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That was the beauty of sparring with Curran. We were evenly matched, in the sense that I was younger and faster, while he was older and more experienced, not to mention dominant as hell. That, along with the knowledge that whoever ended up on top, the match would finish exactly as it did, with our trousers and underwear around our hips, brutally jerking each other off until we both came with matching growls. Afterward, we rolled onto our backs on the mat, thoroughly spent and clutching our swelling knots to keep them from aching too badly.

The slow drain of tension from my muscles and the brief lull in my racing thoughts was a relief, just like it always was. I wondered idly how the hell Gabriel managed to function when he seemed perpetually about to chew his own leg off with frustration. To say the bloke was tightly wound was a disservice to understatement, and as far as I knew, he didn’t have a way to let off steam.

I guess that was what Curran meant about things eventually blowing up on us.

“What about you?” I asked him. “Are you on board when it comes to the omegas?”

He was flopped out beside me, limp as a used-up dishrag. “Course I am, you berk. When that kind of happiness shows up knocking on the door, you don’t slam it in their faces. But I don’t make the decisions for other people, now do I?”

I hummed, noncommittal. “S’pose not. Still, if the boss is being too much of an idiot, you could tell him so. He listens to you.”

“It’s not just us, though,” Curran said, unaccountably gentle. “Emma and Elijah need to decide, too.”

I nodded wordlessly. But what if the sweet pheromones still wafting around the room lied? We all knew they wanted us. I just wasn’t sure thatwantingwould be enough.

THIRTY-FOUR

Elijah

I WAS GOING TO crawl out of my skin.Rest, Emma had said, while excusing the both of us from the overpowering scent of hot alpha in the workout room. What a freaking joke. All I wanted right now was a fat knot inside me. The worst part was, I suspected if I’d asked for it, I would have had at least one enthusiastic taker. Possibly two.

I definitely,definitelycouldn’t ask.

Asking under these circumstances would be the height of stupidity. And it wasn’t that I had anything against casual sex, either. Hell, I was thecrown princeof casual sex. That was the problem—ever since that addictive, scent-matched pheromone cocktail had first slammed into me on theCalliope, nothing about this felt casual.

“You’re spiraling,” Emma said from her perch on my bed.

She’d followed me into the bedroom I’d claimed as mine without any explanation, and I hadn’t protested, because the last thing I wanted was to be alone.

“You’re not?” I asked in disbelief, because I had a nose, and her scent didn’t lie.

“We’re both covered in Onyx’s alpha pheromones after the sparring session,” she pointed out. “A shower might help.”

There was a certain reluctance behind the words, and that was enough to stop my restless pacing around this airy confection of a room.

“You don’t sound like you want a shower,” I said slowly.

Her answering bark of laughter had a faintly hysterical edge to it.

“I don’t know what the hell I want.” She swallowed and looked away. “Back in New York, I used to hate you for how confident you were. Just... having sex with alphas because you felt like it. You acted like it wasn’t d-dangerous. Like it was no big deal.”