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ONE
Luca
I WAS UNRAVELING. COMINGapart at the seams. The terrible déjà vu had descended like a choking cloud, even as familiar, rumbling voices spoke over and over about how I was safe, how everything was all right, and I shouldn’t worry.
“Bite me,” I sobbed, writhing and twisting to get the knot inside me even deeper. “Oh, god, bite me, mate me,please!”
A soothing hand stroked the sweaty hair away from my forehead. Another hand anchored my hips, keeping me from moving too much on the knot stretching me wide. Zalen? It was Zalen inside me right now, wasn’t it?
“Shh, Luca,” he said, sounding strained. “We can talk about it once your heat breaks, if you want to. You’re okay, I promise. We care for you so much. You know that, don’t you? We’ll never do anything to hurt you, or anything that you don’t expressly give us permission to do.”
The words spoke to the normal, rational part of my brain that was currently drowning in a sea of hormones, but they did nothing for the larger part that was desperate for someone to fill the aching black void that lived in the center of my chest. The gap that could never, ever be filled in, because as much as I might want a mated pack, pups, the white picket fence and the perfect omega life, I would never, ever have it.
I was broken, ruined, and no pack in their right minds would tie themselves to someone as useless and shattered as I was inside. It didn’t stop me from begging, even though I knew begging wouldn’t get me what I so desperately needed.
“Please...please! Zalen! Byron, I’ll do anything! I’m sorry... I’m so sorry, I know I’m no good! I’ll—I’ll be better, I promise! I’ll do anything you want!Please bite me!”
Somewhere nearby, Mia was making little breathless, rhythmic cries as she was taken. A low alpha groan sounded, morphing into a growl that made shivers trail down my spine.
“God, I hate this part.” Byron’s voice was so low it was barely audible.
But I heard it. Iheard. And I knew that my brokenness was to blame. Byron was fucking Mia even as he spoke, and my unreasonable demandsstillmade him want to be anywhere except in my heat nest. More tears squeezed from the corners of my eyes.
“Byron,hush,” Zalen said sharply, even as his hands tried to soothe this ugly, disfigured thing inside me that could never be soothed. “Luca, you are perfect. You deserve everything good in life. But what you want now isn’t necessarily going to be what you want after the hormones release their grip.”
I snarled, irrationally incensed.
“Fucking bite me!” I shrieked like a maniac, hating myself just that little bit more when Mia whimpered in distress nearby.
“Shh, I’ve got you, Luca,” Zalen said. He was in control—always soenraginglyin control—but he also sounded sad.
He shifted around behind me, tangling our legs together so I wouldn’t be able to buck my hips on his knot and hurt myself. I held my breath, trembling—knowing all too well what was coming next.
The hand that had been stroking back my hair moved down to the juncture of my shoulder. Zalen’s fingers closed over mymating gland, manicured nails curving to press on the skin where an alpha’s incisors might fall. Lightning-sharp tingles radiated outward, racing back and forth between my gland and the place where we were joined.
Zalen craned up and fastened his mouth over my other shoulder, where it didn’t fuckingmatter. He growled against the tender skin, but it was just for show. I wasn’t a good enough omega to make an alpha I wanted to mate lose control and bite my gland. Not really.
Zalen bit down hard enough to make my blood bead around his canines, at the same moment he dug his fingernails in, denting the skin over my mating gland but not breaking it. I howled, my body helpless beneath thestupid, uselessplayacting. Slick and semen squirted over my thighs, my belly, the cushions beneath me.
The climax was so strong it whited out my vision. Mia’s nearby scream of ecstasy sounded like it was coming from underwater—the sudden spike in pheromones sending her over the precipice after me. My passage rippled and pulsed around Zalen’s knot so hard it hurt, like maybe I’d strained some of the muscles down there. The sharp waves of pleasure-pain shuddered through me for long moments, distracting me at last from the desolate emptiness where my pack bonds should be.
I fell into the dreamless blackness of post-peak slumber with a low whine of relief... wishing, not for the first time, that I never had to wake up from that warm nothingness.
When I next opened my eyes, the ruthless compulsion of heat had subsided. It was replaced, as it always was, with a deep sense of disgust at myself.
Every muscle in my body felt like it had been individually placed on a medieval rack and stretched to the snapping point.Worse, my mind was a movie screen for the same horrifically humiliating flashes of memory that I always got, afterward.
I’ll be better, I promise!
I’ll do anything you want!
Bite me, mate me, please!
Bile rose in my throat.
I looked around the dimly lit nest, trying to take stock. Zalen and Byron were gone. They knew better than to be here when I woke up after my estrus subsided. They’d learned that lesson the hard way the first time they’d talked me into letting them help me through a natural heat.
I’d come back to myself with the same flashes of awareness I always got, knowing that I’d begged them for their knots—for theirbites—like the pathetic, slutty little asshole I was, and I’d freaked the fuck out on them both. Ever since, they’d known better than to stick around once their dicks were no longer required.