Page 28 of Knot Their Safe Haven (The Omega Rebellion Movement #3)

His smirk was lazy, but his eyes—those wicked, impossibly green eyes—were locked on my mouth like a wolf eyeing a steak.

It should have made me want to bite, to reassert my dominance in a room where I was always queen.

Instead, it made me want to lay bare every secret, to let him taste the parts of me no one else dared to touch.

I wondered what else he could sense from that nose of his.

Fear? Excitement? The rare, dangerous hope that lingered in the pit of my stomach, growing with every circle of our slow waltz.

I thought about how I always prided myself on being inscrutable.

How I’d once convinced a room full of geneticists I was an ordinary Omega, even as I hacked their mainframe in heels and a dress that could have paid off their student loans.

But Alessandro saw through every facade.

He could read my pheromones like Braille, could trace patterns in the air molecules I left behind, could distill my lies to their elemental truth.

I should have hated it.

I should have fought him for every inch of power.

But right now, letting him see me like this felt like the bravest thing I’d ever done.

He dipped his head, lips almost brushing my ear.

"I like that you're nervous. No one's ever nervous around me."

"I'm not nervous," I lied, and both of us laughed at the sound of it.

His hand flexed at my waist.

I could feel the tension in his whole body, the wild oscillation between restraint and hunger.

He didn’t need to say he wanted me; every inch of him said it more eloquently than words.

We kept gliding, turning, our feet barely making a sound on the old wood.

If the world outside was burning, I would not have known; the only fire that existed was the one flickering over his shoulder, and the one he kindled in me with nothing but a look.

He was still thinking about my scent, I realized.

Still cataloging, still savoring, still deciding exactly how to consume me.

"Everything about you is unfair." His hand slides lower, fingertips grazing the curve where back becomes ass. "The dress, the glasses, the way you look at me like you're deciding whether to fuck me or kill me."

"Who says I have to choose?"

"Valid point."

We turn slowly, the room revolving around us rather than us within it.

Outside, full darkness has arrived, transforming the windows into black mirrors that reflect us from every angle.

A woman in burgundy wrapped in an oversized jacket, a man in expensive clothes holding her like she might evaporate.

We look good together.

The thought surprises me with its simplicity. Not the complicated dynamic I had with three others, always someone missing, always unbalanced.

This is symmetry—his darkness to my silver, his height to my curves, his patience to my fury.

"Regrets?" he asks.

"About?"

"Them. What you're leaving behind."

I consider lying, but wine and proximity have dissolved my filters.

"No."

"None?"

Of course there weren’t none. There were so many when I began to sank in the depths of those waters that grew darker by the second while I realized my time on this earth was about to run out.

"Twenty years of regrets. All used up. Fresh out."

"That's very efficient of you."

I love how amusingly easy it was to talk to him.

"I'm nothing if not organized."

He spins me again, slower this time, pulling me back closer than before. Our bodies align from chest to hip, every point of contact burning through fabric.

"They're probably planning their response," he says conversationally. "Knox will try violence first. Malcolm will attempt reasoning through medical necessity. Adyani will play the emotion card."

"And?"

I liked his thought process. How easy it was already to know these men’s weaknesses as though he’s really been putting the pieces together with all of them for more than a few days.

"And they'll fail. Because you can't unbreak something by committee."

"That's poetic."

"That's fact." He breathes against my ear, and I shiver. "They had twenty years to choose you without conditions. Now they get to watch someone else do it properly."

The music shifts again—Billie Holiday now, "The Very Thought of You" in honey and smoke. Alessandro hums along, the vibration traveling through chest to chest.

"You know all the standards?"

"Mother loved jazz. Said it was the only American export worth importing."

"Snob."

"Absolutely. Would have hated that I fell for an American."

"Would have?"

"Cancer doesn't get opinions on my love life."

The casual way he mentions death, love, and me in the same sentence makes my heart stutter.

"This is insane," I whisper.

"Which part? The dancing? The compound fracture of your previous relationship? The fact that we're scent matched after nearly two decades?"

"Yes, the last part," I breathe out and try not to giggle.

"Clarity at last."

I pull back to look at him properly. The firelight turns his green eyes into kaleidoscopes, shadows carving his face into something classical.

