Page 35 of Truth or Lie

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Turned my gaze on Leona. “Is he hurt, though?”

“He’s sore, because he insisted on letting you knot him three times in twenty-four hours,” she said. “There’s some minor tearing, but nothing that needed medical treatment. You should probably know that when it comes to you, he’s a bit of an idiot.”

Kam visibly ground his teeth. “I am standingright bloody here.”

“Only because you’re too sore to sit.” Leona’s tone was unapologetic.

“If it’s any consolation, I think my clit is broken.” I shouldn’t be able to joke about this. Not with the dark circles of pain and exhaustion beneath Kam’s eyes.

“I bet,” he said.

I swallowed, my throat clicking. There was no point in putting this off. “You didn’t let me bite you.”

Silence settled over the room for a long moment.

“I thought about it,” Kam admitted quietly.

“We’re not saints,” Leona said. “But we’re also not monsters.”

I could barely breathe. “I almost killed Flynn. I hurt you, Kam. If we’d been mated, none of this would have happened. You could have stopped me...calmed the rut.”

“Yes,” Leona agreed. “But fear and might-have-beens aren’t a good enough reason to mate someone.”

I stared at her like she might somehow have the answers I needed—my own personal oracle. “I’m losing my pack.” It was a whisper.

She scowled, fierce as a hunting hawk. “Never.”

But Kam shook his head. “It’s not that simple, Leo.” He frowned at me, his sunken-eyed exhaustion doing nothing to blunt the edges of the expression. “You want to lose your pack? Then keep walking away from them like you’ve been doing for the last six months.”

“Kam!” Leo sounded shocked.

“It’s true,” he said, refusing to break eye contact with me. “You don’t want to mate us? Fine. But you’ll have to come to terms with the fact that leading your pack now includes us as part of the deal. Of course, the real problem is that youdowant to mate us. You have all along.”

“Of course I fucking do!” The words erupted from me in a frustrated shout. I froze, but it was too late. They hung in the air, irretrievable and indelible.

“We want that, too, Alex,” Leona said—the calm to my storm.

They wanted it, and they still hadn’t stolen it from me when they’d had the chance. Because they were noble in a way I wasn’t, and fearless in a way I desperately wished to be someday.

“I’ll be horrible at it,” I rasped. “You don’t know what kind of a fucked-up bond you’re signing up for.”

“No offense, but you may be in for a bit of a shock when you get a peek inside Flynn’s brain,” Leona said. “The word ‘twisted’ comes to mind, along with a few others.”

“And I, of course, am a paragon of mental health and solid coping skills,” Kam added. “Though on the positive side, you’ll probably only have to experience that part for a few days each quarter, around Leo’s heat.”

Wait. Had I just agreed to mate them? Had I really just done that? My entire body felt numb.

I licked my lips. “When is your next heat?”

“In six weeks,” Leo said. “Well, five and a half now, I guess. So, is it a date?”

I tried to reply, but it took a couple of attempts to get words out. “I... yes.”

I’d done it. I’d agreed to mate two omegas—to risk losing them in the future, as long as it also meant having them in the present. And... I’d done it in the crappiest possible way.

Swallowing audibly, I tried to do better. “I’m sorry, that sounds like I’m trying to put it off, but... Kam? Do you know for certain if Leona’s heat pheromones were what caused the bond to form for you?”

He shrugged, pretending that the loss of the psychic bond after Leona’s heat subsided hadn’t broken his heart. “It’s all guesswork at this point. But Jax bit me ages ago, and the bond flared to life as soon as he also bit Leo. I don’t think I have to take the bite during her heat for it to work.”

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