and quiver, and he doesn't have to say a word for me to know exactly what he means.
Menacing fucking alpha.
"Fine," I mutter, to the ceiling. Not to him.
His mouth curves. "Try that again, but with less dignity."
"You get one word or none."
"Then one is enough."
He rolls us.
He does it so smoothly I'm on my back before I even realize what just happened, and the mattress dips as he moves down my body, one knee braced between mine. His hand spreads flat over my stomach, warm even through the thin shirt I never took off.
"Off," he says, tugging at the hem.
"I'd rather not."
He arches an eyebrow. "Shy, are we? I'm bare." He gestures to himself.
I glower at him, at his almost freakishly perfect body, but he has scars of his own. Countless scars. Cigarette burns, marks from bullets, slices where knives went for his organs and caught his ribs instead.
Not just from fights, either. Torture, clearly.
"Just don't make any comments."
"Promise," he says smoothly.
I sit up enough to pull it over my head. He takes it out of my hands and drops it on the floor, and I twitch toward it automatically, and he catches my wrist and pins it to the mattress beside my hip.
"Leave it."
"That's the floor."
"Your floor. Which you could eat off of," he reminds me. His mouth brushes the bite scar on my throat, the one Whiskey put there, and my entire body arcs. "But I can pick it up for you, if you'd like."
His teeth graze the scar and I forget the shirt exists.
He works down. He kisses the hollow beneath my collarbone, my chest, the scar over my heart, and there he pauses. Long enough that I brace for a question I don't want to answer.
He presses his mouth to it, once, without remark, and keeps going.
My hand ends up in his white hair without any conscious decision on my part.
He noses along the line of hair below my navel and hooks two fingers into the waistband of my sweatpants, and I lift my hips before he even asks. Fucking humiliating. He drags them down and off and drops them, but on the nightstand, not the floor.
He stops, kneeling there between my legs, and he looks at me, his unreadable silver eyes traveling from my face to my cock and back. Prickling heat crawls through my body everywhere he looks, like he's putting it there with his eyes.
"Are you going to do something?" I grit out. "Or are you fucking with me?"
He tilts his head. "Do you think I was fucking with you in the hall at the game?"
I glare away from him, irritated.
He laughs, low, and then his mouth is on the inside of my thigh and the snide remark on my tongue fizzles out.
He takes his time kissing up the crease of my hip, dragging his tongue along the line where thigh meets groin. His breath is hot enough to make me squirm, and when I make another fucking unforgivable sound in the back of my throat, he does it again.
With another dark chuckle.
"Val..."
"Yes?"
"Stop being—" I lose the word. "Stop."
"Stop, or stop?"
I fist my hand in his hair and pull.
He goes down.
His mouth closes over the crown of my cock and my spine comes off the bed, twisting, my thighs clamping around his head. His mouth is hot and aggressive in spite of being completely unhurried, and he takes me deeper with a slow slide of his tongue, hollowing his cheeks with a rumbling purr.
He likes this.
He isn't mocking me. I thought he might be, maybe. But his eyes half-close and his shoulders drop, one hand gripping my right thigh and the other splayed across my hip to keep me from bucking up into his throat.
I try to be quiet.
I really fucking try.
"Fuck!" I bite the side of my hand to muffle it. "Fuck, that's—"
He pulls off with a wet sound and licks a slow stripe up the underside, watching me the whole time with those flat silver eyes. Spit shines on his mouth. His hair is a wreck where my hand has been wrapped up in it.
"Louder," he whispers.
"Someone will hear," I hiss.
"Thane?" His tongue swirls over the head. "Good. I want him to hear. Make him loosen up a little."
"Stop talking about Thane," I groan. "I can't come if I'm thinking about him listening—"
He takes me back in and every thought perishes anyway.
He builds me methodically toward the edge. Deep pulls, then teasing. A twist of his wrist at the base, his thumb pressing beneath my shaft, his tongue working and dragging, his teeth grazing my skin and leaving me shaking and blacking out from lack of breath.
Every time I get close he eases off and drags his mouth along my thigh until I'm swearing at him in all the languages we share, and then he does it again.
"Ya tebya ubyu," I gasp.
"Mm." He grins around me. "Later."
My heels dig into the mattress, my hand fisting so tight in his hair it has to hurt, but it eggs him on, if anything. He just hums pleasantly, letting me scratch and pull at him, and takes me all the way down the ridged back of his throat.
Everything in my head that's been stressing me out nonstop goes silent.
There's just this, us, this thing that shouldn't be happening.
"I'm…" My voice cracks. "Valek, I'm…"
He doesn't pull off. He takes me all the way and starts swallowing, the suction pulling at my cock, and I come so hard everything goes gray. My body locks up and I make the stupidest fucking sound yet, the hand that isn't twisted in his hair tearing at sheets I'll have to wash tomorrow.
He works me through every last shudder, gentling and licking along my shaft, cleaning me, tongue soothing over the oversensitive skin until I whimper and push weakly at his head.
He pulls off and rests his cheek against my thigh, his whole body vibrating with the deepest, most rattling purr I've ever heard.
I can't fucking move.
I'm boneless. Wrung out. He might as well have drugged me, I'm so zoned out. My chest heaves and shudders, and I honestly cannot recall the last time my body felt this empty of everything.
Valek turns his head and presses a kiss to my hipbone.
"Moy mikrobik," he murmurs against my skin.
It takes a full three seconds to penetrate the fog.
"What the fuck did you just call me?" I croak.
He lifts his head.
The bastard is radiant.
"Nothing," he says pleasantly.
"You called me your little germ?"
"Ah." He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, then licks his lip of what's left, absolutely delighted. "So you did understand that."
"You know I speak fucking Russian, I threatened to kill you a minute ago, you smug fucking—"
He barks out a laugh, head thrown back, and the sound is so unguarded and stupidly warm, I can't bring myself to be as irritated as I should be.
Little germ.
This fucking alpha.
"It's affectionate. You're small for an alpha. Persistent." He drops his chin onto my hip again. "Bad for one's health."
I stare at the ceiling and consider whether it's worth the energy to kill him. Mostly because I loathe germs, and I know that's the real reason he called me that. To mess with me.
It is not worth it.
My body isn't working.
I close my eyes instead. The room is spinning slowly, pleasantly, and my limbs feel like they're full of wet sand. Sleep is coming for me whether I want it to or not.
I fight it long enough to remember my manners.
"Do you want me to…" I trail off, gesturing vaguely at him because I don't want to say it out loud.
Valek blinks at me, tilting his head again. "What a strange question."
"What's strange about that?" I bite out. "It's reciprocal."
"Mm. No." He pushes himself up off the bed, and when the mattress rebounds, I get rolled partially onto my side. "You'll lie there and rest."
"I can—"
"You can barely form a sentence." He drags the duvet up over me, and I'm too far gone to protest that it's the wrong duvet, the one from the chair, and I have no idea when it was last laundered. "I'll be right back."
"Where are you going?" I mutter.
He doesn't answer.
I hear him pull his sweatpants back into place, hear the doorknob turn, catch a glimpse of light flooding the room from the hall, and the room goes dark and quiet again.
I mean to stay awake.
Truly, I do.
Specifically, I mean to keep track of him, because keeping track of Valek is clearly going to be a lifelong project for me now, and I am nothing if not thorough.
Instead I turn my face into the pillow that smells like winter air and steel and go out like a light.