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“I mean, no sex,” I say. “Just… bite.”

“You think that matters?” she says.

“I think that Dr. Acker got us to associate blood and erections, blood and sex, blood and claiming. She… there is blood.”

Arrow sucks in a sharp, noisy breath. “There is blood,” he says.

“Okay, you guys,” says Knight. “The bite is completely different—”

“And that’s how she did it,” I say. “She used the bite. That’s why it’s locked in. So, we decouple the bite from sex.”

“Yes,” breathes Arrow, nodding in relief.

Lotus shrugs. “I guess it’s fine.”

“It seems… a little sad,” says Calix. “That sex, the bite sex, it was phenomenal.”

Lotus nods. “Yeah, but we’ll have a bond afterwards, Striker. We’ll have phenomenal.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’d rather be your bitten and bonded alpha and sacrifice the bite sex.”

She brushes her hair away from her ear, remembering where my spot is. “Well, go ahead, then,” she whispers, her voice going flirtatious and eager.

I step forward and brush her skin, right there,myspot.

And then, nothing happens, because I don’t have my teeth. I even open my mouth and touch my normal canines.

“Little performance anxiety there?” says Lotus, teasing me, smiling widely. “Can’t get your teeth up?”

“Uh… it just occurs to me that the only time they show up is when I’m also aroused.”

“Is that safe?” she says.

I sigh. “I don’t know.”

“We can do the teeth without arousal,” says Arrow to Knight. “Right? You did it to me earlier today. Like twice.”

“Yeah, I can do it,” says Knight, and opens his mouth, and there are the teeth, and Arrow makes a little pleasure noise, and then he’s got them too.

“But that’s… like, because of your bond,” I say quietly.

The two exchange a glance and shrug at the same time before turning back to me.

“So, how are you doing it?” I say to Knight.

“Uh, I just think about biting,” says Knight.

I turn back to Lotus, and I think about sinking my teeth into her flesh, think about her skin parting underneath the sensitive sharp tips of my teeth—which are expanding, but so is my cock, and I’m getting a knot—and then I’m suddenly awash in the idea of blood.

Lotus’s blood.

Omega blood.

But then I’m right back in the lab, Acker behind me as she forces me to stare at a slideshow of broken and bloody female bodies, some of them just gore and others sexual in the way they’re rendered—there are drawings of men fucking wounds,biting cartoon hearts, fucked up things—and she’s talking in that Acker voice of hers.

Such a good boy, Striker.

Kill her for me.