Kaede’s teeth found my neck first.
Not a graze. Not a warning. He sank his fangs into the mark he’d left on my shoulder—his mark, the scar he’d branded into my skin the first time he’d claimed me—and bit down hard enough to reignite every nerve ending the original bonding hadseared into my flesh. Pain and pleasure fused into a single white-hot line from my throat to my core, and the bond between us detonated.
Not just heat. Possession. His mind flooding mine with the force of a dam breaking—images, sensations, the raw, unfiltered truth of what I was to him. His. His star. His nestqueen. The mother of his daughter. The center of everything he’d rebuilt his life around after decades of blood and isolation. He was remarking me, reclaiming the territory of my skin with his teeth, and through the bond I felt the primal satisfaction of an alpha Ezzaska demi-human male reasserting what was already, irrevocably, his.
“Mine.” The word vibrated against my torn skin, muffled by blood and the press of his mouth. His hips drove deep, pinning me between them. “Always. Say it.”
“Yours.” The word tore from me on a sob of pleasure. “Kaede—yours—”
Zyxel made a sound. Low. Desperate. Something that belonged to his serpent form—a vibration that started in his chest and resonated through the bond like a struck chord. His chartreuse eyes were wild, fixed on Kaede’s mouth against my neck, on the blood beading at the wound’s edge, and I felt the need rip through him like a physical thing. Not jealousy. Hunger. The ancient, bone-deep drive of a Rkekh male watching his mate be claimed and knowing—with every cell in his borrowed body—that his mark belonged there too.
He looked at Kaede. A question. A plea.
Kaede’s eyes opened. Green fire, slitted to nothing, his mouth still sealed against my bleeding skin. He held Zyxel’s gaze for one searing heartbeat.
Then he nodded.
Zyxel’s fangs pierced the other side of my neck.
The crimson bond erupted.
His bite was different from Kaede’s—sharper, deeper, the fangs of a predator whose venom sacs pulsed with bonding chemistry even in demi-human form. He found his own mark—the matching brand on the opposite shoulder—and sank into it like coming home. The pain was incandescent. The pleasure was worse. His mind poured through the crimson thread and collided with Kaede’s neon-green flood already filling me, and for one impossible, transcendent moment, I held both of them inside my consciousness at once.
Two males. Two bonds. Two sets of fangs buried in my neck. Two claims reasserted in blood and teeth and the primal language that existed before words.
Zyxel’s groan reverberated against my throat. “Enax.” Rough. Shattered. The Rkekh word for “mine” that carried the weight of a species nearly hunted to extinction and a male who’d spent a lifetime believing he’d never have this. “My enax. My home.”
Kaede found the back of Zyxel’s neck. Not pulling him away. Holding him there. Keeping both their mouths sealed against me as the orgasm crested into something beyond physical—a convergence of three bodies, two bonds, and a need so vast it swallowed the hollow ache of every missing thread in my constellation.
I shattered between them with a cry that tore from somewhere deeper than my chest. My body clamped down on both of them, and the dual sensation—the stretch, the fullness, the shared pleasure cascading through two bonds at once—whited out everything. Zyxel broke first, his hips stuttering, my name on his lips in a broken, reverent groan. Kaede followed a heartbeat later, his teeth closing harder on my shoulder as he spilled inside me with a sound that was more growl than moan.
Wave after wave.
The three of us trembled together in the aftermath. Breathing. Pulsing. The bonds humming between us like plucked strings, resonating with a frequency that felt like home.
We untangled slowly. Carefully. Kaede withdrew first, pressing a kiss to my shoulder blade before reaching for the cloth on the nightstand. He cleaned me with the same attentive precision he brought to everything—efficient, thorough, tender in a way he’d deny if anyone else were watching. Then Zyxel, who pressed his lips to my belly before pulling back, murmuring something soft in the Rkekh language I didn’t understand but felt through the bond like a benediction.
We resettled into the nestbed. Kaede at my back, one arm draped over my waist, resting his hand against the soft swell of our daughter. Zyxel facing me, his forehead touching mine, those chartreuse eyes half-closed with sated exhaustion.
Between them, the hollowness was quiet.
Not gone. The ache of my scattered constellation still lived in my chest—a dull pulse where the distant threads stretched thin. But it had been gentled. Wrapped in warmth and skin and the steady rhythm of two heartbeats flanking my own.
“Thank you.” The words came out barely above a whisper.
Kaede tightened his arm. “Don’t thank me for wanting you.”
On my other side, Zyxel’s mouth curved. “What he said.”
Something suspiciously close to a laugh bubbled in my chest. These males. These impossible, dangerous, devoted males.
Kaede’s breathing deepened against my back. Steady. Controlled. Even in sleep he sounded like a man who could wake and fight in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
Zyxel’s fingers traced idle patterns on my arm. Slower. Slower. Until his hand stilled and his breathing matched Kaede’s.
I lay between them in the quiet dark. The Abyss hummed its constant hymn. The stars I’d watched with such grief hours agonow streaked past the viewport, carrying us toward the CEG and whatever waited for us there.
Two days. I had two days to prepare for war.
