Chapter 37 Three Marks
Liza POV
Nine days was long enough.
Wolf healing had done most of the work. Shane’s forearm still carried a tight seam of new pink skin where Kristen’s stitches had been, tender when he gripped too hard or turned his wrist the wrong way.
Everett’s left shoulder moved again, though the joint protested at the top of its range and he slept propped on his right side.
Dominic’s three rib wounds had finally closed into ridged, permanent scars beneath the dark hair on his left side.
They were part of him now, just as my own scar was part of me.
My right palm had healed to a thin silver line from the base of my thumb to its center. I could grip a ski pole. I could hold a radio. I could wrap my fingers around a man’s wrist and feel his pulse without wincing.
Nine days of both packs eating at the same tables.
Nine days of Shane running a snowmobile up the repaired tour route to check the upper cache with an East wolf and a West wolf riding beside him.
Nine days of Dominic watching me across the common room with a slow heat in his dark eyes and never once pushing.
That ended tonight.
? ? ?
After supper I told them what I wanted.
“Dominic’s cabin,” I said. “Tonight. All three of you.”
Across the table, a knowing grin spread over Shane’s face. Dominic set down his coffee cup and looked at me with an expression I’d learned to read over the past weeks: desire held in check by a patience I hadn’t asked for and had no more use for. Everett went still. His pulse jumped in his throat.
“All of us?” Everett asked.
“All of you.”
We walked through cold, clear dark. The snow had settled into the hard-packed crust of deep winter, and our boots crunched in rhythm on the path between the lodge and Dominic’s cabin.
Pine smoke rose from the chimney into a sky thick with stars.
Shane walked on my right with his good hand resting on the small of my back.
Dominic walked on my left, close enough that our shoulders touched.
Everett followed half a step behind. His restraint drew the bond taut between us.
The cabin was warm. Dominic had left the fire banked before supper, and the coals threw low orange light across the stone hearth, the heavy timber walls, the wide bed with its dark wool blankets pulled straight. The room smelled like cedar and woodsmoke and him.
I stopped in front of the fire and turned to face them.
Three men stood in Dominic Salvi’s bedroom.
My fated mate, broad and scarred and watching me with the same quiet intensity that had drawn me to him.
My chosen mate, shaggy-haired and relaxed, with his permanent mark thrumming warm above my right collarbone.
And the man who’d broken me, who’d put himself back together wrong and then right, whose unresolved bond still pulsed beneath my ribs and would not stop.
I pulled my shirt over my head. Then the thermal beneath it. Then my bra.
The firelight caught my skin and sharpened the pale ridge along the left side of my face and throat. It ended just above where my neck met my left shoulder. I stood bare before three men and dared them to look away.
Nobody looked away.
I unbuttoned my pants and pushed them down with my underwear, stepping free of both. Naked in the firelight, I leaned back against the warm stone of the hearth and slid my hand between my thighs.
The room changed.
I took my time touching myself. My fingers knew what I wanted, and I let my eyes close halfway as their breathing roughened. I could feel them watching, all three bonds pulling at once.
I opened my eyes.
Shane’s jaw was tight, his green eyes dark, his hands curled at his sides.
Dominic stood with his arms crossed and his weight settled, the kind of stillness that meant he was holding himself in check by force.
Everett had gone pale, and his blue eyes burned.
Through the bond, faint as it was, I felt the last of his jealousy give way to desire.
I took my wet fingers from between my legs and held out my hand.
Shane reached me first.
He caught my wrist, drew my fingers into his mouth, and sucked them clean.
Then he knelt without being told, and I almost laughed.
His mouth found the inside of my thigh, and his breath was hot against my skin as he kissed his way higher.
Dominic stepped behind me and braced my weight, his broad chest against my back, his rough hands sliding down to hold my thighs apart.
The stretch of his healing ribs made him exhale hard, but he didn’t let go.
Everett came to my left side. His hand cradled my jaw, and he turned my face until the scar was fully exposed to the firelight. Then he kissed it with slow, open-mouthed hunger, from my cheek down to my throat. My wolf shuddered beneath my skin.
Shane’s tongue reached my clit.
He was patient and deliberate, which meant he was enjoying himself.
He licked my pussy in long, slow strokes that made my hips roll forward into his mouth, then circled and flicked my clit until my thighs shook against Dominic’s hands.
Dominic held me open and steady while his mouth pressed hot against the back of my neck.
Everett lingered over the scar while his thumb brushed the corner of my mouth.
The orgasm tightened low in my stomach until I shook against Dominic.
Shane read every shift of my hips and pressed harder, his tongue flat and firm exactly where I needed it.
I came with a strangled sound against Everett’s mouth, my legs almost giving out, and Dominic’s arms were the reason I stayed standing.
Shane pulled back and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. The grin he gave me from his knees was beautiful and absolutely his.
“All of you,” I said. “Bed.”
They shed their clothes on the way to the bed.
Dominic drew me onto the wide mattress and settled me on my knees facing Shane, then pulled my back against his chest. He was already hard against me, thick and insistent, and when he entered me from behind I arched into him with a sound that came from somewhere deeper than my throat.
His scarred ribs pressed against my spine.
His hands gripped my hips and set a deep, measured rhythm that drove thought out of me with every stroke.
Shane lay on his back in front of me, his hair fanned on the pillow, watching my face as I leaned forward and took him into my mouth.
He tasted like salt and clean skin, and the sound he made when I swallowed him down was low and rough and gratifying.
