“And today?” Jalen asks gently, his hand moving to caress her belly.
She’s quiet for a long moment, her brow furrowing like she’s trying to find the right words. “Today I don’t... I don’t know what you are.”
The raw honesty in her voice makes something constrict in my chest.
“We’re whatever you want us to be,” I hear myself say. “For now.”
For now.
The words hang in the air between us, heavy with everything unsaid. For now, while her heat lasts. For now, while we’re stuck sheltering from the storm together. For now, while biology is making choices we might not make otherwise.
But after?
Sierra’s eyes drift closed, exhaustion pulling at her. “For now,” she echoes, so softly I almost don’t hear it. “Okay.”
Her body goes lax against us, not quite asleep but deeply relaxed. The trembling has stopped. Her scent, while still sweet with heat, has lost that sharp, desperate edge.
We’ve given her what she needed. Just enough to let her rest, to give her body a chance to recover before the next wave builds.
“She’s going to need water,” Cole says quietly, “and more food when she wakes up.”
“I’ll get it,” Jalen offers, carefully extracting himself from the nest.
Dax adjusts Sierra’s position slightly, retrieving the ice packthat had shifted during the chaos and settling it back against her hip. She makes a small sound of protest at being moved, but doesn’t wake.
The nest is warm and quiet, filled with the mingled scents of all of us.
It smells like pack.
And for now?
For now, that’s enough.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Jalen
Ican feel it building again before Sierra even wakes.
Her scent shifts first. The sweetness deepens, going thick and golden like it’s been left in the sun too long. It turns richer, almost heady, intensifying until I can taste the sugar on the back of my tongue. Then her breathing changes, becoming shallow and quick, and her body starts to tremble. Small tremors at first, then bigger ones, running through her even in sleep.
Another wave is coming.
And this one feels different. Bigger. Wrong somehow, in a way that makes my rutting alpha scream that she needs usnow. The kind of heat surge that won’t be satisfied with gentle touches and careful orgasms. The kind that demands everything we have to give.
I’m sitting at the edge of the nest, watching her sleep between my brothers, and my hands won’t stop shaking. We’d managed to get more food and water into her an hour ago, but she’d been fighting it the whole time. Whimpering, barely able to focus long enough to swallow. Only Dax’s firm alpha rumble, which shecouldn’t ignore even through the heat haze, had gotten her to eat at all.
Now she’s restless again. Shifting against Cole’s chest, one hand reaching out even in sleep like she’s searching for something she can’t find.
“It’s coming,” Malik says quietly beside me. His scent has gone sharp with rut-response, vanilla ice-cream turning almost bitter with it. His pupils are already wide, the deep brown of his eyes dark. “I can smell it.”
“Yeah.” My own scent is spiking in answer to her need, going acrid and desperate. “This one’s going to be intense.”
Intense doesn’t even begin to cover it. My cock is already hard, pressing painfully against the shorts I pulled on, and Sierra hasn’t even fully woken yet. My rut is screaming at me to get closer, to touch her, to make the distress stop before it even starts.
Cole’s hand moves to Sierra’s hair, stroking gently, his movements careful even though I can smell how close he is to losing it. “She’s going to need more than what we’ve been giving her.”
He doesn’t say it explicitly, but we all know what he means. We’ve been holding back, trying to ease her through the waves with mouths and fingers. Taking care of ourselves separately when it got too intense, jerking off in the bathroom like teenagers so we wouldn’t lose control around her.
