I wake up burning.
Rhett’s mouth is on my throat, teeth grazing the fresh mark he left last night, his tongue painting patterns against my pulse that make my hips jerk involuntarily. The bond between us isn’t humming—it’s roaring, a heavy drumbeat in my chest that synchronizes with the thick, insistent press of him against my ass.
"Morning," he rasps, the vibration traveling straight to my core. His hand slides down my stomach, slow and devastating, dipping lower with each inch until his fingers brush where I’m already wet, already aching, already his.
I arch back into him, grinding against the hard length of his cock with shameless need. Three weeks of tension, of combat, of near-death and barely-life—every cell in my body screams for him to fill the emptiness, to complete the circuit he started last night.
"Rhett." My voice breaks as he pushes one finger inside me, curling just right. "God, now—"
He growls, the sound primal and wrecked, and rolls me beneath him in one fluid motion. His massive frame towers over me, all scarred muscle and terrifying gentleness, his dark eyes blown wide with a hunger that should terrify me but only makes me want to burn.
He settles between my legs, the weight of him perfect, crushing, right. When he enters me, it’s not slow—it’s desperate, a homecoming after centuries of separation. I cry out, nails raking down his back, my legs wrapping tight around his waist to pull him deeper.
"Look at me," he commands, his damaged voice scraped raw. "Stay with me, Abby."
I do. I watch his face as he moves—sweat beading on his forehead, his scarred throat working, the sheer devotion in his eyes as he takes me apart stroke by stroke. The bond flares between us, golden and blinding, until I can’t tell where he ends and I begin. It’s perfection, it’s drowning, it’s—
My stomach snarls loud enough to rattle the windowpanes.
Rhett freezes mid-thrust, his hips stuttering against mine. For a heartbeat, we stare at each other, panting, suspended on the edge of disaster. Then he drops his forehead to my shoulder, laughing—a rough, helpless sound that vibrates through my sternum and makes my inner muscles flutter around him.
"Food," he groans, nipping my collarbone hard enough to bruise. "Then I'm finishing this."
"We're already late," I gasp, rolling my hips to tempt him back. He groans, dropping his hand between us to find my clit, thumb circling with cruel precision.
"Let them wait."
He thrusts again, deeper, angling to hit that spot that makes stars explode behind my eyelids. I’m climbing fast, so close, my fingers tangled in his short dark hair as the bedframe slams against the wall in a rhythm that surely carries through the thin cabin walls—
A wolf howls from the settlement. Close. Too close.
Then laughter—male, knowing, distinctly Theron’s voice calling out: "Hurry up, lovebirds! Some of us are starving out here!"
Rhett collapses on top of me, groaning curses into my neck. "Thin walls."
"So thin," I agree, mortified and still throbbing around him, unsatisfied and desperate.
He pulls out slowly, watching my face as he withdraws, his jaw tight with restraint. "Tonight," he promises, sealing the vow with a kiss that tastes like devotion and deferred hunger. "I'll make you scream so loud they’ll hear it in the next territory."
I learn exactly how thin those walls are thirty minutes later.
The dining hall goes silent when we enter. Rhett’s hand rests on the small of my back, his thumb tucked into the waistband of my pants in a way that screams mine to anyone with functioning eyeballs. Every head turns. A female beta near the bacon station inhales sharply, her pupils dilating as she scents the air—the scent of us, of what we were doing, of the bond sealed and saturated with sex.
"Can they smell it?" I whisper through my fixed smile.
"They can smell you on me," Rhett murmurs, his lips grazing my ear. His voice drops to a register that makes my knees weak. "They know exactly who you belong to now."
I stumble. He catches me seamlessly, his arm banding around my waist, the display of possession so primal that three wolves at a nearby table immediately drop their gazes.
Theron finds me at the training grounds later, leaning against a fence with a posture that broadcasts fuck off. His amber eyes linger on my neck—on the bruised, bitten skin where Rhett’s teeth broke flesh.
"Stings?" he asks, velvet and dangerous.
"None of your business."
"It is, actually." He pushes off the fence, circling slowly. "The pack feels it. Rhett’s stability anchoring through his little human mate." He stops behind me, close enough that I feel his heat. "He’s grounded in ways we haven’t seen since before the hunters took his family."
"Is that a problem?"
His hands settle on my hips, resting there until the unsealed bond flares restlessly—hungry, desperate for what I gave Rhett. "It’s making the rest of us starve," he breathes against my ear. "Hrollok’s destroying trees with his bare hands. Jarek’s calculating statistical probabilities of when you’ll seal with all of us. And Grogan..." He chuckles darkly. "He’s being very patient. But I can smell his restraint cracking."
I step away, trembling. "This isn’t a race."
"No," Theron agrees, eyes dropping to my mouth. "It’s a famine. And you’re the only harvest."
I find Grogan at dusk in the library cabin, desperate to escape the settlement’s sexual pressure. The air crackles as I demand we try the wolf ritual again.
"Close your eyes," he commands.
He doesn’t stay across from me. He presses against my back, chest to spine, hands spanning my ribs just below my breasts.
"Breathe," he murmurs, lips brushing my hair. "Reach. Find the animal."
I try. I reach inward past the heartbeat, past the two sealed bonds glowing golden—Rhett’s warmth, Grogan’s own mark. I search for fur, for fang.
Nothing. Only emptiness.
"It’s not working," I gasp. "I’m supposed to be their Alpha, supposed to hold them together when they’re tearing themselves apart wanting me, and I can’t find my wolf. I’m just... a void they’re pouring themselves into."
Grogan turns me around, his gray eyes dark with recognition. "You’re not a void," he says, thumb tracing my lip. "You’re a crucible. We’ll figure this out."
But I hear the unsaid: Before Hrollok snaps. Before the jealousy burns us down.
That night, I find Theron by the trucks, engine already running.
"Drive me to Margot’s," I say, climbing in. "I need to find what my mother was hiding."
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