"And drain the rest of your energy? Who's gonna be my hero then?"
Rex rolls his eyes. "Are you seriously playing the fucking damsel-in-distress card because you're worried about me?"
I give him my most innocent smile. "Maybe?"
But the smile immediately dies as a bolt of white-hot pain shoots through the scar on my neck.
I stumble.
Rex catches me before I hit the wall, his arm banding around my waist, and the contact sends another wave of agony radiating from the scar outward through my entire nervous system. It's like someone pressed a branding iron to my throat. The crescent-shaped tissue throbs in time with my pulse, each beat sharper than the last.
"Bells—"
"I'm fine," I gasp.
I'm not fine.
The incomplete mark is fuckingscreaming.
Stephen's failed bite—the one that was never completed, never consented to, never meant to be—is reacting to everything. To Rex's proximity, to the pack bonds flaring in my chest, to the fact that my body is straining to complete those pack bonds with thealpha who’s holding me, the alpha who just told me helovesme, while carrying the mark of the wrong one.
It's biological warfare. My own body is attacking itself because the signals don't match.
Rex's hand finds my chin and tilts my face up. His single working eye searches mine, and for once, he isn’t trying to turn his head so I can’t see the scarred side as well.
"The mark," he says quietly.
"It's getting worse." I press my palm against the collar, against the scar beneath it. "Every time you touch me, every time I feel the pack bond, it—fuck?—"
Another spike. I hiss through my teeth.
He works his jaw, watching me. The exposed muscles and tendons flex and stretch at the movement. It takes everything I have to not let my eyes slide to it automatically.
"What do you need?" he asks, his voice rough and concerned.
"Honestly?"
He waits.
"It really fucking sucks that we can't just stop everything we're doing so you can knot me and mark me properly."
Dead silence.
Rex stares at me.
His eye goes wide like he's actuallyconsidering it.
I reach up and tap his nose.
"No.Bad alpha. That's how we die."
He blinks.
"Did you just?—"
"Focus. Escape first. Knotting later."
His lip curls. “You’re the one who fucking suggested it.”