I lift my eyes to his. The brown of his irises is nearly gone—pupils dilated by the heat saturating the room—but beneath that biological response, his gaze carries the same patient attention it held at that barbecue five years ago. The same look that said I see you before I even knew what it meant to be seen.
His other hand comes to my face. Both palms cradle my jaw, thumbs pressing against my cheekbones. He holds me there, eyes searching mine, the question living in every heartbeat. His body is hard against his thigh, his cock flushed and heavy, but his hands stay still. Waiting.
“Can I?”
Two words. The same two words he’s asked me every time, in every context, in this nest and in the guest room and in the hallway behind the stockroom. The same patience wrapped around the same hunger, offered with the same willingness to hear me say no.
My throat tightens. The answer sits behind my teeth and I know what I want—have known for five years—and the only thing between my mouth and that word is the ghost of a voice telling me he is not my Alpha.
Oliver’s hand finds mine from somewhere in the nest. His fingers thread through mine, warm and slick, and he squeezesonce. Lorenzo’s voice comes from behind me, low and steady. “You’re here, Wilson. Take what you want.”
“Yes.” The word escapes me, cracked. “Nico, yes.”
Nicholas’s thumbs trace my cheekbones one more time. Then his hands leave my face and settle on my hips, lifting and repositioning me with a firm but unhurried grip. I part my thighs around his waist. He settles between my legs, the head of his cock pressing against my entrance—still slick from Lorenzo’s prep an hour ago—and my body still open.
He pushes inside me.
The first inch makes me arch my spine off the blankets. The stretch is immediate, wider than Lorenzo’s, his girth pressing against my nerves. I grab the blankets beside my hips, my fingers tearing at the fabric, my breath caught between my lungs and my teeth.
He goes slow. Each inch is a deliberate, measured press forward, giving my body time to adjust around him. His hands grip my hips, his thumbs pressing against bone, his eyes locked on my face. He watches me the way he watched me in Sebastian’s bedroom—with devastating attentiveness, reading my body’s every response before I can.
The knot presses against my rim. My whole body locks. The overwhelming width nudges at my muscle, begging to be let in. My hands tremble on the blankets. My jaw clenches so hard my teeth ache.
“Breathe, Will.” Nicholas’s voice is strained, his body trembling with the effort of holding still. “We go at your pace.”
I take a deep breath, my lungs filling completely. As I exhale, my breath shakes and my body begins to soften around him, my muscles releasing bit by bit. The knot presses in a fraction deeper. Nicholas watches my face, waiting for my expression to give him permission before he moves, a gentle nudge forward that makes me groan, another inch deeper, the stretch buildingtowards something familiar. My body remembers this feeling from those few nights in Sebastian's bedroom when Nicholas was inside me and the world narrowed to the width of his hands on my hips.
The knot pushes past my rim and seats fully inside me. A sob tears from my chest, carrying five years of longing for this. My back arches off the nest, my hands releasing the blankets to grab Nicholas's forearms, my fingers digging into his tattooed skin. The fullness is overwhelming, consuming, his knot swelling inside me with a pressure that hits every nerve ending, making my vision blur at the edges. My body remembers this. It's been carrying the phantom echo of this sensation since the last time Nicholas knotted me in a bed that smelled like cold metal. The reality of it after years of memory is enough to break me open from the inside.
Nicholas's forehead drops against mine. His breathing is ragged, his arms shaking where they brace on either side of my head, his knot pulsing inside me with his heartbeat. His eyes are wet. "Will," he says, my name leaving his mouth the same way it did years ago—reverent, aching, like a prayer offered to something he isn't sure he deserves.
His hips move. The first stroke makes my vision fracture. The knot holds him inside me, the movement a deep grinding roll that shifts the width of him against every sensitive spot in my body. My hands drag up his forearms to his shoulders, my nails biting into the muscle, my mouth open on sounds that have abandoned language entirely.
Nicholas’s rhythm is slow. I savor it. Each roll of his hips presses the knot deeper and the fullness builds in waves that crest and recede, each peak higher than the last. His mouth finds my throat, his lips tracing the column of my neck, pressing kisses against the skin beside the scar. His hands slide from theblankets to my thighs, gripping, lifting, changing the angle until his knot grinds against the spot that makes my body seize.
Oliver’s hand tightens in mine. Lorenzo’s scent wraps around us from somewhere close, rain cutting through the amber and sweetness, grounding the room.
Nicholas’s mouth drags from my throat to my jaw. His lips graze my ear. “You’re perfect, Will. You feel so—”
Then the voice comes from nowhere and everywhere.
You couldn’t even take my knot. What makes you think you can hold a pack together?
Cold metal floods my throat. The room tilts. Nicholas’s face blurs above me, replaced by Sebastian’s flat eyes, Sebastian’s polished jaw, Sebastian’s mouth curved in the smile that means pain is coming. The amber dissolves into smoke and the warmth of the nest chills to the temperature of a bedroom with yellowed light and sheets that always smelled like ash.
My body goes rigid. My hands release Nicholas’s shoulders and press flat against his chest, pushing, and a sound leaves my throat that is small and choked and nothing like the sounds I was making ten seconds ago.
Nicholas stops. Immediately, completely, his hips still, his knot holding him inside me without movement. His hands lift from my thighs and find my face, his palms against my jaw, his thumbs pressing against my cheekbones. “Will. I’m here. Look at me.”
My eyes are open but I’m not seeing the nest. I’m seeing the bedroom. The yellowed light. Sebastian’s hand on the back of my neck pressing my face into the mattress while he tells me I’m not enough, I’ll never be enough, I can’t even take a knot from the Alpha who claimed me—
Oliver’s body presses against my right side. His face burrows into the curve of my neck and his scent floods the space between my skin and the cold metal trying to colonize my lungs.Sweetness, warm and thick, pouring over me in waves that push back against the smoke, and I come alive again.
Lorenzo's hand finds the back of my head with firm pressure at the base of my skull, the exact touch he uses when nightmares grip me.
"You're here, Wilson. You're in the nest. Oliver is beside you. Nicholas is inside you. I'm right here." His thumb presses against my skull. "Stay with us."
The bedroom dissolves around me as Sebastian's face fractures and falls away. Amber floods my lungs from where Nicholas remains connected to me, his knot holding us together. Sweetness follows from Oliver's mouth against my throat, then rain from Lorenzo's hand on my head. The nest materializes around me again—scent by scent—as warmth returns to the blankets and the lamp's glow overtakes the yellowed light.
