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"Guy." Her voice was wrecked. "Now. Do it now."

I got my hand into her hair and turned her head gently and put my mouth to the gland beneath her jaw, where I had stopped myself four nights earlier with every instinct in my body howling, and this time I did not stop.

I bit down.

Her cry went into my shoulder. I tasted copper and lavender and something underneath both that I have no word for, and the whole world went white at the edges, and then it opened.

That is the only honest way I can put it. Something in the center of my chest that I had believed was simply me turned out to be a door, and the door came open, and she came through it.

Her relief. Not mine. Hers, enormous and shaking, the relief of a woman who has been braced for six years and has just this moment put it down. Her exhaustion underneath it. Her love, which I had believed I understood the size of and had not understood at all. And right at the bottom, small and bright and sharp, a thread of pure terror that she had been carrying by herself all day and had not mentioned to me once.

I had her tight against me and I was saying something, I have no idea what.

Then she took hold of my jaw and turned my head, and set her mouth against the side of my throat, and she bit.

I hadn’t expected it to do anything. I’d always been told that an Omega's bite was sentiment, that the bond runs one way. The custom in this kingdom was wrong, or else it has been built on a great many Omegas who were never asked.

It went through me like the ground was falling from beneath my feet. Everything I’d been holding behind my teeth for a fortnight came loose at once, and she got all of it, every bit, the whole ugly enormous weight of how much I wanted her and how frightened I had been in that archive and how completely I had stopped belonging to the Crown somewhere around the night I read a dead man's alibi by lantern light.

I felt her receive it.

I felt her gasp against my throat.

And then it settled, the way a bell stops ringing, and the two of us lay in the wreck of that nest holding on while the thing between us finished putting itself together. My knot pulsed deep inside her as I came, long and hard, flooding her cunt with thick ropes of come until she was completely full. Slick and seed mixed and leaked around the locked knot in messy, glistening trails. She clenched around me through it, shaking, still coming, the bond thrumming between us while I emptied every last drop into her.

"Oh," she said, after a long while.

"Yes."

"That’s going to be extremely inconvenient."

"It is."

She started laughing, and I felt the laugh arrive in my own chest before I heard it, and that is when both of us understood exactly what we’d done.

The light was going orange through the shutter slats before either of us said anything sensible. She was draped across me, with her cheek on my shoulder and my mark darkening on her throat and her mark stinging on mine. The knot had eased but neither of us had moved apart, and I was turning her locs slowly through my fingers. When the knot finally slipped free a thick rush of come and slick poured out of her, soaking the nest between her thighs.

"You're worried," she said.

I frowned. "How do you know?"

She tapped her own chest. "I can feel it."

"That is going to be inconvenient."

"For you, certainly." She sounded insufferably pleased. "I have been an open book to every Alpha with a nose for my entire adult life. Welcome. It's your turn."

I laughed, which hurt. "And what are you feeling, Little Ghost?"

She looked away. "Nothing."

"Robin."

"Absolutely nothing."

I raised an eyebrow at the top of her head. "You're lying, and now I can tell."

She sighed enormously. "Fine. I'm happy. I'm appallingly happy and I would like it on the record that I resent it."