Page 74 of Torment Me Knot
They undid me.I went under so hard it scared me. I haven't felt this destabilized since I was seventeen and pinned to a locker room wall by Brad fucking Henderson, hearingyou're more butch than I am, babebefore he walked away without looking back.
I shove the memory down hard.
“You're not fishing for a better answer than that, Kev.”
His mouth quirks. The whiskey in his scent eases off. He still doesn't look like a man who's getting the answer he asked for.
I breathe through my nose.Get it together. Get it together, Vidal, you are about to lose this room.
There's something off about all this. There has to be. They’ve been polite. Considered. And now they've got their mouths on me and are concerned they didn’t kiss me well enough?
Why now?
What did I miss?
“The problem is, if we’d kissed you properly, you wouldn’t be able to speak.” Ezra makes a low sound at my shoulder. “Because you’re fighting us.”
Fighting us.The alpha I had a brief relationship with in my early twenties is in my head. Tall enough I didn't have to slouch when I kissed him standing up. The morning after the third time I let him fuck me he sat on the edge of the bed putting his socks back on and told me my lock had nearly strangled his dick off and maybe I should look into something for that. A friend overheard him at a bar a week later saying fucking a female alpha was interesting once. Like being in the MMA.
“I'm always still fighting,” I tell Ezra. “It's a feature, not a bug. If that's a problem we can just call it now and save ourselves the awkward part later.”
“Save ourselves —” Ezra's woodsmoke darkens. “Sera, no.”
“Look, I'm a grown woman. I don't need this dragged out, and neither do any of you.”
“None of us is asking for an out.” Lex, this time, even and serious. “Did you hear any of us ask?”
“You will. In an hour. In a week. I'd rather you do it now.”
“Sera. You’re not hearing us,” Kev says.
I’m hearing everything loud and clear. They think they want me. They’ll want to change me because I won't fit. I’m only here because of our omegas, and soon that won’t be a problem.
I've done this dance. I know the steps.You came on strong, you'll go off strong, let's just do the going-off part now without breaking anything important.
Time to cut to the core of the matter. “What is this? Honestly. What brought this on?”
“You,” Kev says.
“That's not an answer.”
“That's thewholeanswer.” His hand comes up and rests on the bench beside my hip. Bracketing me. “We've wanted you since you walked through that door with Espie. We've been stupid about it. We've decided to stop being stupid about it. That's what brought it on.”
“Convenient timing.”
“Don't.”
“I will, actually.” I find a smile from somewhere. “Three male alphas wake up one morning and decide collectively they want the female alpha sleeping down the hall. After zero indication. You'll forgive me if I'm not buying the story you're selling.”
Lex firms his grip on my hip, branding me. “It is not a story, Sera. This is real, not fiction. We’re just very bad storytellers if you didn’t get this in the first read. That’s on us. Not you.”
“And this is a story I’ve heard before. Not one of those happy-ever-after books,” I say.
Kev's jaw works. The whiskey in his scent burns hotter. He's holding himself an inch off me when he wants to be on me, and it's costing him. Good. Let him cost. The faster they get to the part where they decide the math doesn't work and walk it back, the faster I can stop bracing.
I need to end Ethan Wallace. That's all. Stay until the operation is done because the omegas will never feel safe while that asshole is still breathing. Then I leave. Clean. Before any of this gets bad enough to leave another mark.
Lex traces a slow line with his thumb over my hipbone. Ezra's breath warms the side of my neck and Kev is close enough that his scent is the only air in my lungs.
