The song ended long ago, but I can still feel the rhythm of it humming in my blood.
37
Mo
I’m so happy I could burst… Maybe that’s why my body decides to betray me.
I wake up drenched in sweat, my skin too tight, sheets twisted around my legs like I’ve been fighting them all night. The air sits thick in my lungs. Even the light pouring through the windows feels aggressive, bleaching everything white and sharp.
“No,” I groan, recognizing the signs immediately. “Not already.”
My heat. I thought I’d have at least a few more weeks.
I kick off the blankets, but it doesn’t help. Every nerve ending sits raw and exposed, humming beneath my skin.
I stumble to the bathroom, crank the shower to cold, and step under the spray. The shock of it makes me curse, but the relief is fleeting. The moment I step out, the burn rushes back, stronger, radiating from my core outward.
Cassia warned me this would happen. That after years of suppression, my heat would be brutal. But “brutal” doesn’t begin to cover the way my body is incinerating itself from the inside out.
I need help.
No, I need knots. And my body is craving very specific alphas.
My wolf whines, desperate and raw. She knows what she wants, who she wants. Their scents, their touch, their bodies pressed against mine.
Silas appears at my door, eyes wide, the second he catches my scent.
“Can you get Cassia?” I ask urgently.
Twenty minutes later, she’s examining me. “It’s progressing faster than I expected,” she says. “Your body is making up for lost time.”
“Tell them I need them.” My voice cracks, giving in to what my body has been screaming all morning. “Silas, Archer, Elias… and Darius.”
Cassia nods. I curl into a ball on the bed, trying to breathe through another wave. My thighs are already slick, my center throbbing with a need so intense it borders on pain.
When the door opens again, I catch their scents before I see them. Silas. Archer. Elias.
My wolf howls in triumph. But someone is missing.
My wolf howls inside me, desperate for the fourth scent that should be here.
“Darius,” I manage to say. “Where’s Darius?”
The alphas exchange glances, and Archer’s voice is tight when he speaks. “He didn’t think you wanted him here.”
My heart clenches at that. All this time, I’ve been fighting what my body has known since the beginning.
And that’s when it hits me fully—the truth I’ve been fighting against for weeks. The reason their scents drive me wild, why my wolf responds so strongly to them, and why I’ve been collecting their clothes like precious artifacts.
They’re my scent matches. All of them.
I’ve known it deep down since that day when Darius dragged me to the bonfires, when Silas held me against his chest, when Archer’s hands guided mine during training, when Elias made me laugh at the fireflies.
I knew. I just couldn’t admit it to myself.
“You’re mine,” I say. “You’re all mine.”
“What did you say?” Archer says.