Chapter 36 #2
“Come for him,” Tank murmured in my ear. “Let him have it.”
I came apart.
The Summer bond flared white-gold behind my eyes and I felt Maddox’s pleasure flooding back to me through the connection, his own response to mine.
He was groaning against me, working me through it, not letting up until I was shaking in Tank’s arms and begging incoherently for something I didn’t even know.
He lifted his head. His mouth was glossy and his eyes were blown dark, as he looked at me like I’d hung the moon.
“I need you,” he said, simple and raw. “Please.”
I reached for him.
Tank shifted beneath me, sliding down so that he was lying back with me on top of him, my back against his chest. Maddox climbed over us, braced himself on his elbows above me, and I felt the heat of him at my entrance.
He slid inside me slowly. My body was already wrecked, already singing, and he filled me by inches, watching my face the whole way.
When he was fully seated, he stopped. His forehead came to rest against mine.
“I love you,” he said quietly. “I don’t think I’ve told you today. I love you, Alyssa.”
“I know.” My voice cracked on it. “I love you too.”
He started to move.
Tank held me through it, his hands everywhere, his mouth at the side of my neck.
The Spring bond pulsed in rhythm with Maddox’s thrusts, earth meeting fire, grounding and burning at the same time.
I could feel both bonds thickening, twining around each other inside my chest like two lengths of rope beginning to twist into a single cord.
That was the braid. I understood it now. The magic needed to weave, not merge. It needed to wrap around each other and find strength in solidarity.
I turned my head and found Tank’s mouth.
He kissed me while Maddox moved in me, and the three of us were joined in a way I hadn’t understood was possible.
I felt Tank’s arousal through his bond, aching and patient, waiting his turn and loving every second of this one.
His hard cock lay between my ass cheeks and he grounded as every one of Maddox’s thrusts worked me against him.
Maddox’s pace quickened. His forehead dropped to mine again.
“Come with me,” he whispered. “Come on, sweetheart, come with me.”
The second orgasm came faster than I expected, sharper, rising through both bonds at once. I felt Maddox break, felt him spill into me with a groan that he buried against my throat, and the Summer bond blazed one final time before settling into a contented hum.
He stayed there for a moment, breathing against me. Then he kissed me, soft, and eased himself out. I made a small sound of protest that made him laugh against my mouth.
“Greedy,” he murmured. “Good girl.”
He rolled off and settled beside us, his hand resting on my thigh, and now it was Tank beneath me with his hardness pressing against my lower back and his breath ragged in my ear.
“My turn.” His voice was gravel. “If you can.”
“I can.” I could feel his need like a physical weight through the bond. “I want you.”
He lifted me with an ease that was mostly bear, turning me around as he set me astride him. I looked down at him from above for the first time that night. His chest was broad and scarred and his eyes were so dark they looked black in the firelight. He reached up and cupped my face with both hands.
“My queen,” he said simply. “My goddess.”
I lowered myself onto him.
The Spring bond exploded through me, the deep old magic of earth and root and stone, and I heard myself cry out.
Tank’s hands gripped my hips, steadied me, and he let me take him at my own pace.
When I was fully seated, he sat up beneath me, wrapping his arms around my back, our chests pressed together.
“Look at me,” he said.
I looked.
“Breathe with me.”
I breathed.
He started to move, slow and steady, rolling his hips up into mine. Every thrust sent a wave of green-gold light through the bond in my chest, and I felt it reaching, reaching, looking for the Summer thread that Maddox had filled with power and left humming inside me.
They found each other like two magnets with only one possible choice. The two bonds wound together inside me and the braid started in earnest. Two threads twining into one.
I came around Tank with my face pressed to his shoulder and his name on my lips. He followed me over, slower, deeper, his arms tightening until I could barely breathe and I didn’t care. The bond sang inside me and it was almost like I could feel myself leaving my own body.
When he finally lowered me down beside him, I was trembling.
Maddox was there immediately, his hand in my hair. He kissed my forehead and murmured something that I didn’t catch but felt warm anyway.
Across the room, three men were watching.
Ryder was sitting on the edge of the bed, one leg tucked under him, his chin resting on his fist. His eyes were dark with heat and something softer, something that might have been awe. When he caught me looking, the corner of his mouth tilted up in the crooked smile I loved.
