Page 6 of Knot Their Safe Haven (The Omega Rebellion Movement #3)

DREAMS AND DISTANCE

~VELVET~

T he silk clung to my fevered skin like a lover's promise — soft, deceptive, and entirely inadequate for the inferno building beneath.

I twisted in the sheets, consciousness floating somewhere between dream and nightmare, my body a battleground of sensations I couldn't control.

The wine from earlier had done nothing to dull the edges of this torment.

If anything, it had stripped away my last defenses, leaving me raw and exposed to the hunger that gnawed at my very bones.

"Qalbi..."

Adyani's voice drifted through the darkness of my mind, that rich baritone that still made my stomach clench even after all these years.

But as the sound wrapped around me, it shifted—deepened and softened simultaneously, morphing into something distinctly feminine yet retaining that commanding presence that had always undone me.

"My beautiful Scar," she whispered, and I could almost feel her breath against my neck, could almost taste the saffron and desert rose that clung to her skin. "Let me show you what you've been missing, my sweet."

My back arched involuntarily, nipples hardening to painful peaks against the delicate fabric. The silk might as well have been sandpaper for how it abraded my oversensitive flesh. Every brush of material sent lightning skittering across my nerve endings, pooling liquid heat between my thighs.

I could only imagine, from the labyrinthine corridors of my own fevered mind, how she might look— how she might feel —now, after all that she had undergone.

At first, it was the old memory of her body, the one etched into my flesh and my heart from a hundred half-remembered nights, that took shape in the darkness.

The breadth of her shoulders, the sculpted angles of her arms, the way her long, elegant hands could crush or cradle with equal skill.

In dreams I remembered how she— the he that had been before —would pin me under the full weight of her authority, her pressing presence, until I broke or yielded or, god forbid, melted. That was how I had loved her, once.

That was how she had conquered me: completely, and absolutely.

But now, in the shifting, unanchored logic of this dream, her body became mutable, evolving with every shuddering breath until I no longer knew what was memory and what was hope.

Her hands, at first as large and certain as I remembered them, began to shrink and soften, the calluses giving way to silkier skin.

The wrists narrowed. The fingers became more graceful, more delicate— but never frail.

She cupped the side of my face with this new, gentle palm, and I marveled at how small it seemed, how right.

My dream-self shivered at the contradiction: the touch was softer, yes, but the force behind it was undiminished, if anything more commanding for its restraint.

The mind of Adyani was still there, ferocious and brilliant and utterly in control, but now the packaging was different, a reimagined vessel for the same old storms.

I let myself fall further.

The line between old and new dissolved. In the darkness, I reached up and cupped her breast— because I could, and she would not stop me —and the sensation was as real and vivid as any waking touch.

The flesh was perfect, so soft and warm and alive, and she arched into my hand with a low, throaty laugh that vibrated all the way down my spine.

I felt the stiffened peak of her nipple against my palm, felt her breathing hitch as I squeezed—gently at first, then harder, teasing out the boundaries of her pain and pleasure like a cartographer charting unknown territory.

"Is this what you wanted, Scar?" she purred, and yes, that was my name from her mouth, always and only. "Is this what you've been dreaming of?"

I could only nod, mute with longing. The wetness between my thighs was more than an ache now; it was a demand, a biological imperative, a hunger as real as breath or blood.

I squirmed in the sheets, feeling them twist around my waist, feeling the silk tangle between my legs, scraping at the hypersensitive skin as I writhed.

Every movement made my clit throb, every frantic buck of my hips ratcheted the tension higher, until I thought I might scream, or sob, or both at once.

Yet still, I could not touch myself.

Not with Adyani here, in command.

No, I needed her to do it; I needed her hands—however they had changed, whatever they had become.

And then, in the honeyed delirium of the dream, Adyani's hands found my throat. They wrapped around it with perfect pressure, her thumbs stroking just below my jaw, and I gasped at the sensation, the dangerous thrill of absolute surrender.

"You always did love to be owned," she whispered, and my body answered with a flood of liquid heat, soaking the sheets beneath me. I felt marked, claimed. It was everything I had been denying myself, everything I had told myself I no longer needed.

