Page 163 of Slashed Bonds

CHAPTER 22

The First I Truly Feel Alive

~MORRIGAN~

Having a threesome after five rounds of kickboxing, a paper bag of the best eggs I’ve eaten in half a decade, and twenty minutes of something that looked from the outside like normalcy, with two Alphas I’ve known in daylight for nine days, is a glorious way to start game day.

That’s why there’s water coming down on the three of us.

Not the sprinklers this time. Somebody chose this one.

The shower on the third floor is built for a woman who was never meant to share it.

Slate on three walls, a bench along the fourth, a single head in the ceiling the width of a dinner plate, and the water out of it falls like weather, not spray. Heavy. Warm enough to go to the bone. It flattens my hair to my skull and runs in black and red down my face and into my mouth, and I don’t care, because my mouth is occupied.

Killian can kiss.

That’s a finding I’d like entered somewhere official. The man has three expressions and uses one of them per season, and his mouth, when it’s on mine, is none of them. Slow. Thorough. Unhurried in a way that makes the hurry in me look foolish. He kisses like he’s inventorying, like he’s going to be asked about this later and wants to get the details right, and his hand’s at my jaw tilting me where he wants me and I’m letting him.

And Nikolai is behind me.

Hands on my breasts. Both of them, full, with no finesse at all, like a boy who’s been handed the two best things in the world and has decided to hold them until somebody takes them away. He’s murmuring into the back of my neck. Russian, I think, or nothing, syllables that don’t need a language, and every one of them lands on the scar under my ink and I don’t flinch.

I don’t flinch. Note that. Enter that too.

We ate first.

I should say that, because it matters more than it sounds. Killian put the bag down on the one dry corner of the ring and unpacked it like a man setting a table, and I sat on a soaked mat in a see-through tank with a wet goalie on one side of me and a defenseman in black on the other and ate eggs out of a paper box with my fingers.

Eggs. Fried hard, the way nobody makes them anymore. Some kind of flatbread blistered on one side, salty, meant to be torn. A sausage I didn’t ask the origin of. And the smell of all of it rising through the wet-concrete smell of the ring, through the sand turning to paste under us, through two Alpha scents gone warm and close, and under my own, which had changed, which I could smell changing and couldn’t name.

Knox ate his chicken and rice from the small bag with his whole face, then came and put his wet chin on my thigh and watched me eat mine.

He’s never seen me eat with my hands. He’s never seen me eat in company. He kept checking.

Nikolai kept checking too. Not the way Maddie checks, the have you eaten every call. He’d eat a bite and look at my box, and eat a bite and look at my box, and when I was down to the bread he tore his in half and put it in mine without a word, and I ate it, and he looked at the ceiling like he’d gotten away with something.

Then Killian stood up and said, “Shower,” like it was an item on a list, and nobody argued.

Three flights. The Omega wing’s on the top floor and the stairs to it are wide and shallow, built for someone who might be tired, and halfway up I understood what I was climbing through. The Beta at the desk had said he said you might come. The gloves on the rack were my size. The shower, when Killian pushed the door, had one head and a bench and slate the color of my ink, and none of it had ever been used.

He built a floor for a woman he didn’t have a name for. Two years ago. And then he went and found her in a locked room and didn’t tell her.

I didn’t say anything on the stairs. I put my hand on the rail and climbed, with a goalie behind me and a defenseman ahead of me and a dog taking the steps two at a time, and I let the building be what it was.

Now the water.

The two of them.

I haven’t done this. A threesome. In five years of a pack and five of none, I’ve never had more than one man’s hands on me at a time, and the one man’s hands I had were not interested in what mine wanted.

Let’s be accurate. Dark is only useful when it’s accurate.

Sex with Hellsing Ross was a transaction I didn’t set the price on. In and out. A thing that happened to me after games, after wins mostly, when the adrenaline needed somewhere to go and I was the somewhere. Theo first, because Theo was first in everything. The others in whatever order the night produced. Nobody asked what I liked. I don’t think it occurred to a single one of them that the question existed, and by the second year it had stopped occurring to me.

It never got me to the edge. I’d like to be clear about that too. Not once, in five years. I learned to make the sounds that ended it faster.

And heats.