Beautiful, but not pretty. Dangerous but not cruel. Young but not naive.

"What happens when reality sets in? When you realize I'm difficult and stubborn and set in my ways?"

"Then I'll be difficult back. Stubborn is my middle name. And I'll learn your ways until they become mine."

"You make it sound simple."

"It is simple. The execution is complex, but the concept?" He shrugs. "Love someone. Choose them. Keep choosing them. Simple."

"Love?"

The word hangs between us like a challenge.

"What else would you call seventeen years of obsession?"

"Stalking?"

"Dedicated research."

"Creepy?"

"Thorough."

"Probably illegal?"

"Definitely illegal. But statute of limitations and all that."

I laugh despite myself, and his face lights up like I've given him a gift.

"I love your laugh," he says quietly. "Hated that you stopped doing it so much. Every year, less laughter in the surveillance."

"Surveillance. Jesus."

"Only the public spaces. I'm a stalker, not a complete violation of privacy."

"That's a very fine line you're drawing."

"I'm excellent with fine lines. Comes from all those Swiss banking regulations."

The song ends, but we don't stop moving. The silence between tracks is its own music, fireplace percussion and wind through trees the only orchestra needed.

I hook my arms around his neck, forcing him to bend, bringing our faces close enough that our breath mingles. His hands settle on my waist, thumbs stroking the silk.

"This is dangerous," I tell him.

"You said that already."

"It’s worthy of repeating."

"Why?"

"Because in about thirty seconds, I'm going to kiss you properly."

His pupils dilate so fast I can actually see it happen.

"That's not dangerous. That's inevitable."

"You sound very confident."

"Scent matches always end up together. Biology demands it."

"So this is just biology?"

"This is biology confirming what choice already decided." His nose brushes mine. "I chose you before I knew we matched. The scent just means the universe agrees with my excellent taste."

"Arrogant."

"Accurate."

"Alessandro?"

"Yes?"

"Shut up now."

I rise onto my toes, closing the distance between us with deliberation that has nothing to do with wine and everything to do with decision. Our lips meet, and this time neither of us pretends it's casual.

He tasted like chocolate and wine and layered underneath, something sharp and elusive I could only identify as wanting.

The air around us seemed to collapse into a dense, humming bubble—the gravity of his body, his hands, his scent, all crowding out the rest of the universe until every sense I owned was tuned to him.

Our lips met, parted, met again, and each time the contact deepened: my tongue traced the seam of his mouth and found the inviting heat of his own, and he answered with a low, involuntary sound that shuddered through my chest like bass from a forbidden song.

I could tell he wanted to devour me and restrain himself at the same time, an oscillation that manifested in the precise, reverent way he mapped my mouth and the trembling in his fingers where they curled around my hips.

I bit his bottom lip, not hard but not gentle either, and the shock of it broke something in him.

He lost whatever tenuous grip he’d had on self-control, and our kiss tumbled from artful to desperate in a single heartbeat.

I felt him pull me closer, one arm crushing my ribcage to his while the other slid down to anchor just above my ass, and I gasped into him at the rawness of it.

My toes barely skimmed the floor; I felt unstable, weightless, like a girl in a fairytale right at the moment she realizes the wolf is both her predator and her only way out of the woods.

He kissed with all the intelligence and calculation that marked his every move, but also with a kind of reckless hunger that upended me completely.

I was used to being worshipped, to being handled like something dangerous or precious or both; this was new, this sense of being wanted not for what I was or what I represented, but for the very specific, irreplaceable fact that I was me.

I cupped the back of his head, fingers threading through the endless black silk of his hair, and rode the wave of sensation as he tilted me even further back, bending my body to fit his geometry.

His tongue licked into me, and I bit down again, just a hint, just a warning, and he made a noise so feral it vibrated between us like a tuning fork.

I broke the kiss, not because I wanted to but because I had to breathe or risk fainting.

We hovered there for a single, trembling second, my forehead pressed to his, our exhales tangling in the inch of air between us.

His eyes were blown wide, the green lost to so much black that it looked like a storm about to swallow the horizon.

I realized that I liked seeing him undone.

I wanted to see how far I could push before he snapped.