But even as she dominated me, her body continued to shift—her face blurred at the edges, voice modulating from one register to another, so that I no longer knew which version of her was real.

Was it the Alpha prince? The Alpha princess? Some fusion of both?

I tried to call out, to beg her to finish me, but the words stuck in my throat. I was helpless, a marionette in her hands, strung out on lust and memory and all the questions I had never dared to ask.

And then, just as I felt the edge of release, just as the world was about to go white around me, she was gone.

The void was absolute. I was alone, gasping, the emptiness more suffocating than the hand that had gripped my throat.

The loss was a physical pain— a tear, a rending —and I clutched at the sheets with both hands, shaking, desperate, abandoned.

The ache in my body was worse now than when I had started, a gnawing hunger that would not be sated.

I rolled onto my side, furious and grieving, and let the tears come.

They were hot and bitter, not for Adyani, but for what I had lost: the illusion, the possibility, the fantasy of at last being whole.

Yet, the dream would not let me go.

The darkness pressed in, heavier than ever, and I realized I was still trapped in its sticky web. Still at its mercy.

Now there was a new presence. Heavier. More solid.

I recognized him even before he spoke, before the familiar scent of cedarwood and smoke and something wilder than both filled my lungs. Knox. He had always been the anchor of my undoing, the one man who could break me with a word—or a look.

He didn't need to touch me. He only had to be present, and I fell apart. But in the dream, he did touch me.

His hands were everywhere at once—on my hips, bracing me, holding me in place; on my breasts, rough and greedy; in my hair, yanking my head back so he could whisper into my ear. The whisper was a snarl, a threat, and an apology all at once. "You never could stay away, V."

The use of that old nickname, the way he growled it, was enough to make my knees buckle even though I was already horizontal.

I wanted to bite him, claw him, curse him—wanted to rend him with my teeth for all the ways he had failed me, failed our family. But mostly, I wanted him inside me, wanted him to fill the void Adyani had left.

He obliged, because dream logic is cruel and inexorable. I felt him slide into me, thick and hot and overwhelming, and my body convulsed around him.

There was no pain, only an explosion of sensation, pure pleasure untempered by guilt or shame or even the ghost of love.

He fucked me hard, without hesitation, as if he knew I needed to be ruined and was eager for the task.

Every stroke sent ripples of ecstasy through my core, and I met him thrust for thrust, greedy for more, always more.

My nails raked his back, my teeth found his shoulder, and he only laughed, low and dark and satisfied.

But again, just as I neared the brink, just as I felt the climax build and build and build until it threatened to tear me apart, he vanished.

Gone, like smoke, like the memory of a scream.

I howled at the loss, at the emptiness, at the way the world seemed to collapse in on itself. I pounded the mattress, clawed at my own skin, frantic for a release that would not come.

That was when Malcolm appeared.

Always the observer, always the analyst. He didn't belong here, not really, but dreams are not bound by propriety or sense. He stood at the foot of the bed, arms crossed, watching me with that infuriating mix of compassion and clinical detachment.

"You're making it worse for yourself," he said, voice soft but unyielding. "You know how this ends."

"Fuck you," I spat, more angry at my own frailty than at him.

He only smiled, that gentle, maddening smile.

"You can't run from it, Velvet. Sooner or later, you'll have to let yourself have what you want. What you need."

His words echoed in the darkness, and with them came the return of sensation—the ghost of Adyani's hands, the memory of Knox's body, the promise of something more than just torment.

I felt myself splitting in two, then three, then so many pieces I could not count them all.

I was surrounded, invaded, claimed by all these shifting, warring forces: the old love, the old hate, the old need.

Somewhere in the maelstrom, I managed to scream.

It was not a word, not even a sound, but a pure vocalization of hunger and defiance and absolute surrender.

The world shattered with me.

I came awake with a start, drenched in sweat, the sheets twisted around my waist and thighs. My mouth was open, my throat raw— had I really screamed? I couldn't tell. The room was still, the only noise the frantic thud of my own heart.