Outside the window, the wind was still.
I closed my eyes and let sleep take me.
Chapter Seventeen
THANE
She woke quietly.
Her scent changed, becoming richer and thicker, signaling her heat before she even moved. I’d been awake for a while, propped against the nest wall with her tucked against my side and Malric’s arm across her from the other direction, watching the candles burn low and trying to keep my thoughts in order.
Mostly failing.
She stretched, a small, careful movement, and then went still, taking inventory of herself and everything around her, as if unsure what she’d see this time. I recognized the pattern. She was cautious with her safety, now that she was aware of the fragility of her situation. At least she didn’t seem scared of us, a fact for which I was grateful.
“Hey,” I said quietly.
Her head turned toward me. Her eyes were clearer than they’d been in hours, the glaze of the heat had receded, and she looked like herself again. Wrung out and warm but herself. But her scent told a different story. That her heat was building again.
“Is it over?” she asked, her eyebrows raised.
Hope flared in her eyes, her teeth worrying at her lower lip, and I hated to dash her hopes. But I was also looking forward to my chance between her thighs, feeling her come undone around my cock.
“No,” I said, cupping her cheek. “That was the first phase.”
She closed her eyes briefly, shoulders slumping. “How many phases will this last?”
“It varies. Full heats run in waves. The first breaks, you get a window—could be an hour, could be a few—and then it builds again,” Malric said from her other side. He’d been awake too. Of course he had. “You’ll feel it coming. You’ll have some warning.”
“How much warning?”
“Enough,” he stroked a hand over her soft belly in soothing circles.
She turned to look at him and the thoughts that had been racing through my head, the worries over how to manage the complexity of this relationship quieted. I watched his hand move to her hip, the easy proprietary certainty of it, and it confirmed what I’d been telling myself for the past hour. This wasn’t about turns. This isn’t about evenness. This was a triad and I knew what it meant, and I chose it.
All of that was true.
It didn’t entirely address the fact that I had held her through her second heat spike, the first with an alpha, had steadied her and grounded her and kept her from coming apart at the edges. Malric was the primary alpha and took the lead in the first full heat, which was the right call. She needed him first, needed the steadiness he carried, needed the safety he represented before she could come fully undone.
I knew that.
Knowing it didn’t stop the wanting.
“You need to eat something,” I said, because that was useful and immediate and would keep my mind occupied. “And drink. Your body is burning through everything.”
She made a face.
“I know,” I said, laughing. “Try anyway.”
Malric was already reaching for the tray I’d filled with food from the dining table after she’d fallen asleep earlier. Malric and I had eaten something before falling into a light sleep, knowing we’d need our strength as much as Aveline did. We talked quietly about preventing ourselves from falling into a rut, for fear her father would show when we were at our most vulnerable.
He pressed a cup of water into her hands, and she eyed it as if it were about to bite her, then sighed. She took a few sips and then she turned her head away from the cup with a small sound of refusal.
“A little more,” I said, rubbing her shoulders.
“I’m not thirsty.” Her lips turned in a pout.
“Your body is lying to you.”
