12. Cas
CAS
When I waken at some ungodly predawn hour, the sky streaked a misty grey in the crack between the window curtains, it’s with a sore body and fragmented memories of the night before.
Sandwiched between two naked alphas who are very familiar, and several sensations that are not. There’s also the sense of something new within me, tendrils of connection that weren’t there before. Strange in their newness, but comforting all the same.
Between my legs is another story, however.
Not the most pain I’ve ever been in, but it’s up there.
It’s sort of pleasant, though—an ache in my low belly, a dull throb that makes me squeeze my bare thighs together beneath the covers.
My fingertips skim the tops of my legs, my hips; everything feels bruised and swollen, like overripe fruit fallen from a tree.
Up my ribs—which also ache—to my nipples—same deal here—and then at last to my neck, which is perhaps the most sore.
Almost like I’ve slept on it wrong, but the pain here is more acute.
I tilt my head from side to side and it’s stiff as hell.
Beside me Kato stirs for a moment, mumbling something in his sleep, and then rolls onto his side.
There are claw marks on his back, scoring his shoulder blades, freshly scabbed over.
Wonder how that happened.
Wonder why we’re in bed together at all, actually, and where the hell we are.
All three of us. Naked. Because (and I’m paging through my recollection of last night now with a bit more purpose, if not yet frantic) as I recall, I managed to shove Kato off me before he could penetrate me. I’m pretty sure of that.
Didn’t I?
I can’t seem to tear my gaze away from his back.
In fact I feel drawn to him, his woodsmoke scent, and before I realise what I’m doing I’m pressing my face to the back of his neck, burying it in his hair and breathing him in.
He makes another sleepy sound and snuggles into his pillow, squirming back against me.
He smells like home. Not the way my pack did—like he’s mine.
And my body seems to fit quite perfectly where I settle against him, comically tiny big spoon to his little.
Before I can move or question it Nathan’s there behind me, his heavy, half-hard cock pressed up against my ass, making me suck in a breath.
He flings his arm over both of us and I’m quite literally squished between them.
Which I like. Love, even.
I turn my head towards him, his beard scratchy on my naked shoulder, intent on rubbing my face against his before I stop myself.
That same pull I have towards Kato, I have towards him—the irrevocable desire to burrow between both of them and never emerge.
It’s not the fledgling infatuation I was courting, but adoration. Obsession. Need. Flat out.
No. This is wrong.
The thought is enough to bring me back to my senses, at least a little.
I try, as Nathan’s lips brush my shoulder and Kato turns towards me, to remember what exactly happened last night.
What happened after I told them I couldn’t be bred or mated.
I do remember that much, escaping to the floor with my own cum and slick still splattered on me.
We didn’t fuck. We can’t have.
Except I can’t.
Remember.
Anything after that.
Not after telling Kato that I presented late—hah—or after Nathan brought me tea.
And it’s even harder to remember now that they’re both waking up, their hands wandering my body in a sleepy way, Nathan’s lips on my ear and Kato’s on my mouth.
My cock stiffens and I can smell my own responding arousal as they close in on me like a pair of circling sharks—except I like it, want more of it even as the small and logical part of my brain needs this to stop.
Aftershocks of my heat, maybe? I remember that. My heat coming on like a tidal wave, sweeping me away from the shore of sanity.
“You smell so good,” Kato whispers against my lips. “Like us.”
That’s the thing. I do smell like them. And fuck, I can feel the blunt head of Nathan’s cock nudging my sore, slick hole as Kato lifts my thigh.
He fits his own cock against the other alpha’s, like they’re both going to fuck me at once, and instead of telling them both to cut it out I moan softly. It’s like I can’t tell them no.
“What do you think, little ghost?” Nathan murmurs against my ear. And that’s new too, him using Kato’s pet name for me. But it’s what he says next that has my breath catching. “Can you take us both?”
“I—” My eyes flutter as my hands come up and press flat against Kato’s chest. I can feel his heart thudding rapidly beneath my palms, in time with my own. “I don’t—”
Nathan lowers his head and rasps his tongue against the side of my neck and my skin flares hot, trembles with the power of our bond, and I know then. I just know. Intrinsically. The unfamiliar pain between my legs, the cloying scent hanging in the room: it’s sex.
He mated me.
They both fucking did.
I shove them both off me and sit bolt upright, clapping both hands to the sides of my neck. It can’t be fucking possible, but it is: two marks on either side. Claimed by not one but two alphas. The two alphas I begged not to breed me.