I worked him with my tongue and lips while Dominic drove into me from behind, the two rhythms finding each other until I was rocking between them, filled and consuming and lost in it.
Everett knelt beside the bed. His hand slid between my legs from underneath and went straight to my clit. He rubbed it steadily while Dominic’s thrusts pushed me deeper onto Shane’s length, until the three of them left room for nothing but pleasure.
I came apart around Dominic, my cry muffled against Shane’s hip, my walls clenching in waves that made Dominic growl against the back of my neck. His pace turned urgent, his hands bruising on my hips, and his body locked tight as he fought to hold back.
“Now,” I said. I bared the scarred left side of my neck, just above my shoulder where the raised tissue ended.
Dominic bent his head and bit.
The pain struck deep and sharp, nothing like the ragged tearing that had made the scar at seventeen.
This bite was deliberate, chosen. His teeth broke the skin just below the end of the scar, and the fated bond between us exploded open.
I felt him flood through me, every protective instinct, every patient silence, every night he’d waited for this.
I answered with my certainty, letting him feel that I wanted the man as fiercely as the bond.
He finished inside me with a sound that vibrated through the mark and down into my bones. His mouth stayed on my neck, lapping gently at the wound, and the bond settled, wider and deeper and permanent. Sealed. Fated and marked and done.
I pressed my forehead against Shane’s stomach and breathed.
Everett trembled when I turned to him.
His blue eyes were wet as he sat on the edge of the bed. Every feeling showed on his face.
I pushed him onto his back and straddled him.
He was hard against me, and when I sank down onto him his hands gripped the sheets and his throat worked and the sound that left him was something between relief and anguish.
I braced my palms on his chest and rode him with controlled rolls of my hips while Shane’s hands cupped my breasts from behind, his thumbs circling my nipples, his mouth trailing kisses over the permanent mark he’d left on my neck.
Dominic’s hand reached around my hip from the side and stroked me in time with my movements on Everett, his broad fingers slick and sure.
Everett watched me. His gaze never left my face.
I changed the angle and took him deeper, and his hands finally came to my hips, careful of his bad shoulder, holding me like he was afraid I’d disappear. His cock hit the spot inside me that turned thought into static, and I ground down on him until we were both gasping.
I turned my scarred cheek toward his mouth and tilted my head, exposing the end of the scar, right beside the fresh wound Dominic’s teeth had left.
“Mark me, Everett.”
He searched my face, asking the question he couldn’t say out loud: Do I deserve this?
I didn’t answer it. He’d have to live with the question. The mark came without absolution.
He pushed himself up on his good arm and closed his teeth on the scar where I’d bared it. The bite sank deep. It hurt, but pleasure burned through the pain.
The rejection lost its hold on the bond.
His words and mine remained part of what had happened in that hall.
Neither of us could take them back. The mark left that history intact while stripping away its power to keep the bond raw and his body sick.
What remained between us was clean, whole, and permanent, written into the last of the scar he had once been ashamed of.
I felt the wasting pull leave him. His body was still lean, his shoulder still tender, but nothing inside him was being consumed now. The bond filled the space the sickness left, strong and unmistakably his.
Everett drove up into me, and the climax broke over me hard enough to squeeze my eyes shut.
He came a moment later with my blood on his lips and the taste of my scar in his mouth.
Through the sealed bond I felt his climax, his grief, and his overwhelming gratitude, and I let him feel my answer.
I was choosing to keep him, failures and all, because the man who’d knelt before his pack and told the truth was someone I wanted in my bed, my life, and my future.
He pressed his forehead against my collarbone, and we stayed that way until our breathing eased.
Shane pulled me to him with easy confidence.
I straddled him and sank down, and the familiar stretch of him inside me made me exhale hard. Shane gripped my hips with his left hand and held his healing forearm against his chest while I rode him, finding the angle that made us both groan.
Dominic knelt beside the bed and used his mouth on my breasts, drawing one nipple between his teeth and then the other while his hand steadied my waist. Everett, bright-eyed and breathing like a man who’d been underwater for weeks and finally surfaced, knelt behind me.
His mouth moved along my spine while his arm came around my middle and his fingers circled my clit.
Shane’s hips rose to meet mine. His green eyes locked on my face with the same look he’d worn the afternoon he declared himself in front of the garage, the look that said I want you, and I’m not afraid of the complicated part. I rode him harder, my thighs burning, my hands flat on his chest.
The final orgasm gathered slowly. Dominic’s mouth, Everett’s hand, and Shane’s cock inside me drove me closer until all three bonds flared at once. Shane’s chosen mark on my right. Dominic’s fresh bite on my scarred left. Everett’s mark in the scar itself.
I came with Shane’s name in my mouth, and the way my body clenched around him took him with me. He thrust deep and finished inside me with a rough sound, his good hand tangled in my hair as his hips kept rolling.
? ? ?
We collapsed.
The bed was big enough for all four of us if nobody cared about personal space, and none of us did.
Dominic lay on his good side with his arm over my stomach.
Shane pressed against my back with his face in my hair and his injured forearm carefully resting on my hip.
Everett lay across the foot of the bed, one hand on my ankle.
The fire had burned low. The cabin smelled like sweat and sex and cedar and the copper edge of the marks that were still closing on my neck.
I touched them in the dark. Shane’s healed bite felt smooth and permanent. Dominic’s new mark was raw and tender beneath my fingertips. Everett’s mark crossed the last of the rogue’s damage.
Three marks. One scar. The same woman.