14

dmitri

SHE WAS STILL hugging him. She was crying, going on and on about how she couldn't believe he was here, after all this time, that it was really him.

He had his hands all over her, touching her with this casual kind of possessiveness, and there was something about the way their scents twined up that smelled kind of phenomenal. It was making me hard. I was always hard around her, but this kind of knotted up erection, it was making me lightheaded.

He looked at me, giving me a cocky sort of grin, projecting a challenge at me.

Prior claim, it seemed to say.

I had this weird feeling, like she belonged to him in a way that she didn't belong to me, and I didn't like it. Partly because of my own possessiveness. She was mine. I had bitten her. She and I were bonded, connected on a level that was so deep it was impossible to fathom. But also because he made her happy, and I wanted her to be happy, and so I felt this pressure, from our bond, to care about him in the way that she cared about him, and that felt strange and odd.

I was pretty sure I didn't like this guy.

Something about him?

He was just the kind of guy I didn't like.

Aurelie turned, one arm still twined around this guy's waist, wiping at her face with her other hand. "Dmitri, this is Corentin. He's, um, he's… we grew up together. But I haven't seen him in a really long time, and—" She turned back to him, pulling her brows together in indignation. "Where the fuck have you been? You couldn't call? Or text? Or send a fucking email?"

"Sorry," he said.

She extricated herself, wrinkling her nose. She drew back, eyes widening. "How did you…? What the hell, Corentin? How are you an alpha?"

Corentin ran a hand over his head. His dark hair was cut close to his skull. He was wearing the uniform of the kitchen help in the castle, but I could see tattoos peering out at his neck and his wrists. Was he just covered in ink? "Uh, that's a long story, Aurelie, but the point is that I am now. And now we can…" He looked at me for a long moment, and then he turned back to her. "Well, can we go somewhere to talk? You and me?"

Her lips parted.

"No," I said.

She whirled on me, radiating surprise and hurt.

"Who is this guy?" I said. "Why is he here? Why is he wearing a kitchen uniform? What is going on?"

"He's my… friend," she said. "We grew up together. I've known him since we were kids. Our birthdays are only two weeks apart. We…"

Oh, shit. This was the guy. The only other guy she'd ever fucked. The beta who couldn't get her through her heat. How was he an alpha? Why did he smell so damned good? I swallowed. "Uh, okay, well, let's go to the breakfast parlor, then, so that you two can catch up and I can get to know Corentin." I gave him a nasty smile. "You get yourself together." I gestured to the fact that she was half-dressed. "I'll walk him down there and call for some servants to bring us some pastries and tea or something. Okay?" I leaned in and kissed her, kissed her a little too hard.

She pulled away from the kiss, looking worried. "Are you sure?"

"Definitely," I said. "He's important to you, and I want to know him."

Corentin let out a breath, and he eyed me, as if he was sizing me up to attack.

"We can all sit down and have a nice, civilized chat," I said to him.

"Okay," said Aurelie, smiling at me. "I'd like that."

I went over to Corentin and slung my arm around him. We were about the same height. He was solid, too, muscled and tattooed and hard in a way that I knew I'd never be.

Was she attracted to this kind of guy? Really?

I practically dragged him out of the room. Once we were in the hallway, he shoved my arm off him, but he walked with me.

"The parlor's this way," I said, gesturing.

He fell into step with me. "I don't need this to be an altercation. For you, she's some trophy. You're keeping her captive, never letting her out of your sight. Maybe you even think you care about her. But trust me, she and I are in love in a way that you can't even understand. Just let her go."

I let out a laugh. "You're serious. This really is some attempt to try to steal my omega away from me? Try it. She won't go anywhere with you. She's not going to leave me. She's my mate . Maybe you didn't see my bite mark, but I'd be happy to show it to you if you need to see it."

"She can't feel for you what she feels for me."

"How long have you been gone?" I said.

He winced.

We were at the parlor. I threw open the door. "After you," I said with exaggerated politeness.

He sauntered inside, glowering around at the surroundings.

I went over to the circular table, which was empty at this time of the evening. I sent a text to the staff to have some refreshments brought up. "Please, sit down," I said.

He hesitated, and then he did sit down.

We squared off, neither of us saying anything, just glaring at the other one.

Aurelie appeared in the doorway, looked at the two of us, and perfumed.

We both choked, even though I had gotten more and more used to her perfume over these past couple weeks. This had been more potent in some way. He did things to her, things I didn't do.