“You—” The mix of fury and despair makes my voice shake. “What have you done?”
Kato rolls onto his back, throwing an arm over his eyes with a groan. Nathan, at least, has the decency to look somewhat abashed, or whatever passes for that on his otherwise stoic face. His expression seems to shut down almost, his wolf-green eyes bleeding black to brown. “Cas—”
“No.” I’m hissing at him, up on my knees and grabbing at the headboard like it’s the prow of a sinking ship.
It’s not going to save me or any of us, of course.
“I told you both—I remember that much. Distinctly. I told you both I can’t be bred, and—and—” My throat closes as the emotion wells up, balls into a knot.
Beside me Kato sits up, rubbing his face. He almost looks hungover, but it’s not like it stopped him from trying to violate me a second time just now. My lips skim back in a silent snarl as he reaches for me and he backs off immediately, hands raised and expression wounded. “Okay, okay. Sorry.”
“Sorry?” I repeat. “Sorry? You’ve killed me and all you can say is sorry?”
He grimaces. From the indent in one cheek he’s biting the inside of his mouth, though his eyes are still a glowering orange beneath the fall of his messy dark hair.
The worst part is, even as angry as I am, I still want to go to him.
Wish he would touch me, even if I’d break all of his fingers if he dared.
I back away from them both. Something in me balks at that but I make myself do it anyway, pulling that tether that links us nice and taut. I skitter away until I tumble off the foot of the bed and when they both move to help me I viciously snap, “No! Don’t you dare.”
“Cas, you were in the most powerful heat I’ve ever seen.” Nathan, all reason and little emotion, trying to appeal to my rationality, I suppose. “I don’t think you would have survived it without being bred.”
I don’t know what to say to that. It’s not like I’ve ever been in heat before.
“You were all over us,” Kato adds. “Crying, begging…”
I laugh, abrupt and unhappy. “As if that’s the first time you’ve ever been confronted with an omega in heat? Isn’t that what they do? Beg?”
“You pulled nearly the entire pack into rut,” Nathan returns, matter-of-factly. “Including us. A handful of them broke into my house just to get to you.”
That shuts me up, at least for the moment. Again, rifling through pages of memory, but other than flashes of pain and pleasure, begging, and then—oh. Oh no. “What…” I’m terrified to ask, acutely aware of the tremor in my voice. “Who…”
Kato catches on. “No one,” he assures me. “No one but me and Nate. We got you away from the others.”
“I killed one of them,” Nathan says, staring off into space. “You know the phrase ‘seeing red’? It doesn’t have shit on the rage I felt.” He shakes his head as if to clear it. “Rut does that.”
“I hit another with the Range Rover,” Kato murmurs.
“You what?” Nathan asks, head whipping around.
Kato ignores him. “Here, Cas. Come back to bed.”
As badly as I want to, principle keeps me away. I shake my head furiously. Well, at least I hadn’t been gang raped by the entire bloody pack. It’s not much of a silver lining, but it’s something.
“Fine,” I say at last. “You bred me because you felt like you had to—” Surely I would’ve survived, though. Surely? “But why did you mate me? Both of you. You’ve killed all of us.” And that, perhaps, is the worst part. I’m going to drag them down with me.
Nathan turns his head and looks directly at Kato, and I do the same. Kato’s gaze flicks between us as his broad shoulders hunch, hair curtaining his face. “Because,” he mutters. “Because I—”
“Lost control,” the other alpha supplies, and now there’s an edge of anger in his voice too.
His eyes briefly flick shut. “It wasn’t like that.
It wasn’t a control thing. It was…I felt called.
There was just something in me screaming that he—” He opens his eyes again, looking directly at me.
“That you were my mate. And I just couldn’t resist. My wolf took the wheel. It’s never been like that before.”
“Like I said,” Nathan says. “You lost control. You mounted him like a dog before I could say or do anything.”
Kato turns on him in an instant. “Are you serious? Your mark’s on his throat too, you fucking dickhead. And by the way, how’d my sloppy seconds taste?”
Nathan’s nostrils flare and he opens his mouth, but it’s me who speaks first. “Excuse me? Did you just refer to my arsehole as ‘sloppy seconds’?”
Kato grimaces. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“How else could it have been meant?” Nathan asks, taking another dig at him.
I turn Nathan’s way. “You’re no better! Blaming Kato for breeding me when you did the exact same thing!”