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This can’t be happening.
“As much as I’d love to get in on the action, someone has to stay here to hold the fort.” Levi sounded love lost, and he hadn’t even taken her bite. “There’s a car waiting, and the jet is on standby.”
She nodded, reached up, caressed his jaw, tilted his head, her fangs glistening white. She licked their lengths, one then the other, mesmerizing in her sensuality. Then she nuzzled her lips into Levi’s throat. As she sank her fangs into his skin, the knocking in my chest burned.
I blinked hard when the second starburst appeared.
It seemed too easy, but the marks were laden with consequences. I knew it, even if my brothers, even if Charlie, didn’t.
She turned to me and every muscle in my body tensed. I took a step back, lifted my hands, shook my head. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t do this. It was all wrong…too rash. Not the way it was supposed to go.
I looked at Levi, then at Johnny, saw the satisfaction on their faces, and I felt isolated, alone. For the first time in our lives, my brothers had done something without me. Something huge. They’d taken a mating bond with no ceremony, like it was a common thing.
I bared my teeth, cringing at the idea of taking a bite so casually.
When I looked at Charlie, I saw her hesitation. Hurt flashed over her face, there and gone in a second. Then her eyes held wisdom, understanding, acceptance. She knew. She’d always known.
“Let’s go,” she said to me, dismissing my rejection in a heartbeat—cold and decisive, just as an alpha should be.
She turned to the door and left me standing there with my heart in my throat and regret hanging in the air.
I looked at my brothers, who were both rubbing the new marks on their necks. They shared a grin and acted like this was a point of pride.
“Don’t let it go to your heads,” I barked. “You don’t even know what it will do to you.”
I frowned, shook my head, then I followed Charlie out of the door and barely stopped myself from punching a hole through the wall as I went.
Chapter Seventeen
Charlie
The silence was thick, and fuck and I’d love to be able to be anywhere else but with Kane on this tin-can plane. Okay, not exactly a tin can with the butter-soft leather seats, full food and beverage service and lavender-scented air that made me want to curl up and take a nap. There was probably even a bed in the back all ready for me to sleep my troubled thoughts away, though I hadn’t explored.
The bite I gave to Levi and Johnny might have produced an instantaneous fizzy stomach, all-the-feels kind of connection and tattoo-like mark, but it was only now that the true implications of what I’d done were hitting home. It was impulsive of me to mark them so suddenly, acting on the desperate desire to stay connected to them while I was back in Toronto and the insistence of my beastly instincts. I’d never felt that kind of separation anxiety before, but when the barriers were removed and the path to Toronto open for me, I just didn’t want to go without leaving a part of myself behind with my men.
My beastly instincts screamed to lay claim, and I hadn’t seen any reason not to.
Now, the hooks of my decision had latched in, and I felt every pulse, every worry, every ounce of emotion from those two. I wanted to get off the flight and go back to the mansion. I wanted to be with them now, glued to their sides, never to be parted again.
I fought the urge to text or call, just to hear their voices, because I knew how crazy that would seem, and I never did crazy. At least now that my werebeast and I seemed to be one, I felt like crazy might push me over the edge to obsession territory.
The bombardment of emotions was overwhelming me to the point of panic. Levi and Johnny genuinely gave a shit about me, and while I’d kind of understood that in theory, now I had proof. I was connected on a soul level with both of them.
And yet, as much as it was threatening to drown me, I wouldn’t even try to clamp down on the flood of emotions. It was the first time, since my father had died, that I felt loved, cherished, valued. I’d had no idea how much of a hole his passing had left in my heart.
So, I was marinating in Levi and Johnny’s worry, knowing that it was amplifying my own trepidation about what I’d find in Toronto.
Two hours into the four-hour flight, I was dying for a distraction. I couldn’t stop tapping my foot on the carpeted floor, my hand on my knee as I jittered like I’d had way too much caffeine.
And Kane…? He was just sitting there, directly across from me, staring at his hands like there was some kind of hidden message there for him to see.
His rejection stung. It more than stung. It was a blade to the heart, and I was trying to reconcile why. My sudden change of mind, accepting the reality that there was something inside me that knew I had a destiny with these men, giving the bite, making it official in so much as blood was spilled, it was spur of the moment. When Johnny asked, I’d felt compelled to do it. I knew Kane would have some reservations but to reject me outright? Even with the evidence right in front of him. Those starbursts…
“You know, you’re clinging to the patriarchy like it’s a life raft,” I blurted, stunned by my own words. I clamped my mouth shut, glaring out of the window like it would save me from myself, silently cursing the word vomit that I spewed.
I could practically feel Kane’s hard gaze on me. I expected a blast of his temper, a lashing with his wicked tongue. What I got instead cooled my inner rage instantly.
“It’s too sudden. I’m not ready.” He sounded reasonable, calm, so I dared a peek at him and found his eyes like lava, burning with intensity. He was as conflicted as I was. It was right there in his furrowed brow and tense jaw.