I sighed heavily. Damn it. "Come here, omega," I said, gesturing for her to come and sit next to me. "Don't worry. You can absolutely have him. I can't deny you anything, and you know that."

She brightened, coming over to sit down next to me and kissing me on the cheek. "Really? How will that work?"

"Wait, what?" said Corentin, his voice rising.

I sighed again, leveling an annoyed gaze at him. "She's an omega, and she has needs. I was never intending to keep her all to myself. If she wants you, of course she's allowed to indulge—"

"Allowed?" said Corentin. "You don't own her. You can't give her permission—"

"Corentin," she broke in. "He's my mate." She tugged down her shirt to show him my mark, which made something pleased and feral rise in me.

I couldn't stop myself from bending down and running my tongue over it. A purr rose in my throat.

She sighed into me, her scent going soft and satisfied.

Corentin's scent filled the room, brash and intense. He clenched his hands into fists. "I need to talk to you alone, Aurelie."

"Anything you need to say, you can say in front of him," she said, taking my hand and entwining our fingers. "We're getting married tomorrow, and I want you to be there, of course, my special guest—" She looked up at me. "We can make that work, can't we? Shuffle around the seating arrangements last minute? I know it's a hassle, but I can't believe he's here. I'm going to go to sleep and wake up and think this was all a dream. It's…" She let out a little laugh. "It's so good to see you, Corentin. I hadn't realize how much I missed you." There was a thread of something in her voice, some strange longing that pierced me somewhere.

I squeezed her fingers, too tight, because she winced and pulled her hand out of mine.

Damn it.

Corentin rubbed his forehead. "You… you like him." This was a revelation to him. He had never considered that could be a possibility.

"I'm in love with him," she said.

It was so good to hear her say that out loud. It was steadying. I reached for her hand again.

But she tucked it away onto her lap.

Corentin leaned forward, across the table, his voice going low and urgent. "Whenever we talked about him, about how that arranged marriage had fallen through, you said you were relieved. You said you never wanted that. You said you didn't even want the sort of life you had with your family, that you wanted to be free—"

"I was sixteen, Corentin. Everyone wants to be free at that age."

He sat back in his chair, his jaw tightening.

It was quiet.

"I did this for you," he said. "I did all of this—"

"What did you do?" she said. "How are you an alpha?"

"It's not just that," he said. "I have… money. I started a little company, and it ended up taking off, and—"

"A company?"

"We make skateboards," he said. "Euphoric Wheels." Oh, wow, that was a pretty big name in skateboards. Even I'd heard of it, and I didn't know anything about skateboarding.

"Really?" she said.

"I told you this," he said. "I told you, I swore to you that I was going to make this happen, find away to give you the life you deserved so that we could be together, and I've been working on it, and you… then I see the news, and you're getting married, and I had to rearrange everything to get here to try to stop it, but it took longer than it should have, and now…" He pointed to her mark. "I'm too late."

Her lips parted. "You've been working on it? All this time?"

"You didn't wait for me," he said.

"You didn't tell me to wait for you," she said. "You disappeared. You broke my heart and I sent ten thousand texts to your phone and called you and called you, and you ghosted me, and made your mother say that she didn't know where you were—"

"I mean, she didn't," he muttered.

"And I'm supposed to intuit that you're coming back, that you still care about me? Seriously?" Her scent was full of tendrils of intensity now. She was angry.

He bowed his head. "Well… at first, I wasn't sure if I could even do it."

"Do what?"

"Become an alpha," he said.

"You can't do that," I said. "That's not possible. People have designations or they don't."

He spread his hands. "And yet, here I am."

"How?" I demanded.

"Yeah, how?" she whispered.

He chuckled softly. "What does it matter? It was for nothing, I guess. You want to stay here and be a princess. I mean, of course you do. You were always sort of shallow, deep down, Aurelie. I always knew that about you. I never minded, though. It was just part of who you were, and I've always been in love with you, so I never minded."

"I'm not shallow," she whispered.

"You're not," I agreed.

"Oh, you two will be very happy together," he said sarcastically. He got up from the table. "What was I even thinking?"

She got up from the table. "What are you doing?"

"We're done here," he said.

"You're leaving? Again? Is that what you do?"

He scratched the back of his head. "Don't pretend like you want me around—"

"Dmitri just got done saying you can be one of my alphas," she said. "We can be together."

"One of your…" Corentin looked back and forth between us. "How many alphas do you have?"

