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“Night, Luca,” Emiel said, his voice a low alpha rumble. “Can’t help with the nightmares, but I won’t let anything else get near you.”
A moment later, a soft weight hopped onto my thighs and curled up, purring.
“Well, except for Princess,” Emiel amended.
I turned, pressing my cheek into Mia’s stomach to stifle the watery smile that wanted to come through.
“Night, Emiel,” I whispered into the dark.
TWENTY-FOUR
Mia
I AWOKE SOMETIME BEFORELuca’s alarm went off. I was warm and comfortable, floating in a sea of cushions with a solid presence supporting me. A second presence lay fast asleep, draped half across my lap. The complex combination of three scents floating around us smelled divine.
For a brief, terrible moment, a little voice in my mind whispered a question that I couldn’t afford to answer.What if you could wake up like this every day for the rest of your life?
It was as though my brain had cheerfully ignored Emiel and Luca’s heartbreaking confession from earlier in the night. They couldn’t mate. Not ever. Or, at least... they didn’t think they could. Were they right?
I nuzzled further into Emiel’s side. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t moved an inch since I’d fallen asleep against him. His stroking thumb paused its travel over the skin of my shoulder when I stirred, then resumed its steady rhythm once I settled again.
What would it be like to have a psychic bond with someone who’d experienced such trauma in their life, truly? Alphomic mating bonds were one of the things which set us firmly apart from betas. Romanticized, they were the stuff of those novels I’dthreatened to make Emiel read. But only someone truly naïve would ignore the darker side of a psychic bond.
Blaze had never bitten Luca, but hecouldhave. Luca could easily have been tied for life to an alpha he hated; a sadist who held him in utter contempt and considered him a mere possession.
Although it wasn’t remotely the same thing, I might have ended up mated to Emiel during my heat, if his self-control had slipped a little further than it had. I’d brushed off the near miss at the time, telling myself that he was probably exaggerating how close he’d come to biting me.
It happened sometimes, though—I knew it did. There had been high-profile legal cases surrounding nonconsensual mating bites. Monetary settlements. Sometimes omegas even had their mating glands surgically removed to break unwanted bondings after the fact.
What if Emiel had mated me? What would I have done?
It would have been instant grounds for divorce with Nat due to adultery, obviously. But Nat had already offered divorce if I wanted it. He’d assumed that I’d moved on from the marriage. He wasn’t even totally wrong about that.
If Emiel had bitten me, maybe I could have stopped him from running away to the cage fights and nearly getting himself killed. No matter how upset he’d been, I knew he would never have left me alone while I was still in heat.
Could I have soothed that old, remembered pain with my own thoughts and emotions? God, I’d wanted his bite so badly. I’d wantedallof their bites. It was easy to say that it had just been because of my rampaging hormones... that it was simply the way omegas were wired. But I’d practically been able totastemy pack-that-wasn’t. That was what I’d yearned for, beyond the wild physical pleasure of the heat nest. And I knew Luca hadbeen feeling the same thing, begging just as hard for Byron and Zalen’s teeth on his neck.
Fuck. I couldn’t afford to think about this.
Mating a pack of dangerous, broken bad boys—well, bad boys plusZalen—was the province of escapist fiction, not reality. Not least because none of the men in question had the first intention of matinganyone, despite what Luca seemed to believe. And if they did, they should mate him, not me. They were practically a pack already, in so many of the ways that counted.
If I could prove to them that acting like a pack in other ways wouldn’t kill them, then maybe I would have done a good deed. Maybe it would go some way toward repaying the generosity they’d shown in letting me stay here, in accepting me as one of them even though they’d barely known me.
But why did that idea hurt so much?