“Hi.” His voice was rougher than I’d ever heard it.
“Hi.” I was breathless.
“Are you okay?”
It was such a Ryder question. Even now. Even here. I laughed and felt tears spring up at the same time.
“I’m okay.”
“Can you keep going?”
“Yes.”
He moved. He crossed the space between us on his knees and gathered me up off the furs and into his arms, and the Autumn bond we shared rose through me like a gust of wind through dry leaves.
He kissed me. There was no sweetness in it this time. There was only want, hungry and honest, and I felt his hands shake where they cupped my jaw.
“God, Alyssa.” The words were broken against my mouth. “Watching you like that. Watching them with you.”
“Come here.” I pulled him down with me.
Then Damon’s shadows joined us. I felt them before I saw them, dark silk winding up my calves, over my thighs, coiling around my wrists. They weren’t cold. They weren’t warm. They were Damon. They felt like him, and they knew exactly where to touch.
“Is this okay?” His voice was low, from somewhere above me. The shadows were doing things that had my back arching off the bed.
“Yes.” It came out as a moan. “Yes, Damon, please.”
Ryder laughed, soft and dark, his mouth at my throat. “She likes your shadows.”
“I noticed.”
The shadows grew bolder. One of them traced the underside of my breast and then circled my nipple with a pressure that made me gasp. Another slid between my thighs, parted me,and found the spot that was still oversensitive from Maddox’s mouth.
I came again, fast and sudden, just from the shadows and Ryder’s mouth on my neck. The Shadow bond snapped into place alongside Summer and Spring, and three threads started to twist.
“Fuck.” Ryder’s forehead dropped to mine. “Watching that was. I can’t.”
“Don’t wait.”
He didn’t.
He pushed into me on a single smooth thrust and I arched under him with a cry.
Autumn power poured through the bond, wild and changeable, like the wind that turned the leaves.
Ryder’s hips set a rhythm that wasn’t steady like Tank’s or intense like Maddox’s.
It was playful and sudden and aching. My toes curled and my eyes rolled back in my head as I just let myself sink into the sensations of everything that was Ryder.
Damon’s shadows didn’t leave. They were on my skin everywhere, and I realised with a jolt that one of them had wrapped around Ryder’s wrist, binding him to the post of the bed in a loose coil that Ryder clearly noticed and very clearly didn’t mind.
Damon was watching us with eyes gone solid dark. He was kneeling beside the bed, patient, and when I reached out my hand towards him, his shadows lifted him into place as though the dark itself carried him.
“You’re beautiful.” His voice was hoarse. “Both of you.”
Four threads hummed with power inside me now. Braided halfway up.
The only one missing was ice.
I turned my head and looked for him.
Dean was standing by the bed.
He hadn’t moved. He’d shed the rest of his clothes but he hadn’t come to us, and his face was a mask of control that was starting to crack around the edges.
The Winter bond was running so cold I could feel frost forming on the inside of my ribs, and underneath the cold there was something else, something I couldn’t name, something he was holding back from me.
Ryder saw me looking. He slowed his pace.
“Dean.” Ryder’s voice was calm. “Come here, brother.”
Dean’s jaw worked. His hand flexed at his side.
“Dean.” I said it this time. I held out my hand to him, the one that wasn’t tangled in Ryder’s hair. “Please.”
He came.
He knelt on the edge of the bed and took my hand and pressed my palm to his chest, and I felt the ice pull back, just enough to let me in. His heart was hammering underneath my hand like it was trying to break through the frost from the inside.
“I love you.” I said it looking him right in the eyes. “Whatever you’re carrying, I love you.”
Something in his face broke. He closed his eyes against it, hard, and when he opened them again, the control was back, but less. He’d let me past one wall. Maybe only one. But it was enough.
He lowered his mouth to mine.
The kiss was different from the others. Dean kissed like he was taking something he’d been denying himself for too long, like every second of restraint had built into this single release, and Winter magic surged through the bond with a force that made Ryder groan above me.
“Fuck,” Ryder managed. “I can feel that.”
“So can I.” Damon’s voice.
The fifth bond was snaking into the braid. Caressing against the others as it took its place. And with Dean’s mouth on mine, I could feel the fifth, Winter, finally reaching for the others, finally letting itself be held.
