His bite is the deepest.
I grip the sheet with one hand and Matteo's arm with the other and I make a sound that is not quite a word and Tomas holds the bite steady for a moment before he lifts his head and looks at me with those gray eyes and something in them that I will spend a considerable amount of time learning to read.
The room fills.
All our scents together, braided in the warm morning air, all of it permanent. The bonds sit in my chest like three things that were always supposed to be there and have simply, finally, arrived.
She kicks, probably because I’m so overwhelmed by what has happened the last few days.
Santos laughs, low and warm, and presses his forehead against mine.
Matteo's arms come around me from the left and he holds me with the steady unhurried certainty of someone who has been waiting for permission to do this and intends to do it properly.
Tomas takes the cloth and cleans the marks with careful gentle strokes, one after another, and the warmth of his hands is grounding in the specific way that Tomas is always grounding.
After a while I say, "I want to see."
Santos stands and offers me his hand and walks me to the mirror on the wall beside the window.
I look at my reflection.
The marks are three, close together on the left side of my neck, slightly raised, already beginning to settle into something permanent. They sit against my skin with the particularpresence of things that belong there. My strawberry scent is warm and full in the air around me and underneath it their scents woven in, mine now, part of me now, the way the island is part of me, the way the kitchen at nine in the morning is part of me.
I put two fingers against them, very lightly.
"Does it hurt," Santos says, from behind me, his warm eyes finding mine in the mirror.
"No," I say.
I look at the marks for a long moment. The three of them are reflected behind me, Santos with his saffron warm and open, Matteo with his pale eyes steady, Tomas with his gray gaze quiet and certain.
I look at myself. At the marks. At what has just become permanent.
"I love it," I say.
And I mean it completely.
Tomas's mouth does the thing, brief and real, and in the mirror I watch it happen and file it in the place where I keep the things I intend to return to. I've bonded with the three alphas that I lusted after, indulged and then hated in Vegas, yet nothing could be better or could I ask for more right now.
"Can we lie down for a while?" I ask them.
“Of course,” Matteo says.
I reflect on what Anna said, about them wanting to please and protect me.
29
JENNIFER
One morning you wake up, look at your bed, and decide it is wrong. Not broken, just wrong in a way you can't explain and your omega can't be bothered to explain because she has already moved on to cataloguing everything else in the room that also needs addressing immediately.
The mattress is excellent. I know this for a fact, I have done the research. The sheets are fine. The pillows are adequate. None of that matters because something in me has taken one look at this space and issued a verdict and the verdict is: fix this, fix it now, and do not ask me questions.
I stand there for a minute waiting to feel less ridiculous about it.
That doesn't work.
I go and find Santos.