Page 89 of Run Wild Omega

Then he presses his lips to her pulse point and breathes out.

He marks both wrists—left and right—turning them over with a care that feels almost clinical, except for the way his fingers linger on her skin, tracing the veins, the bones, the warm places where the blood runs close to the surface.

When he’s done with her wrists, he looks at her. She nods, almost imperceptibly, and he leans in and marks her neck as well, his mouth landing on the spot where my scent already lingers, layering his own over it.

Three scents on her skin. Three claims.

The room smells like all of us now—woodsmoke, pine, sagebrush, leather, and underneath it all, her. The alpine sweetness amplified by the warmth of our marks, rising off her skin in a cloud that says mine, ours, claimed.

Tess’s eyes are closed. Her breathing is shallow, fast. Her hands are in her lap, and I notice they’re gripping each other, the knuckles white.

“Okay,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “The marks.”

Wyatt goes still. “You want to do the marking now?”

“If we’re doing this, we do all of it.”

Wyatt looks at me. Then at Miles. Marking is different from scenting. Scenting is about presence—overlaying our smell on her skin so that anyone who gets close knows she belongs to someone.

Marking is permanent. It’s a break in the skin, a scar that won’t fade, a visible, undeniable claim that says this woman is spoken for.

It’s also intimate in a way that scenting isn’t. Scenting can be passed off as affection, as closeness. Marking is deliberate. Intentional. It requires a blade or teeth—usually teeth for a pack mark, a bite that breaks the skin and leaves a permanent scar in a specific location.

The traditional location is the mating gland at the junction of the neck and shoulder. A bite there, during a real bond, triggers a hormonal cascade that cements the connection. For our purposes, the bite has to be shallower—enough to scar, not enough to activate the gland.

But it still means teeth on her throat. It still means breaking skin. And it still means Wyatt—the one whose claim would be primary, as the pack’s de facto leader—putting his mouth on the most vulnerable part of her body.

“I’ll do it,” Wyatt says. His voice is rough, strained.

He pulls a small leather case from his jacket pocket. Inside is a sterilized blade—thin, precise, surgical. Not teeth. He chose a blade because teeth would be too intimate, too hard to control, too easy to let become something it shouldn’t.

He kneels beside the bed and looks up at her.

“I need you to hold still,” he says.

“I know.”

“This is going to hurt.”

“I know.”

He reaches up and gently moves the hair away from the left side of her neck—the side he scented—exposing the mating gland. It’s a small, slightly raised area of skin, barely visible unless you know what to look for. In a bonded Omega, it would be swollen, sensitive, active. Hers is dormant. Inactive.

For now.

Wyatt’s hands are shaking.

I see him notice it too—he pauses, staring at his own fingers with a look of raw, unguarded frustration. He flexes them, curls them into fists, opens them again. The blade trembles.

“Hey.” Tess reaches down and covers his hands with hers. “It’s okay.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You’re going to. That’s the point.”

“I don’t want to hurt you more than necessary.”

“Then stop shaking and do it.”