Page 190 of The Case of the Missing Love Stone

His forehead presses against hers. “You’re sure?”

“Yes. I want my pack.” Scarlet’s hand reaches back to close around mine.

Wes bares his teeth near her gland. He doesn’t bite.

She turns her head and offers the vulnerable curve of her neck. “I choose you as my Alpha,” she says. Her words shake. Their meaning does not. “Protect me without possessing me.”

Wes’s control breaks with a sound that is almost grief and rocks her on his knot. Scarlet cries out as pleasure crests through her body. Then his teeth sink into her bond gland.

Scarlet goes completely still, and the room fills with cedar. I feel his terror from when the bullet struck his vest and Scarlet screamed his name, the loyalty and devotion of his years with me, and the fierce, reverent joy of finding the omega he didn’t believe he was allowed to need. All of it pours through our new bond.

Scarlet gasps. Her eyes find mine, wider than they were during pleasure. “I feel him.”

Wes releases her skin and licks gently over the bite. His body shakes against hers.

Scarlet holds his face. “You came back to me,” she whispers.

“Always.” The word enters the bond before it leaves his mouth.

Scarlet cries. The bond carries the reason. She spent her life believing closeness meant waiting for the moment someone decided she was too strange, too dangerous, or too difficult to keep, and fearing that if someone stayed, it would cost her herself. Now she knows that Wes’s bond doesn’t feel like a lock. It feels like an open door he will guard but not block. The emotional force of it moves through the three of us, even though my connection to Scarlet isn’t yet complete.

She reaches for me. “Roman.”

I shift to her side, moving closer until my forehead meets hers. Her fingers trace my bond gland. I expect her to ask me to bite her next. Instead, she looks at me with tears bright on her face. “I want to choose you differently.”

My breath catches. “How?”

“You spend your life translating for everyone else. You make space. You help people say what they need.” Her thumb moves along my skin. “I want you to be the one receiving.”

Understanding breaks through me with enough force that I can’t form words.

Scarlet looks up at Wes. He is still knotted inside her, his arms secure around her waist. His eyes meet mine, and love passes between us. Permission is not the right word. Welcome.

Wes kisses my mouth. Then he murmurs, “Let her claim you.”

Scarlet turns back toward me. “Do you want my bite?”

I didn’t expect her to ask me that. It’s possible but not an assumed part of pack structure. It’s a gift she wants me to accept.

My voice fails on the first attempt. “Yes.”

Scarlet cups the back of my neck. “I choose you, Roman.” She sits up as much as the knot will allow, pressing her forehead to mine. “I choose you because I love the way you see the world. You make me laugh when I want to disappear. And your hands know how to hold every broken piece without treating me like I’m broken.”

My eyes burn.

She kisses me once. Softly. Then she bares her teeth against my gland. “Mine?” she asks. The possessive word from her feels like being found.

“Yours,” I say. “And his. And my own.”

Scarlet bites, and pain flashes. Then the bond opens. Sage and rain flood every part of me.

Her fear. Her humor. The budding hope she protects beneath suspicion. Her love for Wes, vast and bright. Her love for me, no lesser, no softer. My place in her heart has its own shape. My name lives there.

The realization tears through me more powerfully than pleasure, breaking open the last hidden part of me that feared being the beta meant remaining slightly outside the center. Scarlet’s bite pulls me in. Wes’s hand closes around the back of my neck.

The bond between Wes and me, built over years, blends and weaves its roots through the new connections. Cedar threads through sage and rain. Cardamom and cinnamon rise between them. The pack bond settles as a living circle.

Scarlet releases my skin and licks the mark.