Page 164 of Slashed Bonds

Hot potato. That’s the phrase. I found it in a facility at three in the morning and it’s the right one.

A heat with Hellsing Ross was a schedule. Who had me when. Passed from room to room with my knees shaking, and if one of them was tired or hurt or had a girl on the side that week, I’d wait in a hallway in my own slick until somebody remembered the Omega was due. I was a shared chore. A dish to be washed before it started to smell.

And I’d made my peace with that. That’s the part that’s hardest to say in this water. Somewhere between the shed and the money games I decided that what I’d had was what Omegas like me got, and that the version in the books, the version where three men who want each other also want the woman between them and nobody’s keeping time, was a thing other women were built for.

Then two of those men started kissing each other over my shoulder.

They’re doing it now. I feel Killian’s mouth leave mine and go past my ear and I turn my head under the water to watch, and Nikolai’s taken him, hard, with his hands still on me, and Killian’s got a fist in the goalie’s wet hair the way he did in the kitchen that first morning, and the sound they make together is the lowest thing I’ve ever heard two men produce.

I’m so turned on I can’t feel my feet.

Not performing it. Not making the sound that ends it faster. My body’s doing a thing it has never done in the presence of other people, which is want something and say so without checking the room.

And there it is. The second finding. The one under the first.

I’m not watching the door.

There’s a door. I clocked it on the way in, I clock every door; since the day a locked one at Halbrook turned out to be the least of my problems.

And in this slate room with water coming down and two men’s hands on me, I’m not watching it.

I’m not listening for feet in the corridor. I don’t have the itch between my shoulder blades that means someone’s got a camera or a phone or a laugh ready.

That hasn’t happened since I was eighteen.

Not in the shed, where I slept with four deadbolts and a chair under the handle. Not in the Underground, where every room was a performance and I knew it. Not in Nikolai’s bed in Viper House five days ago with a dog across my legs, because even then I’d lain awake until four doing arithmetic on the exits.

Nikolai’s Switch wrapped a hand around the back of my neck two hours ago. Three floors down, in a ring that hadn’t flooded yet. Gripped it the way an Alpha grips an Omega’s nape when he intends to keep her, and kissed me with the grip still on, and I planted my feet and stayed.

I didn’t fall apart.

No tunnel. No hands going cold.

A man put his hand on the exact place where four others had sunk teeth and a drug, and my body said okay.

What the fuck is wrong with me? Or right. Is it right? I don’t have a rubric for right.

My nervous system is confused.

That’s the honest state of it. It’s running the alarm and finding nobody at the panel, and the silence where the siren should be is loud enough that I almost want to go looking for the danger myself, to make the world match the shape I know.

I don’t.

Killian’s hand slides down my spine and settles at the small of my back and pulls me into him, and Nikolai’s chest is at my shoulders, hot even under the water, and I’m held between two bodies the way a word is held between quotation marks, and I let my eyes close.

How long since I let myself have a single thing without pricing it first?

I don’t know. Years. Before Halbrook. Before a girl with a braid learned that wanting was the fastest route to being used.

No expectations. That’s what this is, with my eyes shut and water in my lashes. No one’s going to grade me after. There’s no scoreboard in here, no Theo looking over my shoulder to see if I’ve pleased the room, no uncertainty about whether I’ll be remembered when the next body’s tired.

Two men who want each other and want me and have built a whole clean room to put the wanting in.

I don’t have to think. I don’t have to map a single exit.

I follow it, whatever it is, this path with no lights on it, and I let it take me wherever it goes…

Killian breaks the kiss.