"Your turn."
His expression softens with the slightest hint of reverence if Rex were capable of reverence, which according tohimhe's not, but Rex has been wrong about himself for a long time.
Raf's knot softens and he pulls out slowly, his lips pressed to the mark he left, murmuring something I don't catch. But it sounds sweet. He eases me forward onto the mattress and rolls to the side, spent, his bronze chest heaving.
Rex takes his place.
He moves over me, bracing himself on one arm, and the other hand finds my jaw and tilts my face up. The fairy lights reflect slightly off his scars and I reach up and trace the edge of his jaw with my thumb.
He flinches.
Then he doesn't.
He enters me slowly. The scarred ridge of his cock drags against my oversensitized walls and the sound I make is barely human, more like a pathetic whimper. If I had the capacity for embarrassment around these alphas anymore, it would embarrass the fuck out of me.
Rex's rhythm is careful at first, like he's terrified of hurting me, which is insane given that Raf just knotted me with the subtlety of a battering ram and Rex fucked merelentlesslyon the rooftop of the studio.
I wrap my legs around his waist and pull him deeper, and his control snaps.
His hips slam forward and I arch into it. The pace becomes brutal, desperate, years of isolation and touch starvation and loneliness pouring out of him in savage thrusts that drive me up the mattress until Phoenix braces his hand against my head to keep me from hitting the wall.
Rex's knot swells. His whole body shakes as he locks inside me. A snarl that lacks all the usual anger and rage rips out of him and his mouth finds my neck, the side where the original crescent scar sits beneath Phoenix and Raf's marks.
His teeth press against the old scar.
He hesitates.
One heartbeat. Two. Then three. Like he's asking for permission from the girl who was bitten without consent by the man she stabbed in the fucking eye, then neck, which is still something I'm choosing not to think about because it doesn't bother me half as much as it should. The weird apathy actually bothers me slightly more than the violence itself.
I thread my fingers into his dark hair and pull him closer.
"Do it," I whisper.
His teeth sink into the exact place where the crescent scar began. Rex's bond crashes through me and I feel the pack bonds braid together, thumping in time with my pounding heart like a bassline.
Rex collapses over me, panting, his face pressed into my throat, his damaged cheek against the fresh marks. Phoenix's hand finds my hair and Raf's fingers lace through mine.
Eventually, Rex's knot softens and he rolls off me with a grunt that might be the least elegant sound I've ever heard from him. He lands on his back beside me, chest heaving, one arm flung over his eyes.
I'm a fucking wreck.
A glorious, annihilated, thrice-knotted, freshly markedwrecksprawled in the center of a nest that smells like all four of us combined.
Phoenix pulls a blanket over my body because he's Phoenix and he can'tnottake care of me. Raf curls against my right side, his nose in my hair, his arm draped across my stomach. Rex somehow ends up on my other side, nuzzling into my hair.
We breathe together, staring up at the twinkling fairy lights.
Fuckingmagical.
"I'm going to tell them," I hear myself saying suddenly.
Phoenix's hand stills in my hair and Raf lifts his head. Rex lets out a soft questioning growl that rustles my hair, but he doesn't move.
"The omega thing," I clarify. "I'm going to tell the world I'm an omega."
Silence.
"Not because Carmine wants a press strategy, or because some journalist is going to dig it up anyway and I should get ahead of it. And not because it's smart or strategic or… or whatever the fuck label people would want to call it."