"Three, right now," she said. "Two are just sort of potentials. I haven't actually done much with them. Well, I kissed Johannes and Nikolai went down on me this one time—"

"What? Nikolai did what?" I said. "When?"

She turned to look at me. "Oh, right. He said not to tell you that. Oops."

Okay, Nikolai and I were having a conversation as soon as possible.

Corentin nodded slowly. "Well, then. Got it. You want me to be part of your harem. You want me to be one of your alphas."

"She's an omega," I said quietly. "What did you think, that you'd be enough to satisfy her? I hear you already spectacularly failed at that already."

He jerked back.

Aurelie bit down on her lip.

"You told him about me?" Corentin sounded utterly betrayed.

"Not… I didn't say your name, he just… figured it out, I guess." She flushed bright red. "Corentin, you're the only other person I've ever been with, so obviously, I talked about you."

"Only?" he said in a very small voice. "Really?"

"So," I said in a not-very-nice voice, "I guess while you were out there ‘working on it,' you weren't exactly celibate."

He shifted uncomfortably on his feet.

"That's okay," she said. "I don't need that from you."

"Right," he said. "I'll be in your harem, and you'll be fucking other men, so I can fuck other people, too, huh? Fair's fair."

"Generally the way it works, yeah," I said. Even though, admittedly, I wasn't exactly really well-versed in the ways of polyamory.

"No," he said. "No, that's not…" He came around the table to take both of her hands in his. "This is us, Aurelie, you and me. This is our story. This is not the way it ends."

She was affected by this. She gasped a little, and her perfume was like bright blossoms in the sunlight.

"Come with me," he said. "Come with me now. You know it's right. You feel it."

She made a little noise in the back of her throat, shaking her head back and forth, overcome.

"Aurelie, I love you," he said. "And you love me. This—what we have—this doesn't happen every day. This is bigger than this, than him, than a harem, this is… Let's go. Now."

She tugged one hand out of his and fingered my mark on her chest. "He bit me, Corentin!"

"We'll work around it," he said.

I got up from the table. "All right, enough."

He hung his head. He let go of her. "Aurelie, just talk to me alone? Please."

"No," I said. "No, I'm not letting you coerce my omega into making some ridiculous mistake that will make her miserable in the end. I'm not saying she doesn't care about you, or that you're not important to her, Corey or whatever your name is, but you have no idea what it is to separate an omega from her bonded mate. If you really loved her, you'd—"

"Share her?" He let out a caustic laugh. "You people don't even know what love is." He turned and went for the door.

He might have had a dramatic exit, but the staff was coming in with the cart with pastries and tea I'd called for, and Corentin had to awkwardly dance with them until he managed to get around them and stalk out of the door.

Aurelie clapped a hand over her mouth. She shook all over. Then, she burst into tears.

I was going to strangle that man.

How dare he?

On the night before my wedding?

aurelie

ILSE POURED US shots of marshmallow-flavored vodka. We were in her bedchamber, and she had a pretty impressive drink cart in the corner of her room, practically a full bar.

I had fled from Dmitri. He wanted to talk, to comfort me, but I couldn't talk to him about this. I needed someone else, someone impartial, someone who felt more like a friend.

So, I'd come to Ilse.

My family was actually here in Koch. They'd all come in for the wedding. Maybe someone else would have gone to her mother about something like this. Maybe someone else would have been closer to her sisters. But my parents had never approved of Corentin and my sisters and I didn't talk about this kind of stuff.

It was nice to see my family again, but everything with them was always formal and stilted. I already felt closer to Dmitri than I did to them, even in such a brief time.

"Oh, fuck, the childhood sweetheart?" Ilse said. "He's a bad boy? He's dangerous? He's run off and done a whole Jay Gatsby to win you back after all this time? What the fuck kind of literary nightmare are you living in, girl?"

I held out my hand for the shot. "Shut up."

"Maybe it's more of a Heathcliff, really," she said. "Or Westley from The Princess Bride . Is he a pirate?"

"Spoilers," I said.

She shrugged. She gave me the vodka.

I downed it. It tasted good, but it was still strong, and I grimaced a little.

"Well," she said, taking her shot, "these things, they end badly. In books, anyway."

"This is not a book," I said. I held out my shot glass. "Another one."

"You're here because you want advice," she said. "I'm an older, wiser, more experienced woman, your only girl friend in this whole drafty mess of a castle, and I'm also an alpha. So, I'm going to tell you exactly what to do."

