"Your vitals are elevated but stable," Ethan informed me, pressing two fingers to my pulse point. "The heat should begin to taper within the next twelve to eighteen hours."
"You're checking my vitals," I said flatly, "while I'm lying in a pool of cum with four bite marks bleeding on my neck."
"Precisely because you're in that condition," Ethan replied, unruffled. "Heat places enormous strain on an Omega's body. Without proper care, complications can arise. I won't let that happen to you."
Something in my chest twisted. "You really do care, don't you? It's not just... clinical interest." Ethan's hand stilled on my wrist. His green eyes met mine, and for once, the analytical distance was gone.
"I've spent my entire life being told I don't feel things the way others do," Ethan said quietly. "That I'm too cold. Too detached. That I analyze when I should feel." His thumb stroked across my pulse. "But I feel you, Ava. Every heartbeat. Every breath. Every sound you make. I feel all of it, even if I don't express it the way the others do."
"Ethan—"
"I love you," he said simply, as if stating a fact. "I've loved you since I calculated the probability of finding an Omega who could match all four of us, and realized the odds were astronomically low. You shouldn't exist. But you do. And you're ours."
He didn't give me time to respond. Just shifted between my thighs, pressed inside me with that devastating precision, and took me apart piece by piece while reciting my own biological responses like poetry. When he bit me—his teeth precisely on his mark, the pressure exactly calibrated—I came so hard I blacked out.
On the third day, Mason played piano.
I hadn't known there was a piano in the cabin. But there it was, tucked in a corner of the living room, a beautiful upright that gleamed in the afternoon light. Mason sat at the bench, shirtless, his golden hair disheveled, his back to me as his fingers moved over the keys.
The music was soft. A lullaby, I realized. Something haunting and sad and beautiful. I stood in the doorway, wrapped in a blanket that smelled like all of them, watching him play. The heat had finally begun to recede, leaving me wrung out and hollow, every muscle aching, every bite mark throbbing in time with my pulse.
"You play," I said stupidly.
Mason's fingers never faltered. "My mother taught me. Before she died." I didn't know what to say to that, so I just stood there, listening, letting the music wash over me. It was the most peaceful I'd felt since they'd taken me.
"Come here," Mason said softly, still playing. "Sit with me." I crossed the room on unsteady legs and sank onto the bench beside him. His arm came around me, pulling me against his side, his fingers still dancing over the keys with one hand.
"She used to play this for me when I couldn't sleep," Mason murmured. "I was a terrible sleeper as a child. Nightmares. She'd sit at the piano and play until I calmed down."
"It's beautiful," I whispered.
"So are you." He pressed a kiss to my temple. "Even now. Especially now. Exhausted and covered in our marks and still so fucking beautiful I can barely stand it." Tears spilled down my cheeks. I didn't know why I was crying—didn't know if it was exhaustion or hormones or something deeper, something I wasn't ready to name.
"I don't know who I am anymore," I confessed, my voice breaking. "I don't know what's real. What I feel because you made me feel it, what I feel because it's true. I'm so confused, Mason. I'm so tired of being confused." The music stopped. Mason turned to face me, cupping my face in his hands, his honey-brown eyes soft with something that looked terrifyingly like love.
"You're Ava," he said simply. "You're fierce and stubborn and brave. You're ours, yes—but that doesn't erase who you were before. It adds to it." His thumbs brushed away my tears. "We didn't take you to break you, Avalon. We took you because you were already perfect, and we couldn't stand to watch you suffer alone anymore."
"I wasn't suffering?—"
"You were dying," Mason corrected gently. "The suppressants were killing you. Slowly, quietly, but killing you all the same. We took you because it was the only way to save your life. And yes, we wanted you—god, we wanted you—but that wasn't the only reason."
I stared at him, searching for the lie, the manipulation. I found only sincerity.
"Play for me again," I whispered. "Please."
Mason smiled, soft, genuine, nothing like the possessive Alpha who had bitten me bloody just hours before, and turned back to the keys. He played until I fell asleep against his shoulder, the lullaby following me down into dreams. When I woke again, I was in the nest, surrounded by my Alphas, the heat finally, finally quiet.
For one brief, terrifying moment, I didn't want to be anywhere else.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
MASON
She slept for fourteen hours straight.
I watched her the entire time, unable to look away, unable to do anything but trace the lines of her face with my eyes. She was curled in the center of the nest she'd destroyed and we'd rebuilt together, surrounded by blankets that smelled like all of us, her red hair spread across the pillow like fire. She looked peaceful. Soft. Nothing like the woman who had screamed at us, fought us, destroyed everything she could get her hands on to prove she wasn't ours.
The bite marks on her neck and shoulders stood out against her pale skin, distinct wounds layered, over the original claiming marks from her first heat. We'd been brutal with her. Deliberate. Every time one of us knotted inside her, we'd bitten down, reopening the wounds, forcing her body to remember who she belonged to.
