Chapter Forty-Four #2
She rolls her hips forward. The lock shifts with her, and my vision whites out.
Her scent floods the nest, blood orange gone syrupy, and I grab her hips with both hands and try to pull her faster.
I can’t pull out. I’m stuck inside her as her lock strangles me in the best way.
My balls throb. I’m on the verge of an orgasm but it’s behind a wall.
I make an inarticulate sound, half way between a whine and a groan.
“Easy.” Her voice has gone low. “Stay with me. Don't rush it.”
I'm stinging behind the eyes and I don't know when that started. My heat has me and I am not fighting it. That's the difference. That's the whole difference.
Thomas. Matteo. Liam. The Richardson pack. My first heat. Their hands on me and their scents all around me and nothing in the world to be afraid of. I thought that was the only time I would get to have that. I was wrong. And I need more. I need another of my alphas.
“Kev.” His name comes out low. Not a question.
“Right here,” he says against my ear. “I've got you. This is yours, Aubrey. All of it.”
Sera turns me onto my side. Kev settles in behind me. His palm glides slowly up my spine, his scent wrapping around me as a shiver rolls through me.
“Okay?” he asks, low.
“Yes.” My hands clench on Sera's hips. “Yes. Please.”
His cock lays in the crack of my ass. I press back against him, needing him where I ache. The tip of his cock nudges my entrance and I sob as he pushes inside. I’m so wet, there’s no resistance.
He works into me slowly, his chest pressed to my back, and the pressure opens up through my belly and my spine. Sera is in front of me, her lock strangling my cock, and Kev is behind me, stretching me open, and I’m in omega heaven.
Sera rolls her hips. I drive back into Kev. The rhythm finds itself. Espie's hand finds mine in the dark of the nest. I squeeze her fingers. She gasps, then comes the sound of a kiss, and Lex's Earl Grey rises in the air.
“You feel incredible,” Kev rasps.
The heat builds. Drawing up from my belly instead of clawing in from the outside. Mine. My body doing what my body was made to do, with people I chose.
“Sera.” I cup her face. “I want to bond with you. Please. I want you to be mine.”
She goes very still. “Aubrey—”
“You don't have to say yes,” I say. “But I need you to know I want it.”
She studies me for a long beat. Then she tilts her neck and bares the gland there, the line of it exposed. “Yes, Omega. Please. Bond me.”
I sink my teeth into her neck. She gasps against my hair and bites my shoulder and the bond opens and she pours into me. All that fierce, controlled, battering-ram energy suddenly without walls, and underneath it something so careful and so frightened and so determined to belong.
I lick my mark and she shivers. “Mine,” I whisper. I hold her tight.
And now for my other alpha. I look over my shoulder, gripping his arm and positioning it in front of my mouth. “Mine, also.”
I bite down, and then he is in me too, alongside Sera, and where she came in like walls coming down Kev comes in like something that was always there finally being named.
Steady. Certain. A decade of patience and quiet love and the particular grief of a man who had stopped expecting this.
All of it arriving at once, pressing into the space behind my ribs.
“Omega, I need—Please may I claim you back,” Kev rasps.
Kev nuzzles into the curve of my neck, his stubble dragging against my skin. I feel the want rolling off him. His whole body is shaking with how much he needs this.
“Gods yes. Claim me. Both of you!” I cry.
Sera's mouth drops to the other side of my neck. Her lips drag across the gland there and I feel the same need in her — sharper, more desperate, the longing of someone who almost didn't let herself want this at all.
They bite down together. The pain is nothing.
What comes after is everything. The bond opens on both sides at once and I pour into them and they pour into me and for a second I can't tell whose chest is whose, whose heartbeat is whose.
Kev makes a sound against my neck. Sera's arm locks around my waist.
I grab both of them and hold on.
Kev drives deeper. I cry out. Sera clenches and I feel it from both sides at once, knotted and locked, nowhere to go.
Kev goes rigid behind me. Sera inhales sharp. They are suddenly aware of each other through me. I am the point where they connect. I feel Kev's want lock onto Sera. Feel hers lock onto his. The need between them has been building for weeks and now it has a direction.
“Sera.” Kev's voice is low. “My love. Please.”
She lifts her head from my neck.
“Yes, Alpha. Please claim me,” she says.
Kev surges forward and bites Sera’s gland. Her whole body jolts. She tightens around me and I cry out from the sensation.
“Now you know exactly what you are to me.” His voice has gone to gravel.
Sera goes completely still. Not shocked or frightened. Just… overwhelmed in a way I don't think I've ever seen from her. Like nobody has ever chosen her this openly before.
She breathes out shaky. She reaches for him, gets her hand at the back of his head, and pulls him in.
She bites the side of his jaw hard enough that he hisses.
His arm comes around her waist and he drives into me again and the three of us shudder together as the bonds between all three of us burst open at once, each one feeding into the others.
“Mine.” I spill inside Sera's lock. Kev knots me from behind and I am locked from two directions, pinned in place, and I am sobbing as we climax together. Then everything inside me goes quiet.
Completely.
Every fractured piece sliding into place so suddenly it steals the breath from my lungs.
Nobody moves for a long moment.
The bonds pulse hot and alive between us while we lie tangled together in the ruined blankets, all of us breathing hard.
I brace myself for the aftermath anyway.
Panic. Shame. That hollow sickness Axel trained into me until touch always ended in pain.
But it never arrives.
Kev presses a kiss to my shoulder. Sera rests her forehead against mine. Neither of them asks for anything else. They just hold me while my heartbeat slowly learns a gentler rhythm again.
The fear is still there. That’s the part I can’t stop staring at. It didn’t disappear. I’m not suddenly healed because someone touched me softly instead of cruelly. The damage still lives inside me.
But it no longer fills every corner of me.