“We need to get his shirt off,” Atticus says, already reaching for the buttons. “He’s practically sweat through it already.”
“Right.” I scramble to the other side, working the oxford from the bottom while Atticus handles the top. Mason’s skin radiates heat through the damp cotton, his chest rising and falling in rapid, shallow breaths.
For a moment, he’s completely limp. Surrendered. His head tips back against the pillows, eyes closed, lashes dark against flushed cheekbones.
Then my fingers brush the skin of his stomach as I pull the fabric up, and his eyes snap open.
“Wait—” His hand shoots down, grabbing the hem of his shirt and yanking it back into place. “Don’t.”
“Mason, you’re soaking wet. You need?—“
“I saiddon’t.”
His voice cracks on the word, and the desperation in it freezes me for half a second. But his grip is weak—heat-weak, trembling-weak—and when I pull the fabric again, it slides free of his fingers without resistance.
The shirt clears his chest.
And that’s when I see it.
My hands stop moving. My lungs stop working.
There, on the left side of his chest, just below his collarbone—a scar. Raised and silver-white against his skin, the distinctive crescent shape of teeth marks pressed deep enough to leave a permanent impression. Not random. Not accidental. The unmistakable topography of a claiming bite.
Abond mark.
The world reshapes itself around this single detail.
Every beach day excursion or time spent lounging poolside where Mason wore a tank top. Every time I changed clothes in front of him without a thought, and he always, always stayed covered from the collarbone down. I chalked it up to modesty. To his buttoned-up personality, his discomfort with casual intimacy.
I never thought?—
I never once?—
“You’re mated,” I hear myself say.
The words fall out of my mouth like stones dropped into deep water.
Mason squeezes his eyes shut. A sound tears from him—guttural, anguished—and he rolls away from me, curling onto his side with his back to both of us. The knobs of his spine press against the skin between his shoulder blades, each one visible through the sheen of sweat.
“Not anymore.”
My brain races, shuffling through three years of data. Every deflection when I asked about his romantic history. Every flinch when alphas got too close. I assumed he was like me, so sick of the terrible alphas out there that he wrote all of them off entirely.
“But who?”
The question doesn’t even finish leaving my lips before the bedroom door bangs open so hard it bounces off the wall.
Judah fills the doorframe.
His chest heaves. Ocean eyes are blown nearly black, pupils swallowing the blue until only a thin ring remains. His nostrils flare wide, jaw locked in an expression that strips away every ounce of the steady, polite alpha I’ve spent the last few days getting to know. What stands in his place is something older. Something that runs beneath language and reason, wired into the base of the skull where instinct lives.
Alpha. Responding to an omega’s heat way more strongly than a stranger would.
Dominic crowds the space directly behind him, one hand gripping Judah’s shoulder like he’s physically holding him back. Dom’s usual smirk has fractured down the middle, dark eyes darting between Judah and the bed where Mason lies curled and trembling.
“Judah.” Dom’s voice is low, strained. “You need to stay calm.”
Judah doesn’t seem to hear him. His gaze has found Mason’s bare chest, the exposed planes of his ribs, and the claiming bite now clearly visible to everyone in the room.
