The relief from pain made me lightheaded, but the pain haze that had been fogging my thoughts was starting to lift. This was like the worst period pain ever—it felt like PMS cramps, if your eggs were ninja stars. “Speak.”
Darius’s heavy sigh puffed against the back of my neck, cooling it softly, which told me that I was sweating. “The heat, and the yearning for male Omegas, is nature's way of ensuring that we, uh… procreate. The only way to naturally ease your discomfort is to do what nature intended and have sex.” He trailed off, leaving me with a suspicion that wasn’t the whole truth.
“And?”
Darius let out a whine, making something in me keen with him, and I wiggled my ass back against him subconsciously. Like I was trying to ease his pain too.
“You would still hurt, but it would be less. It could take around a week for the heat to subside this way, and basically, it would be five to seven days of constant sex to make sure your body was too flooded with endorphins to realize we weren’tquitedoing what Mother Nature intended.”
He was talking in circles, and I growled low in my throat, making the energy of the room shift. I could almost feel them all stretching toward me.
It was Corvin who answered my unspoken question. “We were made to breed during this time, Kitten. Traditionally, to ease the heat, Darius would fuck you, drawing your eggs into his body for us to fertilize. You would have to impregnate our male Omega.”
“Oh.” That did seem drastic.
Beckett snorted. “Fuck, I missed you, Kitten.” Then he pressed his lips closed, like he’d said something bad. His dark brown eyes were shining in the dim light and his normally light brown hair seemed almost black from the shadows.
I realized, too late probably, that I was rubbing up against his Omega like I had any right. I twisted, looking over my shoulder at Darius. He looked like he was in pain. “Sorry.”
He shook his head, giving me a tight smile. “Not your fault.” He gave the guys the stink eye. No prizes for guessing whose fault he thought it was.
“Third option?”
“Cooper said they’re putting the new Omegas in the bottom cells of the Legion building to keep them safe, then sedating them as best they can with human drugs.”
Oh hell no. That wasn’t an option for me. I wasn’t going anywhere near the Legion Building.
“I can’t go home and…” I cut off as my body curled in on itself, a cramp doing its best to set my insides on fire. Seven days of this torture sounded just as impossible. There was only one solution that my brain, or maybe it was my Beast, would even remotely consider. “Can we do option one?”
Everyone in the room stilled. Even the air stilled. The silence was like a heavy blanket across us all, suffocating and comforting all at once.
It was Corvin who broke the silence. “Excuse me, what?”
4
COOPER
I’d left the guys and the sleeping girl alone about an hour ago, but judging by the soft hum of voices, she’d woken up. This secret Beta-turned-Omega that the guys had hidden from us for nearly half a decade. My Packmates. The men I loved more than any other people in the world, and they’d been lying to Darius and I like it was nothing. But you only had to see the way they looked at this woman, this Kitten, to know that they’d loved her at some point. Maybe they still loved her.
Now, everyone's feelings were all mixed up in the heat pheromones, and it was hard to know what was legit and what was just horny Alpha desire. I paced up and down the hall, but all was quiet here.
“Coop?” someone called softly, and I looked around the corner at Beckett, who looked guilty as fuck.
“What?”
“We need you here. Pack decision.”
I raised both eyebrows. “Oh, now it's a Pack decision? You and Corvin don’t want to unilaterally make decisions for all of us?”
His jaw tensed. “Come on, man. It wasn’t like that. Please, just come and meet her. Speak to her. We need to have a Pack discussion.”
“Is she Pack now?”
He hesitated, and I knew she could probably hear. I was being a dick, but one of us had to keep their goddamn head.
“Please, Cooper.”
I sighed and pushed off the wall. As I got closer to the room, the scent of Omega became dizzying. I gritted my teeth. What the fuck were we going to do about the fact that we had a house full of kids?
