“Cara?” Lucas asks carefully.
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she turns to Nate.
“Shirt off.”
He blinks. “What?”
“Your shirt.” Her voice has dropped, gone husky. Commanding in a way I’ve never heard from her. “Take it off. Now.”
Nate doesn’t hesitate. He pulls his shirt over his head and hands it to her. She presses it to her face, inhales deeply, then sets it aside.
She turns to me next.
“Theo. Shirt.”
My hands are moving before my brain catches up. I yank my shirt off and pass it to her. She breathes it in the same way—eyes fluttering closed, something easing in her expression—then adds it to Nate’s.
“Lucas.”
He’s already pulling his off. She takes it, inhales, and a small sound escapes her throat. Satisfied. Hungry.
Then she moves.
We watch—the three of us, shirtless and aching—as Cara transforms the room. She pulls blankets from the shelves, arranges them in layers on the mattress. Pillows get repositioned, fluffed, placed just so. Our shirts go in the center, tangled together, and she adds a throw blanket on top, then changes her mind and moves it to the side.
She’s building a nest. A real one. And she’s using our scents to do it.
“This one’s wrong.” She frowns at a pillow, tosses it aside, grabs another. “This is better.”
None of us speak. None of us move. We just watch her work, watch her omega instincts take over, watch her claim this space as hers.
It takes maybe ten minutes. Maybe longer. Time goes strange when you’re watching the woman you’ve loved for a decade finally, finally let herself need you.
When she’s done, she sits back on her heels and surveys her work. The nest is a perfect circle of softness—blankets and pillows and their shirts tangled together in the center.
Then she looks up at us. Three alphas, shirtless and aching, watching her like she’s the only thing in the world.
Her eyes are dark. Demanding. Pure omega.
“Get in. Now.”
Chapter 21
Cara
Iwake up in a pile of alphas.
Not a sentence I ever thought I’d think, but here we are.
Nate is behind me, arm heavy across my waist, purring in his sleep like some kind of oversized space heater. The man never purred in his life before bonding me. Now he can’t stop. It’s like living with a very large, very stoic cat.
It should feel unfamiliar. New.
It doesn’t. It feels like coming home.
Lucas is in front of me, holding my hand even unconscious. Because of course he is. And Theo is sprawled across the foot of the nest like a starfish, drooling on one of the pillows and taking up approximately seventy percent of the available space.
Some things never change.