"Okay," I said, waiting.

She took my glass and hers and filled them both back up. "You forget about him."

"What?" I said.

She handed me the shot. "You'd already written him off. He's been out of your life since you were seventeen. You figured you'd never see him again. Dare I say, you've been very happy with Dmitri, against all odds, because I've never seen him so downright cheery. Why screw all that up? You've barely even scratched the surface of things with Johannes, and I know you two have a connection."

"And Nikolai," I said. "Yeah."

"You can't run off with Corentin, obviously."

"Obviously," I said.

"You'd be leaving all this behind."

"I would," I said. "And I don't want to do that."

"So… shut the door on Corentin."

"But how did he become an alpha?" I said. "How is that even possible? What did he do? A person can't do that."

"That is very strange," Ilse said. "It begs the question, right? If you can turn yourself into an alpha, can you turn yourself into a beta?"

I blinked at the possibilities of that thought.

Ilse downed her shot.

"You wouldn't," I said. "Would you? Be a beta?"

"Be normal?" she said faintly. "No, who'd want that?"

"You're bonded to Cole," I said. "You wouldn't give that up." I still hadn't really ever talked to Cole, apart from a few conversations here and there at various functions, but Dmitri and I never stayed at functions for very long, because we were too wrapped up in each other.

"No," she said. "I wouldn't." There was something wistful in her tone, though.

I waited. When she didn't say anything, I couldn't help but prompt her. "But?"

"But there's something we lose, isn't there, the way we have to live?"

"Being normal, you mean?"

"I mean, the having-one-other-person-to yourself part," she said. She heaved out a very noisy sigh and went over to the drink cart to pour herself another shot. "If you tell anyone I said this, I will deny it. This is the vodka talking, you understand? Sometimes, when you're drunk, you say things, but they don't mean anything."

"Can I have more vodka?"

"No, you've had enough. You're getting married tomorrow." She upended the shot into her mouth, swallowed, made a face and then set it down with a flourish. "Cole was always the King's, always. I came into that situation later, and there's always priority to, you know, them. They are a twosome, Cole and the King, and when I'm with Cole, it's never really like it's just me and Cole, because I'm always the third wheel or the fourth wheel or even the eighth wheel if Cole is having a particularly terrible heat. Although, if I haven't thanked you for triggering Cole's last heat, remind me to do that, because…" She shivered. "That was fan-fucking-tastic."

"Um… you're welcome?"

She lifted a finger. "Look, most betas can't even do it. The statistics on infidelity are rather shockingly high. Something like seventy percent of people engage in some kind of unfaithfulness at some point in their lives. So, thinking that you're going to end up in some kind of perfect relationship with a perfect person who never wants anyone except you, it's a pipe dream. It's not realistic. But there's a reason we still want it, regardless, I suppose. And even though I know I'll never have it, and I don't even really want it… I don't want Cole to hurt, for instance. I would never wound him in that way, ask him to give up things that he needs . And I don't want to give up my freedom either. I don't want those eight-way sexual experiences to disappear from my life. Even though I don't want it, I still…" She turned to look at the shot glass, shaking her head. "No, never mind. No, I take it all back. I don't mean that. I really don't."

I didn't know what to say to that.

"I'm sorry." She let out an embarrassed laugh. "I really shouldn't have had that third shot. I'm debating taking another one so that maybe I'll be drunk enough not to care that I'm too drunk, but I think that's a particularly stupid idea, and—"

"I'm a little worried, I have to admit," I said.

"About Corentin?"

"About Dmitri and me," I said. "Right now, I can't help but be affected, in some way, about the way he wants me all to himself. It's nice, even though… even though I want the other men, too, even though I know some deep, instinctive part of me needs the other men. But when he says to me that he wants to wait, that he wants to have me to himself until after the wedding, it makes some part of my chest tight and I… I…" I felt dangerously close to tears. "Why would this happen? Why would my body be made to need multiple partners to ease my needs, when I romanticize monogamy?"

"It's just society," she said, waving it away. "We all have all these messages, coming at us, all our lives, all those diamond commercials and the fairy tale princess stories and we internalize things. But it's just a matter of ignoring that, that's all."

"Right," I said with a little nod. "Ignore Corentin. Ignore the worry. Ignore everything."

"Exactly," she said. "I'm glad we've had this little talk. Hope I helped?"

"Um…"

"You better get some sleep," she said. "You've got a big day tomorrow."