He'd barely pulled away, leaving me a trembling, over-sensitized mess, when Rett was there, moving over me with a dark, possessive purpose. He’d positioned himself above me, his powerful body caging mine, and entered me with a slow push that had felt like being claimed.
“Mine,” he’d growled, and the others had echoed him. “Ours.”
That’s when it had happened. As Rett had moved inside me, bringing me to the edge of another climax, he’d lowered his mouth to my neck.
“Let me claim you,” he’d whispered. “Let us claim you.”
In that moment, I’d said the words that had changed everything.
“Yes,” I’d gasped. “Yes, claim me. Make me yours.”
His teeth had sunk into my flesh, and the pain had blossomed into something else entirely. A white-hot pleasure that had torn a scream from my throat. And as I’d climaxed around him, the others had followed suit, each finding their spot, each marking me in turn.
Four claiming bites.
“Mine,” they’d growled.
And I, lost in the most intense pleasure of my life, had echoed, “Yours.”
It was a lie, of course. I wasn’t theirs, not in any way that mattered. Betas were temporary distractions to most alphas anyway. A fun night, a casual fling, but never a future. I’d learned that lesson the hard way with my ex back in uni. Two years together, only for him to drop me the second his family introduced him to a ‘suitable omega.’ He’d looked almost apologetic when he said it. ‘You understand, right? Betas don’t bond like omegas do.’
And now I had four sets of teeth in my neck like some kind of collector’s item. Either this was a cruel joke, or I was their temporary fix for a drunken itch.
“Miss? We’re here.”
I jolt back to the present, my face flushed and body uncomfortably warm from the memory. The cab has stopped in front of my apartment building, a six-story structure of weathered brick. My eyes catch on how normal it looks. The window boxes that will burst with flowers come next spring. The way the sunlight hits the brick. All so normal when there’s a storm roiling inside me.
“Oh,” I say, fumbling for my purse. “Right. Thank you.”
The driver is looking at me with a knowing expression. “Whoever they are,” he says, nodding toward my neck, “they’ve got you tied up in knots.”
I laugh, a short, slightly hysterical sound. “You have no idea.”
I pay him and add a generous tip for putting up with my weird behavior, then step out onto the sidewalk in front of my building. Home. Safety. The one place in the world where I don’t have to deal with alphas and their possessive bullshit.
I head through the tiny lobby and skip the elevator for the stairs. I’m fumbling for my keys at my apartment door, my head still spinning, when the door across the hall cracks open. It’s mynosy neighbor, Mrs. Grant. A woman who lives for gossip and complaining about the recycling bins.
“Zoe, dear, I was just—” she begins, then stops dead.
Her eyes, usually darting around critically, are wide and fixed on my neck. Her mouth hangs slightly open. The scent of four powerful alphas is clinging to me, an invisible cloud I can’t wash off, and she can clearly smell it.
The usual busybody annoyance is gone from her face, replaced by something else. Shock.
“Oh,” she says, her voice pitched a bit too high. She takes an involuntary step back, away from my door. “You’re looking… well, never mind. I should get going. You have a good day, dear.”
Before I can form a reply, she gives a short, awkward nod and quickly shuts her door.
I stand alone in the hallway, my keys in my hand, staring at her closed door. Never once in three years have I ever seen Mrs. Grant so... tongue-tied. She’s never rushed to end a conversation with me before. There’s a sudden, unsettling silence where her usual nosy questions used to be.
I haven’t even unlocked my door, and my own hallway already feels like foreign territory. My normal life is officially over.
CHAPTER FIVE
Rett
The penthouse is silent when we return, but it’s not the peaceful silence I woke up to. This silence is hollow. Empty.Wrong.
I stride through the living room, trying to outpace the noise that’s building in my head again. The static. After five blessed hours of mental quiet, its return is like an unwelcome squatter has broken back into the home of my mind and started smashing all the windows.