Ryder started to move again. Dean didn’t stop kissing me.
Damon’s shadows were everywhere at once, and somewhere in the fog of it I registered that Maddox and Tank were both watching from the side of the bed, both of them touching me in small ways, a hand on my ankle, a hand on my hair, keeping their bonds alive in the braid.
I was going to come apart. Not physically. Magically. I could feel it building, the five threads tightening, the braid reaching up my sternum and starting to glow.
Ryder came with a broken sound and collapsed above me, pressing his forehead to my collarbone. Autumn magic pulsed inside me and then settled.
Damon took his place.
He entered me with a slowness that was almost unbearable, his shadows cradling both of us, and when he started to move, the Shadow bond poured in so deep that I felt it in my bones.
It was dark and silent and safe, the dark under a night sky with no moon.
A darkness I could lose myself in without ever being lost.
Dean was still kissing me. And an orgasm was rising up inside me that I already knew was about to devastate me.
“Alyssa.” Damon’s voice was tight. “Something’s happening.”
I knew. I felt it.
The braid was almost complete.
“Dean.” It was Tank, from beside us. His voice was low. “She needs you.”
Dean’s mouth left mine. He looked down at me with an expression I’d never seen on him before. Not the soldier. Not the alpha. Not the controlled man who lived at the edge of his own ice. Just Dean. Just mine.
“My love.” It was barely a whisper.
“I’m here,” I breathed. “I’ve got you, Dean. I’ve always got you.”
Damon eased himself out of me. Shadows were still alive in my chest, braided with the Summer, Spring and Autumn magics. Four threads twisted tight. Waiting for the fifth to solidify its presence with them.
Dean moved over me.
He took my face in both hands and looked at me for a long moment. I felt him let go of one more thing behind his eyes. Not all of it. Not whatever he was still holding. But another piece.
Then he slowly pushed inside me, and Winter magic poured into me with such an intensity that it took my breath away. The braid was finished.
Five bonds.
One current.
The magic hit me like a tidal wave. I could feel it sinking into every cell of my body, rewriting the very essence of my being.
I didn’t come in the ordinary sense. I shattered.
The five threads wound themselves into a single rope of light, and the light blazed outward from my chest. For a moment I wasn’t a woman in a bed in a Spring Court chamber with five men I loved.
I was something else. Something larger. I could feel the realm breathing around me, forests and rivers and sky.
I could feel my mates each distinctly and all together at once, five voices singing into one song.
Dean gave a strangled sound above me and I felt him lose himself too, his release triggering his own surrender to the bond. Winter magic flared, and the braid burned brighter.
Then it settled.
Slowly. Softly.
The single cord of light pulled back inside me and took up residence in my chest, and where there had been five separate threads, there was now a single living thing with five voices, each of them distinct, each of them mine.
I was crying. I didn’t remember starting.
Dean’s face came into focus above me. He was crying too, silently, tears running into the rough scruff on his jaw. He kissed my forehead, my cheek, the corner of my mouth.
“My love,” he whispered. “My goddess.”
He eased himself out of me and collapsed beside me on the furs, and then I was in the middle of all of them.
Maddox on one side, his hand in my hair.
Tank at my other, one massive palm splayed over my belly.
Ryder at my feet, his head resting against my calf like a cat.
Damon above my head, stroking my temples, his shadows still curling around all of us in lazy loops.
And Dean, pressed full-length against my side, his face buried against my throat.
I breathed.
The bond hummed in response to it all.
“It worked.” My voice was hoarse. “I can feel it. I can feel all of you. It… it feels so different to what my magic was before.”
“We can feel you too.” Tank’s voice, quiet. His palm on my belly rose and fell with my breath.
“What now?” Maddox asked.
I thought about it. Tried to put the shape of it into words.
“Now,” I said slowly, “we’re ready.”
Nobody answered. They didn’t have to. The bond spoke for them, five voices braided into one, and it said yes. It said we’re with you.
I turned my head. Dean’s eyes were open, watching me. Behind the exhaustion and the fresh tears, the ice had receded further than I’d seen in weeks. Whatever he was carrying, he was still carrying. But for tonight, it had been set down. For tonight, he was just mine.
“Sleep.” I brushed his cheek. “All of you. We’ll need it.”
And somehow, in the tangle of six bodies on a bed built for two, we did.