The sound vibrated through his throat and against my lips where they were still pressed to his pulse point, the laughter transmitting through our points of contact like a current.
“I hope you bought a few packs of water,” he said, and his voice carried the warm, rough, anticipatory tone of a man who understood exactly what the next seventy-two hours were going to require and was calibrating his expectations accordingly, “cause we’re gonna need it.”
CHAPTER 15
The Weight Of Water
~OCTAVIA~
“The ice never forgets a fall. Neither does a body that’s been denied what it was built to crave.”
Iwas on Luka’s lap before the bedroom door even clicked shut behind us.
The room itself was a blur—high ceilings, exposed beams the color of dark honey, a king-sized bed that looked like it had never been touched by anything more chaotic than a perfectly folded duvet. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked a snow-dusted Vermont hillside I’d never seen before. None of it registered. Not the faint scent of fresh linen clinging to the sheets, not the low hum of the heating system, not the way the moonlight sliced through half-drawn blinds and painted silver bars across the hardwood.
All I registered was Luka beneath me: thighs like warm steel, chest rising and falling against my breasts, the thick, insistent ridge of his cock trapped behind denim and pressing right where my body had decided it needed him most. My knees dug into the mattress on either side of hiships. My dress had ridden up to my waist. The soaked lace of my thong dragged across the rough fabric of his jeans with every tiny, involuntary roll of my pelvis, and the friction was obscene—too rough, too perfect, not enough, never enough.
My heat had officially stopped asking permission.
It roared through my veins like a triple axel gone wrong: that same stomach-dropping lurch, that same split-second of weightlessness before gravity remembered its job.
Except this time the landing wasn’t pain. This time the landing wasneed. Raw. Relentless. Hornier than any heat I’d ever survived, and I’d survived plenty. My skin felt two sizes too small. My nipples ached against the thin fabric of my dress. Between my thighs, slick had already soaked through the lace and was painting a wet stripe across the front of Luka’s jeans like a claim I hadn’t consciously decided to stake.
I wondered, distantly, if it was him—the way his rain-soaked-stone scent wrapped around me like an old blanket I’d cried into for five years. Or if it was the knowledge that four Alphas were now legally, biologically,minefor the next forty-eight hours.
Four different signatures circling me like planets around a sun that had just gone supernova. The idea of it—of being able to reach out and take whichever one I wanted, whenever I wanted, no remorse, no breaks, no performance review waiting on the other side—made my inner walls clench around nothing and my breath hitch so hard Luka’s hands tightened on my waist.
“Easy,” he murmured, voice gravel-rough. He tried to press a chilled water bottle to my lips again. The plastic was beaded with condensation. “You’re burning up. Drink.”
I turned my face away like the bottle had personally insulted my ancestors.
“I don’t want water.”
“You need it.”
“I needyouinside me.” The words left my mouth before my brain could vote. My voice had gone husky, low, the Omega register that used to make his pupils blow wide in the past. “I need you stretching me open until I forget every single day I spent without this. I need?—”
He cut me off with his mouth.
Not gentle. Not the careful, exploratory kiss of a man testing boundaries. This was five years of silence compressed into one savage collision—teeth clicking, tongues sliding, the faint metallic taste of the tequila we’d shared earlier still clinging to him. I moaned into it, hands fisting his shirt, hips rolling in a slow, filthy figure-eight that dragged my clit along the hard line of his cock and made stars burst behind my eyelids.
He tasted like every bad decision I’d ever loved making.
Rain on granite after a storm. Clove smoke curling from an expensive candle. Dark chocolate left to melt on the tongue until it turned bitter-sweet. Beneath it all, the unmistakable thread of aroused Alpha—salt and musk and something darker that made my preheat-drunk brain catalog it the way I used to catalog blade edges: inside, outside, forward, backward, clean, dirty,mine.
I broke the kiss only because oxygen was a coward.
My lips felt swollen, glossy. When I looked down, his throat was already blooming with the first of what I planned to make a full constellation. One hickey right over his pulse—purple-red, messy edges where my teeth had dragged. Another just beneath his jaw, smaller, sharper. I bit mybottom lip, tasting the faint copper of where I’d bitten too hard earlier, and wondered where to mark next. Collarbone? The thick tendon that ran into his shoulder? The place where his neck met his ear, the spot that used to make him growl my name like a prayer?
Luka’s green eyes were heavy-lidded, lashes spiked from the shower we hadn’t taken yet. His chuckle was low, wrecked.
“You gonna keep going until I look like I lost a fight with a curling iron?”
“Maybe.” I traced the darkest mark with one fingernail, watching the skin flush darker under my touch. “Where should I bite next?”
He laughed again—genuine, surprised, the sound vibrating through his chest and straight into my core.
“Shower first.”
