Page 34 of Keep My Alpha

“Mine,” I whisper against his skin. The word comes out wrecked. “Soren. You’re mine.”

His fingers card through my hair, slow and trembling. A low rumble starts in his chest, a purr. Aaron told me about this once, about omegas and the sounds they make when they’re happy, and I called him an idiot. But he was right. It’s real, and it vibrates through me like a second heartbeat.

“Yours,” he murmurs. “Yeah. Yours.”

I roll us carefully onto our sides, still locked together, and pull the blankets over us. The nest settles around us. His birds watch from the shelf. My henley is bunched up under my hip. There’s slick and cum everywhere, on his stomach, between his thighs, soaking into layers of blankets, and neither of us gives a shit.

I brush my thumb over the bite mark, featherlight, checking the edges. He shivers but presses into the touch instead of flinching away. I smooth my palm down his neck, his shoulder, settle the blankets higher around us, tuck a fold of Milo’s quilt against the small of his back where he runs cold. My knot throbs gently inside him, and he hums, content, pressing back against me. His purr deepens, buzzing warm against my ribs.

This is the part I didn’t realize I wanted. Just holding him after. The quiet part.

He traces the mark on his own neck, fingertips featherlight. Smiles with his eyes closed.

“Does it look how I think it looks?” he asks.

“It looks like you’re taken.”

“Good.” He presses closer, tucking his face into my throat. “I want everyone to see.”

We talk about nothing. His favorite bird: Stumble, he says, because she was the first one that felt like she had a face instead of just a shape. I have to bite my tongue so hard I taste copper again. The festival. Whether Jude will actually make a playlist about this.

“He’ll pretend to be disgusted and then demand every detail,” Soren says, yawning.

“And you’ll tell him.”

“Obviously. It’s only fair.”

My knot eases slowly. I slip out of him, and he makes a small, unhappy noise, so I pull him tight against my chest, arm heavy over his waist, my nose pressed to his new mark. His heartbeat thumps steady through his back. Trusting.

Tell him about the birds.

The thought pushes through, clear and sharp, and I don’t crush it. I hold it. Turn it over.

I almost say it. But tonight I bit him, put my mark on him, made it permanent while he still thinks the guy leaving birds everywhere is someone else. If I tell him now, right after all this, it’ll feel like I was keeping secrets on purpose. Like I set him up before he even knew what was happening.

He deserves to hear it when he can think straight. When he’s not still buzzing from the bond and my teeth marks and my knot. When he can look at me and decide how he feels about it without feeling trapped.

Not tonight.

Soon, though. I’m done hiding behind the work.

My hand finds his, lacing our fingers together over his stomach. I close my eyes and let him pull me under.

Soren

Three days have passed since Wren bit me. Now it’s midnight, and I’m at my windowsill, shifting carved birds around, feeling like I’m losing my mind.

Keats isn’t in her usual spot. But she’s perfect: tiny body, tilted head, wings so thin the light shines through. She’s been at the center of my collection since I found her, right between Stumble, the robin with the crooked wing who wobbles but never falls, and Snowdrop, my junco, who’s so small and round I thought she was a strange sparrow for the first two weeks.

I slide Keats two inches to the left, then back, then forward again, turning her to face the bed.

Before Keats, there was always a rhythm. It wasn’t regular or predictable, but it was steady enough.

Then everything changed. Wren bit me.

I put Keats down a little too hard, and her beak taps against Stumble. I flinch, as if I really hurt her.

“Sorry,” I whisper. She’s just wood. Here I am at midnight, apologizing to a carved bird, and it feels like I’m losing my mind.