Page 142 of Knot All is Crystal
I yelp. “Your father? What the fuck did I miss?”
“A lot,” Gage remarks with a wry laugh, squeezing my knee. “But I’m good. Never needed a dad.”
Manny groans a little from the backseat as he adjusts in the seat. “We can work through all of this later. Crystal, you seem lucid, are you?”
She nods and reaches out for his hand. “I am, yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Puck bit you, we gave you fizz, and you were having a heat spike. We thought you’d be lost to us for a while.” I reach back to stroke her face, wincing at the heat radiating off of her. “But you are on fire, so…”
“It probably won’t last,” she replies succinctly. “I don’t know what’s keeping me lucid right now, but I’m glad it is.”
“Puck, are you with us?” Manny asks. His voice is tight, and I can’t figure out why.
Our final Alpha grunts and pulls Crystal tighter against him. “Yep.”
“A man of many words,” I croon. Gage smacks me on the chest with a laugh.
“I just want to make sure we know how you want us to handle things during this quasi-heat,” Manny continues, as if I didn’t speak. “We want you to be able to consent. Earlier, Puck…”
“Made you come on his fingers,” I supply.
Manny scowls. “I was in the middle of dealing with Tyler, and I couldn’t check in to see if you were okay with it.”
“I’m fine with it. He’s my Alpha,” she says dismissively. “What happened with Tyler?”
“You’re fine with it?” Puck says, startled. “I bit you.”
Crystal takes a deep breath, leaning back to better stare Puck down. Gage pulls into a parking spot at her townhome.
“Yes, you bit me. Did I consent? No. Did you have a choice? Also no. The important question you all need to ask yourself in situations like that is, do you think I would have consented? Would I have consented if I were lucid and had all the facts?”
Immediately, my gut says yes. I haven’t known Crystal for long, but it’s been enough time to see that she is pragmatic and understanding. She cares about us, about Puck, and wants nothing more than to be free of Kieran, whatever it takes.
Took.
Almost forgot the bastard is dead.
“But with me?” Puck’s voice is so small for such a large man. “You would have willingly taken my bite?”
“Puck, you’re my Alpha. I know things could’ve happened better between us, but you’ve always been good to me, even when I’ve been an ass to you. We were always going to end up here, ya know? We’re inevitable. Undeniable. You may have been on those suppressants, but you always smelled good to me. We were always drawn to one another.” She clutches his face in her tiny hands, pushing their foreheads together. “Yeah, we found each other in the trash, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make something beautiful. You should know that better than anyone else.”
Puck kisses her gently, making my chest ache when I see them together. It feels like our pack is finally coming together, that things are slotting into place. With Kieran dead and the five of us together, I have hope that we can make a good life together.
“Now, what about Tyler?” Crystal asks as she pulls away from her hidden Alpha. “What happened?”
“I’ll fill you in, but do you think we could go inside?” Manny says in a pained tone. Maybe he’s having a migraine? “I think I need a first aid kit.”
That makes my eyes jerk to the quiet Alpha, and I notice the blood soaking into the navy blue joggers he’s wearing. He’s clutching his thigh, and his face looks a little pale.
Crystal immediately yelps, scrambling to get off Puck’s lap and to Manny. He strokes her hair away from her face with his clean hand. “It’s just a graze,” he says gently. “Nothing to worry about.”
Gage slams the driver’s side door, and I pile out behind him. As he walks to the front door to unlock it, I hear him muttering, “Just a graze my ass. Fucking high pain tolerance.”
FIFTY-FOUR
“So he wasthe head of the trafficking arm?” I ask incredulously, pulling my blanket tighter around me. I’m still naked, but when I tried to put on clothes, it felt like I was rubbing my skin with sandpaper.
“Yeah, it appears so,” Puck replies from his position opposite me in my tiny nest. With him in here, it is abundantly clear that we are too big a pack for this place. “Kieran kept things very siloed. I was over Prism, and I like to think I was his most trusted employee because I did more for him than Ricky ever did, but I had no idea about Tyler.”
