Page 13 of Fight or Fly

“Whatismy place here?” I whispered, my gaze wandering past Jax to fall on myodama, held securely in Flynn’s arms as she slept off the aftermath of her first peak.

“Your place is to be given whatever you need while you’re under our care,” Alex said. “No matter what that might be.”

My throat closed up and I crawled to her. She reached out a hand, and I followed the touch on my jaw as she positioned me on a pile of cushions heaped in front of her on the floor next to the couch.

“Right now, I’m pretty sure you need to stop thinking,” she told me. Her voice turned wry. “Believe it or not, I’m familiar with that particular problem.”

I gazed up at her, wondering what would be left of me if I let go of all the thoughts and worries swirling around the inside of my brain like angry dust devils. Those worries seemed to define me these days.

Alex was tall and strong and sharply beautiful—dark-haired and green-eyed and leanly muscled beneath the black tank top and gray sweatpants she wore. Her feet were bare.

She didn’t crack a smile. Her expression might as well have belonged to a statue of Lady Justice, or maybe the Huntress Diana. I thought about the hotel in Bucharest, before everything had fallen apart—when I had waxed lyrical to Leo about teasing the enigmatic female alpha’s clit from inside its folds with my tongue.

And...god. She knew about that little fantasy now, didn’t she? Leo had blurted it out during a drunken confession. I should probably be angry about that, or maybe mortified. Shouldn’t I?

Alex’s long fingers tangled in my hair and tugged, the pull on my scalp landing just a hairsbreadth on the wrong side of pain. I gasped and arched my head back, my throat bare to her gaze as my cock throbbed and jerked weakly against my fly. Why the hell had I decided to wear jeans today?

“You’re still thinking too loudly,” she said. “Believe me when I say, I can come up with ways to make sure you stop.”

The grip on my hair pulled my head back another inch. A high sound that I refused to describe as a whimper was born and died in the back of my throat. It... wasn’t a protest, exactly. With a small jolt, I realized that for that moment in time, every single thought had fallen out of my head like Scrabble tiles dumped from the box. They lay in a jumble somewhere beneath me—unreadable nonsense waiting for someone else to pick them up and make sense of them.

Some of the long-held tension slid out of my spine.

“There now,” Alex said, gentling her grip in favor of guiding me to rest my head on the edge of the couch cushion next to her thigh.

I breathed in her smell—clean sandalwood and the complex sweetness of night jasmine. Her fingers that had been harsh and unyielding before grew soft, stroking through my hair and making me shiver. A wavering sigh emptied my lungs, and I tried to resist the sudden, irrational urge to weep.

Fucking heat pheromones. They weren’t evenmine.

“We can stay like this for a bit,” she said. “There’s nothing else you need to do except feel whatever you’re feeling. Sometimes feeling shit like that sucks, but locking it away sucks worse in the long run. Ask me how I know.” The last few words were an exhausted sigh.

I reached my hand out and covered her knee, my body moving before my mind could come up with a dozen reasons why it was a bad idea. Her fingers stilled in my hair for a moment, but then she resumed the soothing rhythm.

Time passed. Whenever my shoulders started to tense up, Alex’s hand tightened in my hair, the shivery almost-pain abruptly clearing my thoughts again, and only relenting when I went limp and compliant in her grip.

It shouldn’t have meant anything. It was... nothing, really. A fist in my hair, or a light stroking over my scalp. Punishment and reward. And yet, the minutes ticked by, becoming hours, and somehow I ended up lying on the couch instead of kneeling on the floor. More time passed, and I found my head pillowed on the alpha’s thigh.

How had that happened?

Eventually, the achy oversensitivity in my cock eased as the air cleared a bit, Leo’s pheromone production waning during the valley between heat peaks.

Even so, I wasawareof my body in a way I usually tried to avoid—probably because there was nothing else for me to think about right now. Or at least, nothing that didn’t immediately result in my hair getting pulled until I stopped.

My body was such an odd thing. I hated it, while knowing objectively that it wasn’t fair of me to feel that way. It wasn’t my body’s fault that its insides had been raped and scarred by monsters who thought they owned me and could rip out whatever parts of me didn’t meet with their approval. It wasn’t my body’s fault that I injected it with testosterone and worked it to exhaustion in the gym, so I would look more like a beta.

My physical form had always done its best for me. Hell, it had even saved my mating gland by being left-handed—hiding that part of me on my left shoulder rather than my right one, where the butchers had assumed it would be. That little gland was still gamely churning out weak omega perfume, despite everything it had endured and continued to endure.

For the first time in what felt like a very long time, I listened to my body instead of trying to tune it out. It was oddly peaceful; my physicality settling around me like a familiar cloak in this warm, soft room full of alphas who had promised to watch over us.

Was this strange interlude helping Alex find a sense of peace with her ghosts as well? It was clear she had quite a collection of things haunting her, even if I didn’t know the details. I wasn’t sure if it was helping her or not. She wasn’t purring—but she was at least focused enough on me that she’d sensed every single time my mind started to wander back to my worries. Surely that couldn’t leave room for much else, could it?

Right on cue, her hand tightened, sending shivery tingles from my scalp down the length of my spine. I released a breathless moan and went limp again, making a point of nuzzling into her thigh as she returned to stroking me.

At some point, relaxation morphed into dozing. I awoke to the feeling of slender fingers playing over my mating gland, raising gooseflesh across my chest and arms. Weak perfume or no, the gland was a fairly useless appendage at this point. Without enough omega hormones circulating to regulate it, there was no way it could perform its intended function of bonding me to one or more alphas. It was still sensitive, though—and Alex’s light touch drew a low whine from my throat.

“I sure do like the sound of that,” Flynn said.

“It did sound like a good noise,” Jax agreed.

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