I devoured Rowan’s release, savoring the wave of pride and raw animal satisfaction that rolled through him, pulsing out into my own chest like a second heartbeat. He leaned his head back, knuckles whitening on the leather seats as I worked every last shudder out of him with my mouth and hand, never once flinching from the thickness of his knot—actually, I took a vindictive pleasure in milking him with my palm, knowing exactly how to drive him right up to the edge of oversensitivity and then let him fall. When he was finally spent and twitching, a delicious, ruined mess, I eased off with a smug little pop, licking my lips and glancing up.
Ronan was watching with an expression that was almost reverent—except, of course, for the hungry glint that never left his eyes. I turned my attention to him, shifting fluidly, and he opened up to me with zero hesitation, cock bobbing proudly, already leaking for round two. I wrapped my fist around the shaft, thumb teasing over the salt-slick head before I took him deep, swallowing half of him in one go. He hissed, hips jerking, and his hand found the back of my head, not forcing but guiding, like a challenge rather than a punishment.
Ronan tasted different—sharper, almost citrus-bright, and I realized with a muted flash of surprise that I liked the contrast. They were twins, sure, but in every way that mattered, they were utterly unique. I wanted to taste the differences, to flex my dominance over the tiny details, to claim it all as mine. I bobbedmy head, working him furiously, and used my other hand to massage the still-swollen knot at the base, squeezing until he bucked so hard my nose nearly smashed into his abs.
“Fuck, Sage, you’re going to ruin me for anyone else,” Ronan groaned, voice ragged and breathless.
“Good,” I managed to say, momentarily pulling off to stroke him with a twist, then dove back on, taking him deeper still, feeling my lips stretch and bruise around the girth. Ronan’s restraint was nothing like Rowan’s—he was a livewire, barely holding himself together, and I could feel him tremble as I tongued the sensitive underside, alternating suction and pressure until he howled, spilling into my mouth in a sudden, violent rush. I swallowed every drop, holding eye contact as I did it. He slumped back, spent, his whole body shivering with aftershocks.
I kept going, licking them both clean, every motion deliberate, a slow savoring of the carnage we’d made of each other. Their scents hung thick—juniper, ozone, burnt sugar, the raw metallic hum of arousal and completion. My hands never left their knots, thumbs working lazy circles until the last of their tension dissipated. Only then did I pull back, chest heaving, and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, meeting their eyes in turn.
The twins’ amber gazes, usually so predatory, had gone almost lazy, contented—like lions after a successful hunt. There was pride there, and a grudging respect, and something softer I couldn’t name. I could’ve basked in it forever, the sense that, for the first time, I was more than enough.
But it was Archie who made the next move. His hand found my throat, warm and familiar, fingers curving just under my jaw in a way that was both tender and unmistakably possessive. He drew me up and back, and when our mouths met, it wasn’t the frantic, desperate kiss of before—it was slow, lingering, atasting of what we’d become together. He kissed me like I was something precious, like I belonged to him, and when he broke away, I saw that the glint in his eyes wasn’t just lust anymore. It was something deeper, raw and dazzling, and it left me breathless.
Archie’s hand slides around to the front of my throat, gentle but possessive, tilting my head back until our mouths meet in a slow, heated kiss that tastes like all of us. When he pulls away, his green eyes are bright with something deeper than lust.
“You did fucking brilliant,” he says, voice low and reverent.
I smile, wrecked and glowing, still kneeling between my pack with the taste of them on my tongue and the evidence of our night drying on my skin. “So I win the bet?”
He grins, dimples flashing, the same grin I saw the first time I crashed into him on that forest trail and refused to apologize for breaking his glasses.
“Yes, Wildcard. You won this round.”
CHAPTER 37
Shield
~SAGE~
We are mid-drill when it happens.
The formation is a cycle pattern that Archie designed this morning on the whiteboard, a neutral-zone transition exercise that requires the forwards to carry the puck through a series of three-cone gates while the defensemen maintain gap control and the center orchestrates the timing from behind the play. It is the kind of drill that looks simple on a diagram and reveals its complexity the moment five bodies attempt to execute it simultaneously, the timing windows between passes shrinking with each repetition as the speed increases and the margin for error compresses from forgiving to surgical.
I am holding the blue line, my weight forward on my edges, my stick positioned across the neutral zone passing lane, my eyes tracking the puck carrier through the second gate when his release will commit him to a direction that I am already calculating the interception angle for.
The drill is flowing. Clean. The team's chemistry, built across weeks of daily sessions and the specific, accumulated trust that develops when fifteen players learn to read each other's intentions through body language rather than verbal communication, is producing the kind of cohesive movement that makes Coach Mercer nod from behind the boards and that makes my competitive instincts hum with the satisfaction of a machine operating at the efficiency it was designed for.
"WATCH OUT!"
The shout erupts from somewhere to my left. Not from our formation. Not from any player currently executing the drill. The voice carries the specific, frantic, this-is-not-a-drill urgency that converts ambient noise into alarm and ambient awareness into survival-level focus.
I turn my head.
The puck is already airborne.
Not a stray pass. Not the incidental redirect of a drill gone wrong or a shot that missed its target and continued on an errant trajectory. The puck is crossing the dividing line between the two practice zones, the invisible boundary that separates our Division Two ice from the senior team's territory on the far side of the rink, traveling at a velocity and on an arc that tells me it was launched with intention rather than accident.
It hits Archie in the face.
The impact is audible from thirty feet away. The specific, hollow, sickening crack of vulcanized rubber meeting unprotected facial structure at a speed that converts a three-ounce disc into a weapon. His head snaps backward. His body follows, the kinetic transfer of the impact traveling through his skull into his neck into his spine into his legs, the chain reaction producing a backward lurch that his skates cannot compensate for because balance requires a stable head and his head hasjust been struck by a projectile that arrived from a direction his peripheral vision was not monitoring.
He skids. Falls. His back hitting the ice with a thud that echoes through the arena with the dull, heavy percussion of a body making uncontrolled contact with a frozen surface.
"OH SHIT!"
The exclamation erupts from multiple sources simultaneously, the collective verbal response of a team that has just watched its captain receive a puck to the face during a practice drill that did not include cross-rink projectiles in its design specifications. Players abandon their positions. Sticks clatter to the ice. The drill dissolves into the chaotic, concerned convergence of fifteen men whose competitive formation has been replaced by the protective clustering of a pack whose alpha has been struck.
