Mira looked at him. To Solomon, to me.
“You’ve all mentioned claiming,” she said. “Bits and pieces. You keep dancing around it.” Her eyes settled on mine. “What does it actually involve?”
This was the part where tact mattered. Where the delivery had to be honest without being clinical, romantic without being evasive.
Mira didn’t respond well to half-truths or careful omissions. She responded to directness, and if we handled this wrong, she’d spend the next week assuming we were hiding additional secrets.
I mean we are, kind of.
Damn. This is making my head hurt.
“The bond between a lycan and their mate exists in potential until it’s activated,” Solomon continued. “The thread you feel now? It becomes a full connection. Permanent. Mutual. You’d feel us the way we feel you. Our emotions, our presence, our physical state. If one of us is hurt, you’d know. If you’re indanger, we’d know with certainty, not the partial signal we’re getting now.”
“That sounds useful,” she said. “What’s the catch?”
“It’s activated through claiming. Which is...” I glanced at Lucian. He gave me nothing. Classic. Solomon’s expression was equally unhelpful.
Thanks, brothers.
Might as well bite the bullet.
“Claiming involves a bite. During… intimacy.”
Mira blinked.
“A bite?” she repeated.
“On the neck. It forms a mark. Permanent. It’s the physical seal of the bond.”
“During intimacy?” She raised a brow.
I answered as casually as I could, “Yes.”
Her eyes moved between the three of us again. The wheels turning behind her irises with the visible intensity of putting pieces together.
“And since there are three of you,” she said. “Three separate bonds. Three separate...” She gestured vaguely. “Activations.”
“Correct.”
A pause. A long one.
Mira stared at the coffee table. Stared at her book, at the ceiling. Then her head snapped toward me and her eyes went wide with an expression that was equal parts disbelief, amusement, and alarm.
“So what you’re telling me is that in order to fully activate this magical soul bond, I have to sleep with all three of you? Consecutively?”
The words practically crashed our living room.
Lucian’s jaw locked, a muscle in his cheek twitched. Solomon went perfectly still, his brain was rebooting. My own brain had short-circuited somewhere around“sleep with all three of you”and was now producing images I had absolutely no business entertaining in a room full of people with supernatural hearing and scent detection.
All three of us. Her. Consecutively.
Fuck.
The image hit without permission.
Mira between us. Flushed, breathless. The sounds she’d make when... No. Absolutely not.
I shut that door in my mind, locked it, and threw the key into a mental volcano. My blood had already rushed south and I shifted on the couch, crossing my ankle over my knee with what I hoped looked casual and not desperate.
