CHAPTER TWENTY
Sierra
Iwake slowly, my brain swimming through layers of fog like I’m surfacing from deep water.
Everything feels heavy. My limbs are lead weights. My eyelids might as well be made of concrete. Even thinking requires effort, like my thoughts are moving through molasses.
For a moment, I just lie there, trying to remember where I am. Why everything feels so strange?
Then it hits me in fragments.
My heat week retreat. The storm. The window. The Knightley pack?—
Oh god.
Oh god oh god oh god.
Memory floods back in broken pieces. Heat-haze images that feel more like fever dreams than reality, but I know they’re real. I know they happened.
I went into heat.
With the Knightley pack.
Trapped in this beach house.
And I... I invited them into my nest. I let them... we... they...
The memories are disjointed. Blurry around the edges. But some flashes are crystal clear. Dax’s low and commanding voice. Malik’s mouth on me. Cole’s hands. Jalen’s soft words. All of them surrounding me, touching me, taking care of me.
Knotting me.
My face burns so hot I’m surprised the pillow doesn’t catch fire.
This can’t be real. This has to be some kind of heat-induced hallucination. There’s no way I actually spent two days letting the Knightley pack help me through my heat.
Except I can feel it in my body. The pleasant ache deep inside. The tenderness between my thighs. The way my muscles feel like overcooked noodles, thoroughly used and completely wrung out.
It happened.
All of it.
I keep my eyes firmly closed, my breathing carefully even, because I am absolutely not ready to face this yet. Not ready to open my eyes and see them looking at me with... what? Regret? Pity? That awkward morning-after energy multiplied by four?
What do you even say to a pack of alphas who just spent two days fucking you through your heat?
Thanks for the assist?
Let’s never speak of this again?
My chest feels tight. Something is twisting in my stomach that I don’t want to examine too closely. Something that feels uncomfortably like fear, which is ridiculous because what do I have to be afraid of?
Except... oh god, what if they just leave? What if they’re waiting for me to wake up so they can politely extract themselves from this situation and pretend it never happened?
Which should be what I want, right? A clean break. Back to our separate lives. Forget this ever occurred.
So why does the thought of them walking out make my chest hurt?
I focus on my other senses, trying to figure out the situation without opening my eyes. The emergency lights are still on. I can see the faint glow through my eyelids. The storm must still be raging outside because I can hear wind and rain.
